I’m so happy that I was wrong about Spencer Pratt. Last week, I feared that the reality TV villain’s early lead in the race for mayor of Los Angeles meant he would spend the next six months campaigning against homeless people and resharing AI videos of himself as Batman.

Fortunately, that didn’t pan out. LA City Council member Nithya Raman ultimately overtook Pratt by about 30,000 votes with more than 98% of the ballots counted. Raman’s progressive platform will be challenging incumbent mayor and establishment Democrat Karen Bass. Pratt—who pledged to leave LA if he lost, but was already living in Santa Barbara and the Hotel Bel-Air—is probably coming up with his next monetization scheme already.

It isn’t surprising that LA voted for two Democrats over a registered Republican. But Pratt and his MAGA supporters are pushing a conspiracy that he only lost because of election fraud. There’s no real evidence for this, just like there’s no real evidence that fraud factored into Donald Trump losing the 2020 election. Still, it’s not harmless or fringe. It’s a preview of reactions to the midterms and potential fuel for far-right political violence.

Trump falsely claimed the LA mayor’s race was “rigged,” conservative influencers got paid by betting markets Polymarket and Kalshi to post that California Democrats were “cheating,” and Pratt himself suggested that Raman was able to “find” extra votes somewhere. Alongside the usual election deniers, I noticed another kind of commentator joining in: anti-Blake Lively podcasters.

On one hand, this crossover makes perfect sense. Pratt is also a longtime pop culture podcaster who has more recently used the medium to promote his political ambitions. Some of his campaign’s loudest supporters were people in the reality TV and celebrity gossip industry. But the content these creators are posting goes beyond endorsement to craft entire narratives that undermine trust in elections.

It’s also not that different from the way they talked about Lively. After the actress alleged in 2024 that her costar and director Justin Baldoni sexually harassed her on set and retaliated further with a paid PR smear campaign, anti-Lively commentators began churning out frequent and even daily negative coverage to counteract her case. Instead of disproving her allegations, they relied on character attacks like derogatory nicknames, spread unsubstantiated counterclaims, and suggested that sympathetic or even just neutral judges and journalists were secretly working for her. After Raman surged ahead of Pratt, they used the same playbook. Instead of showing evidence that Raman’s voters were fake, they justified their suspicion with character attacks on her, Bass, and their voters. Their rhetoric included meme-inspired phrasing like “the math is not mathing,” insinuating that election officials and infrastructure used to count votes are faking totals.

This pop culture-to-politics pipeline funnels celebrity gossip fans into alt-right conspiratorial thinking. The genre has been overlooked compared to the manosphere, in part because the creators and audiences involved are dominated by women and queer people. But hate trains against famous actresses and other high-profile women can travel far and wide, carrying near-universal appeal in cases like Depp v. Heard. These kinds of smear campaign tactics have increasingly converged with politicians and politics. They have significant downstream impacts in addition to how they disrupt their targets’ lives and reputations.

This pipeline isn’t new, either. It’s just revamped for the creator economy, short-form video, and Trump 2.0. Tabloid media has long occupied readers’ attention with juicy gossip about celebrities while simultaneously feeding them conservative talking points. Nowadays, the girls and gays spill the tea (verbiage lifted from the Black queer community) on their podcasts about Bravo stars and Hollywood mean girls. Then, they might accuse a woman of stealing an election from her unqualified opponent, which is not all that different from accusing an actress of lying about sexual harassment to take control of her director’s movie.

Back in mid-May, I noticed that Pratt had reshared an endorsement on X from a prominent Lively hater named Zack Peter, who hosts a popular pop culture podcast called "No Filter.” Even now, weeks after the case was settled (disputes over legal costs remain), Peter has released videos about Lively’s “destroyed” beauty brand and her “smug little smile” in a selfie with her husband. This mirrors the way anti-Amber Heard creators are still making new content about her case more than four years after it ended. The profit incentive and audience hunger is still there.

Peter is also enmeshed in the mainstream celebrity news and entertainment world. He previously hosted podcasts about reality TV for The Ringer’s network and he’s freelanced for a slew of digital culture websites. And before that, he also had a stint in his early twenties as the Executive Director for notorious anti-vaxxer Jenny McCarthy’s group Generation Rescue, which pushes the disproven theory that vaccines cause autism.

Oh. Well, I guess it’s not that surprising after all that Peter would cast doubt on official election results. But when he does so, he doesn’t indicate that he’s ideologically aligned with Trump or MAGA or even MAHA.

“I am not a Republican. I am not MAGA. And my most anti-Trump friends and family I know voted for Spencer,” Peter said in a recent YouTube Shorts video. “Listen, I’m not here to spread conspiracy theories and say ‘Oh, California voter fraud is a real thing and that’s what happened here and it’s rigged.’ What I am saying is that the math is not mathing.”

His comments mostly agree. “Even if you're a full blown leftist democrat, anyone with eyes or a brain cell left can see something is corrupt with this election,” says catherinehumphries5491. “Haha!! I’m here in Southern California and I’ve been watching you about Blake, lively [sic] and other things but now you just got my follow…” wrote a woman whose YouTube account identified her as a health coach and colon hydrotherapist.

Peter is far from the only anti-Lively, pro-Baldoni commentator who argued that the LA mayor’s race wasn’t legitimate. Another one of them was former Fox News and NBC broadcaster Megyn Kelly, who said allowing mail-in voting was illegitimate in itself.

“I mean, these are lazy ass people. They can’t get off their fat asses and get to election polling stations on election day,” Kelly said. Five days before that, Kelly insisted in a video that Lively was still hurting “actual victims.” After being fired from NBC, Kelly rebuilt an independent platform by covering trending pop culture topics from a conservative viewpoint, in addition to regular pro-Trump political coverage. This is becoming a crowded field for newly independent conservative influencers. Unlike most of them, Kelly also conveniently shares a lawyer with Baldoni, and his counsel has appeared on Kelly’s show to bolster his other client’s defense.

Anti-Lively pundits who think the LA election was fair have even gotten blowback from their viewers for not promoting the fraud conspiracy. Andy Signore, a #MeToo pariah who rebuilt his YouTube audience by attacking Heard, shared his disagreement with Trump for calling the mayoral race “rigged” on X. Peter, formerly a staunch ally of Signore’s in the campaign against Lively, then ratioed Signore by falsely claiming it was “statistically impossible” for Raman to win. Signore also received dozens of angry comments. “I liked your Blake vids, but on this, Get Fucked Dude,” wrote one person. Once an audience starts going down the conspiratorial pipeline, the creator can’t stop them. They can join them or lose them.

In the 2020s, I’ve watched plenty of creators and audiences follow this trajectory. Some of them start out as anti-Trump social justice warriors and fall for reactionary conservatism disguised as progressive (a common thread in political manifestations of DARVO). Other times, they were always conservative and concealed it to partake in seemingly nonpartisan displays of misogyny against celebrity women. Reality TV, high-profile court cases, and influencer scandals may not have been obvious political territory before, but they’ve clearly turned into conduits for alt-right thinking. And smear campaigns against famous actresses and progressive politicians in the spotlight rely on the same biases and rhetoric that could later justify voting for Trump or claiming the position of mayor of LA was stolen from a different reality villain.