Get out of your bubble

Tell me you’re a product of Orange County without telling me you’re a product of Orange County.

So in case you missed it (and I really hope you didn’t—because the thing was a bear), yesterday I posted my rankings of the 26 worst Orange County political figures of 2026.

Buried beneath neon names like Will O’Neill and Todd Spitzer and Jack Hibbs and Mari Barke was, at No. 21, Sophia Lorey, the outreach director for California Family Council (aka: a whole bunch o’ white conservatives who believe We, The People, need more God, less trans, more Bible, less diversity). And, in a way, I felt torn about including Lorey, who looks to be in her early-to-mid 20s, graduated from (the e-x-t-r-a-o-r-d-i-n-a-r-i-l-y sheltered) Vanguard University and has been thrown—dirty towel-like—into the echo chamber that is right-wing media (land of older white male hosts fawning over younger white female guests with good hair).

And, if I’m Lorey, I’m milking this cow as long as I can. Fox News calls? Get on it! Newsmax calls? Get on it, too! Hell, back in my early days as a Sports Illustrated writer, I was jumping from radio interview to radio interview to radio interview. For an early media pro, PR is everything.

Truly, I get it.

But … yesterday, on her IG story, the same person telling thousands of viewers and followers what to believe, how to act, why they should be angry, posted this …

And, like, what?

What!?!?!?!?!?

You need your pepper spray … walking thru downtown Philadelphia? In daylight? Seriously? Like, seriously seriously? Are you carrying $100,000,000 in your purse? Are you wearing a mink coat with the price tag dangling off? Why, in God’s name, do you deem it necessary to have pepper spray (in a look-at-me pink canister, no less) in (of all the places) Philly?

My next sentence was going to be, “It makes no sense”—but then I realized, it makes perfect sense. This is a child of conservative Southern California; a product of Vanguard. I remember when we first moved here from New York, and I was dumbfounded to learn how many of my daughter’s friends had never been to (gasp) Santa Ana, let alone Los Angeles. It was all just too … scary. Too … chaotic. Too Latino and Black.

But it also causes you to realize that people of this young woman’s ilk, who thrive in translating the Bible into essential life lessons, haven’t lived life. They haven’t seen. They haven’t smelled. They haven’t experienced stepping into a dirty pot hole, sipping from a beer at a Trenton pub, walking the streets of Washington Heights, taking a glimpse at Gary, Indiana, meeting folks on the stoops of Brooklyn and Detroit and Chicago.

They walk among us, and they walk believing they have the answers.

But they carry pepper spray in a pink canister.

In Philadelphia.