Spencer Pratt paced around a dirt lot set up with chairs and microphones, waiting for his wife, Heidi Montag, to join him. It was late August. The air tasted like batteries, and the ground was scarred with burn marks.

Pratt, the reality TV star best known for his role as Montag’s bad boyfriend-turned-husband on MTV’s “The Hills,” took a seat where the couple’s bedroom used to be. The canyon view was still there, but instead of walls and windows, there was nothing but a white canopy with a production crew.

The couple’s Pacific Palisades home burned down during the January wildfires that destroyed thousands of structures across Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, decimating the neighborhood where Pratt grew up and still lived. After the debris was cleared, they refashioned the property into an outdoor podcast studio.

“Hopefully they’re going to stop cutting down trees pretty soon,” Pratt, 42, said to his producer as the sound of revving chain saws drifted over from a property nearby.

The podcast is called “The Fame Game with Heidi and Spencer.” In theory, it features “Speidi” chatting about pop culture and celebrity. Lately, however, the show is just as often a platform for Pratt’s rage directed at California’s leaders. Angry gadfly is his new brand.

For months, Pratt’s social media presence has been dominated by hectoring posts blaming Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles for failing to stop the fires. He shows up at protests and flies to Washington to ask the Trump administration to investigate the state’s leaders. He takes on causes that include keeping affordable housing out of his former neighborhood and investigating how the money raised for fire victims is being spent.

Speaking to his followers in a hopped up, “you’re never gonna believe this” tone, Pratt has documented all this, along with lawsuits, insurance claims and the new portable toilet at his lot, with the vibe of a crusading activist on a hunt for the truth.

Like most everything with Pratt, his venture into politics comes with a product tie-in. The podcast is shot in front of a retaining wall painted with the name of Montag’s new album, “Heidiwood.” In addition to crystal pendants and Montag’s music, Pratt’s website now features “Spencer for Governor” T-shirts ($45).

The blurring of activism and merch is one reason Pratt’s detractors portray him as a yapping opportunist who riles people up instead of looking for solutions. Another is that Pratt dismisses climate change as a major factor in the fires and instead seems to be looking for someone to blame. Governor Newsom’s office referred to him as a “C-list” reality star whose post-first-ask-questions-later style spreads misinformation and sows mistrust.

He has the credibility of a real fire victim, though, and his following can’t be ignored: 1.1 million followers on Instagram and 2.2 million on TikTok. This year, a number of bills in the state legislature have been shelved or amended in response to critiques (some of them inaccurate) that Pratt pushed on social media. Nobody would attribute this to him alone, but in an era when influencers outshine local media, to many, he has become the voice of the Palisades.

“He’s an example of this larger thing that’s happening in our political ecosystem, where you have people that have a very large social media following that can have an impact on policy,” said Sasha Renée Pérez, a California state senator from Pasadena who is 33 and grew up watching “The Hills” in the late 2000s. Pratt, she said, “plays a really big role in amplifying things.”

Given how polarized the nation is, it’s probably not surprising that Pratt’s crusade against Governor Newsom has won him new fans on the right. His feed on X (formerly Twitter) is a virtual cheering section of accounts that identify as “MAGA.” His fire-ravaged lot has become a venue for out-of-state Republicans to stage news conferences and make content.

Rick Scott, the Republican senator from Florida, was there in August to discuss a congressional investigation into the fires. The investigation was announced a few weeks later — the same day that Kelly Loeffler, the director of the Small Business Administration, showed up to talk about rebuilding and red tape.

Despite the rush of new attention, Pratt said he has avoided commenting on anything he doesn’t perceive to have some link to the Palisades. He isn’t getting into tariffs, abortion or even California’s congressional redistricting fight (Pratt said he generally hated politics and didn’t identify with a party).

Pratt is so myopically focused on the Palisades — an affluent 25-square-mile neighborhood with a prefire population of 25,000 — that he said he had resisted requests to post about other disasters such as the Maui fires, Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and even the Eaton fire in Altadena, which many people consider the same fire as the Palisades. “I need to fight for my literal neighbors that are texting me,” he said.

On the day I visited the podcast taping, Montag, who is 39, finally emerged from a parked S.U.V. wearing a red tube top, red leggings and red heels. She precariously navigated a flight of stone steps down to her chair with a hair and makeup crew trailing behind.

For anyone with even the barest familiarity with Speidi content — their staged paparazzi shots, maybe, or Montag’s claim to have once had 10 plastic surgeries in a single day — this episode was quite the twist. The subject was zoning policy, and their guest was state senate candidate Nico Ruderman.

The California legislature had been debating a bill called SB 79 that would allow apartment buildings as high as nine stories in neighborhoods within a half-mile of major transit stops, like a light rail or bus rapid transit station, regardless of local zoning rules. The legislation wouldn’t apply to the Palisades, which does not have such a stop, but for weeks Pratt had suggested on social media that it would. This in turn had prompted the bill’s author, Scott Wiener, the Democratic state senator from San Francisco, to accuse him of spreading a “bald faced lie.”

It was wonky stuff. Ruderman, who lives in Venice, Calif., was aligned with Pratt on housing and had written an opinion column that called SB 79 “a Trojan Horse for overdevelopment.” For much of the next 45 minutes, as he and Pratt volleyed about building codes and parking minimums, Montag sat cross-legged with her hands on her knees looking as if she’d arrived with a subpoena.

After the show, Pratt said he wished the podcast was more about escapist entertainment as he and Montag originally intended. But reality is their brand, and the empty lot was real.

“This is our whole life now, so it’s kind of taken over any aspect of entertainment,” he said as the podcast crew packed up and his neighbors continued sawing. “It’s dark comedy, but it’s not fun.”

A-List Fame on a C-List Budget

Pratt’s lot sits about two miles up the hill from the house where he grew up and where his parents still lived, until the fires took it. His dad is a dentist and his mom a homemaker. Pratt went to Crossroads, an exclusive private school in Santa Monica, and described himself as the least connected person there. Its alumni are a roster of famous actors, famous directors and the children of famous actors and directors.

It was a rarefied orbit and gave Pratt the access to start his career. He left Crossroads for the University of Southern California, but took time off to produce a reality show that became “The Princes of Malibu.”

The show was about Pratt’s friend Brody Jenner and his brother Brandon living a spoiled life of leisure in their parents’ mansion. Pratt played an Eddie Haskell-type character described as a “permanent houseguest.” When the show was canceled after one season, Pratt walked away determined to get back on TV and soon set his sights on “The Hills.”

“We had a meeting with the president of MTV to talk about a new show, and he said ‘I’m going to go date one of those girls in ‘The Hills’ and I’m going to blow your show up,’” said Brant Pinvidic, an executive producer on “The Princes of Malibu.” “That was his goal from the very beginning.”

It worked, and after joining in the second season, Pratt became the show’s villain. He kicked Montag out of his car when she refused to move in with him. He hit on other girls and slammed doors. After his sister cried during an argument, Pratt told her “I’m sorry you’re making yourself cry.”

“I hated it so much,” said Pratt’s mother, Janet Pratt, of the show. “But I saw the checks.”

Pratt and Montag have spent much of their post-Hills career describing the show as fake. The same theme runs through his forthcoming memoir “The Guy You Loved to Hate,” which Simon & Schuster is scheduled to release in January and aims to set Pratt up for a “redemption arc.”

But the mean-guy routine sold, and Pratt said at the peak he and Montag were making more than $100,000 per episode and could get the same just to show up at a club for a few hours. As they made money, they spent it — designer clothes, expensive booze, private plane flights.

The problem, Pratt said, was that their tabloid profile gave them A-list notoriety “with a C-list budget.” “We were always living check to check even though we’re making all this money because the cost of fame is so expensive,” he told me.

In 2017 Pratt and Montag moved into a $2.5 million home in the Pacific Palisades that was tucked against hills next to a collection of grassy hiking trails. Pratt said he used $500,000 in gold coins as the down payment, although records list Pratt’s parents as the purchasers (Pratt said this helped them secure a more favorable loan).

The three-bedroom house was where Pratt started building up his social media presence, documenting the family’s life in Truman-show style granularity — kids’ illnesses, daily breakfast burritos, time-lapse videos of Pratt mixing hummingbird nectar. In place of the pot-stirrer from “The Hills,” he came off as a family man who doted over his wife and made self-deprecating jokes about how famous he used to be.

“There was no reason to be a villain anymore,” Pratt said. “No one was paying me.”

Unmoored

Pratt’s social media feed was probably the first place many of his followers heard about the fires. He filmed the flames from a trail above his house throughout the morning and afternoon on Jan. 7. In one video you can hear wind whipping in the microphone and see plumes of smoke in the distance. It ends with him saying: “I should go home and start packing up the house.”

In the weeks after the house burned, Pratt documented everything: his first trip back to the wreckage, the charred remains of the pot he made hummingbird nectar with, security footage of the moment when the flames consumed his son’s nursery. Pratt said he didn’t have a single family picture that predated cloud storage. The trophies and photo albums he kept at his parents house have all now burned.

From the beginning there was a vocal group online saying that compared with most people, Pratt — who is now living at his parents’ second home near Santa Barbara — would be fine. But other fans wanted to help and, at Pratt’s urging, began streaming Montag’s music, helping to send her 2010 album “Superficial” onto the Billboard 200 album chart.

Pratt said his home was insured under California’s last-resort FAIR plan and that the couple’s payout was about $1 million, far from enough for a full rebuild. His parents had no insurance at all. In mid-January, he and Montag joined two dozen other homeowners in a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

The crux of the Pratts’ suit is that the Palisades fire is a story of mismanagement. If the surrounding hills had been cleared of brush, if the nearby Santa Ynez reservoir hadn’t been empty and offline, if more fire trucks and water tenders had been stationed nearby, the Palisades would still be standing, the suit argues. It is one of dozens against the city, state and insurance companies that are poised to drag on for years and already total tens of billions in claims.

The January wildfires, which included a dozen blazes across Southern California, have spawned several investigations by state, federal and local authorities into their causes and the local response. Whatever shortfalls they find, fire experts have said a devastating alignment of extraordinary winds and dry tinder accelerated the inferno, hampered efforts to fight it and made it nearly impossible to fully plan for.

In a written statement, the water and power utility said that “no water system can deliver reliably when subjected to the stress of massive wildfires, like the Palisades fire,” and argued that the empty reservoir did not affect the firefighting effort.

Pratt has no patience for complicated realities in which there are many factors and no clear villain. He rejects explanations like extreme weather, climate change and the fact that the hills around the Palisades and Malibu have been burning for generations. Instead, he places most of the blame on a handful of politicians that he argues fell down on the job.

Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass are well aware of Pratt’s online attacks and outreach to national Republicans, and in an emailed statement, Bass said Pratt was “lashing out and creating confusion.” But they have mostly tried to ignore him.

“We are all working toward the same goal — helping this community heal,” said a spokesperson for the governor.

Pratt’s view of healing is less ideological than nostalgic. He’s against affordable housing one minute, then fighting to save a trailer park the next. He said he didn’t want the single-family home neighborhoods in the Palisades to change, but that apartment complexes that previously existed should come back at the same scale.

The main theme of his advocacy is that he wants whatever gets rebuilt to look more or less how he remembers it. When the Palisades burned down, Pratt lost the one place in the world where he wasn’t just a jerk on TV.

“In my version of life, my kids were going to live here, and I was going to be a grandfather and do Palisades baseball, do the whole thing,” he said. “These people always stood by me.”

Pratt’s neighbors all have the same unmoored sense of loss. The question some have is whether his fury might be alienating the very state and local leaders they need on their side. No matter how many out-of-state Republicans Pratt invites to his lot, in the end, it’s the Californians who stick around who will determine what the Palisades becomes next.

“All that anger is not going to get houses rebuilt any faster,” said Jed Weitzman, a music industry executive who lives in the Palisades and has known Pratt since he was a child. “You need to figure out a way to work within the reality of the situation no matter how painful or how difficult that may be.”

Weitzman added that his home was still standing, and he might not sound so high-minded if it had burned.

Mr. Pratt Goes to Washington

A few weeks after the zoning podcast, Pratt was standing by a baggage carousel at Ronald Reagan International Airport when a bulldozer operator and his wife walked up to thank him. Pratt had flown to Washington for two days of meetings with lawmakers that included a news conference on the congressional investigation that Senator Scott had promised to pursue during his tour of Pacific Palisades.

At the Los Angeles airport, on the plane and in the nation’s capitol, fans approached Pratt to say (and, in one case, shout out from a restaurant patio) that they loved what he was doing in California and to compliment his “Newsom Will Not Be President” hat ($44).

All of Pratt’s suits were now ashes, so after checking into his hotel, he and a friend went to Macy’s, where he made a video of the shopping trip. Then they were off to the U.S. Capitol, where he made a video about the upcoming news conference.

“It’s going down tomorrow, 10:30,” Pratt posted on TikTok, standing in front of the symbol of democracy wearing cargo shorts and a Heidi Montag T-shirt.

After filming, Pratt walked back to a waiting black S.U.V.

“You see why these guys get all into this,” he said. “I really feel these buildings.”

He also noted that the streets around the Capitol smelled like Santa Monica, by which he meant they smelled like urine.

It was raining the next day, so the news conference took place in Scott’s office, where a podium had been set up in front of flags for the United States and Florida (no lawmakers from California were there). While the press waited, Pratt sat in a closed-door meeting with Senators Scott and Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin.

“Breaking news, at Senator Rick Scott’s office here in Washington, and we got the subpoena power, investigator Senator Ron here — watch out!” Pratt told his fans on Instagram and TikTok.

A few minutes later Pratt emerged from Scott’s inner office in his Macy’s suit and an unusually straight face. When the news conference was over, Pratt donned his “Newsom Will Not Be President” hat and headed to the hallway.

Then it was off to the national mall for a tour of modular buildings with Scott Turner, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The next morning Pratt made a swing through the office of Jim Jordan, the Republican congressman from Ohio and chair of the House Judiciary Committee, to press for an investigation into the FireAid charity that Pratt believes is misusing funds raised for fire victims. (A few days earlier, in response to criticism, FireAid released an independent review of its grant activity that found no misuse of funds.)

I asked Pratt at one point if he considered the possibility that he was being used. Doors were opening now that he was trying to make Governor Newsom look inept. He might find that the politics become trickier if the Palisades — a high-end, Democrat-voting enclave in a blue city in a blue state — were to, say, ask for federal rebuilding funds.

Pratt said that it was possible he was being used, and he didn’t care. He will work with anyone who is willing to help the Palisades, regardless of party. He added later that anyone who thinks they’re manipulating Spencer Pratt is bound to come away disappointed.

“I’m going to do me,” he said.

Shortly after leaving Jordan’s office, Pratt got in the black S.U.V. for the ride back to the airport. On the drive there, he said he hoped it was his last trip to Washington. He missed California and hates leaving home.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.