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.
Targeting Atlanta, of all places, for that shit is doubly stupid. Atlanta is famously known as “the city too busy to hate” precisely because of the way the black political/cultural/civil rights movement leaders of the city allied themselves with the white business leaders of the city. As such, it isn’t run nearly as “liberally” (in the pejorative sense) as the right-wing white terrorists seem to think.
In reality, Georgia is such a fucked-up state because of the shit that happens in the Gold Dome imposed by rural white conservative politicians over the objections of ones from Metro Atlanta (white and black alike).
Atlanta is also the “Cop City” city and the place with a suburb where they carved the likenesses of a bunch of Confederate traitors into the side of a cliff.