Growing up as a native Arizonan, my folks often spoke about how the state and its capital, Phoenix, were a microcosm of America.
"Phoenix is the future," I was told.
Their point was that many of the cultural clashes that featured prominently in Arizona politics reflected the clashes taking place on the national level — immigration, climate change, housing, public vs. private education, school curricula and so on. It’s a point writer George Packer essentially made for The Atlantic in his recent article about Phoenix, aptly titled “The Most American City.”
I thought about Packer’s article and my parents’ outlook about Arizona on Wednesday, when federal officials announced they’d arrested Mark Prieto, a white man in Prescott, Arizona, who was allegedly plotting a mass shooting he believed would ignite a race war.
As NBC News reported:
An Arizona man planned a mass shooting targeting African Americans and other minorities at a rap concert in Atlanta in May, looking to incite a race war ahead of the presidential election, federal authorities said. Mark Adams Prieto was indicted by a federal grand jury Tuesday on charges of firearms trafficking, transfer of a firearm for use in a hate crime and possession of an unregistered firearm. The indictment follows a monthslong investigation by the FBI that ended with his arrest last month, the Justice Department said. A spokesperson for the agency said Prieto is in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service for transport from New Mexico to Arizona. His attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Virtually all of my coverage about Arizona politics reflects my belief that, to truly understand politics in the U.S., one need look no further than Arizona. And that certainly applies to the strain of violent extremism in the state, an increasingly disturbing trend that has many Arizonans sounding alarm bells heading into this year's elections. Prescott, for example, where Prieto lived, and similarly remote areas of northern Arizona have long been known as breeding grounds for racist extremism.
Prescott is in the congressional district represented by Republican Rep. Paul Gosar, a man who has referred to the border crisis as an "invasion of illegal aliens," echoing white nationalist rhetoric, and has promoted and appeared at a white nationalist event (he blamed his video appearance on a "miscommunication" with staff), and who had several staffers with reported ties to white nationalists (in response to that reporting, Gosar's office told the Arizona Mirror he has "the longest and most thorough record of support for Israel and the Jewish people in the House" and that the staffers no longer work for him).
In this article from 2020, writer John D’Anna did a good job of laying out Prescott’s extremist roots in detail and helps to explain why no one should be surprised that it’s a hotbed for bigoted right-wingers.
The town of Kingman (also in Gosar’s district) is one of the locations where Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh coordinated his deadly 1995 massacre, and it has maintained its legacy of bigotry in the 21st century. As one former GOP operative told The New York Times about Kingman in 2022, “This is the part of the country where they believe Timothy McVeigh was right.” It was an acknowledgment that racist, anti-government conspiracies — McVeigh sold copies of "The Turner Diaries" at gun shows and called white nationalists his "brothers in arms" — continue to plague Kingman. It's a problem actor Sacha Baron Cohen even put under a microscope in his 2018 television series, "Who is America?"
These articles offer some valuable history for folks who want to understand how hate spreads, using the extremism documented in Northern Arizona as a guide. They show how a combination of permissive gun culture, rank racial resentment and opportunistic lawmakers can make for a toxic brew that engenders the kind of political violence that law enforcement appears to have foiled in Prescott — this time.