Messaging about crime and disorder in major US cities is an expression of conservatives’ existential dread of being ruled by urban elites and Black leaders

In May, the FBI arrested Mark Adams Prieto, a 58-year-old gun show dealer from Prescott, Arizona, on firearms trafficking charges. Prieto had been on the way to Atlanta at the time, according to court documents, because he planned to kill as many Black people as he could at a Bad Bunny concert while planting Confederate flags and shouting white power slogans, to provoke a race war ahead of the 2024 election.

“The reason I say Atlanta,” Prieto allegedly told an informant working with the FBI, “Why, why is Georgia such a fucked-up state now? When I was a kid that was one of the most conservative states in the country. Why is it not now? Because as the crime got worse in LA, St Louis and all these other cities, all the n****** moved out of those [places] and moved to Atlanta.”

Prieto is a product of decades of Republican fearmongering, not just about Atlanta, but about big cities across the country. This is the message that Tucker Carlson and other conservative pundits have been pushing for years about San Francisco, New York and Detroit – it’s exactly the same way conservatives amped up their rhetorical combat on Chicago in the wake of Barack Obama’s ascension to the White House 16 years ago.