Among the favorite pastimes of Republican men, two stand out: first, boasting about what strong, courageous, hypermasculine operators they are; and second, publicly melting down about how pants-pissingly terrified they are of American cities.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) is the latest in a long line of conservative men expressing delirious panic about an American city, in this case Washington, D.C. “I drive around in Washington, D.C., in my Jeep and, yes, I do drive myself. And I don’t buckle up,” he said on Fox News recently. “And the reason why I don’t buckle up, and people can say whatever they want to, they can raise their eyebrows at me, again, is because of carjacking.” Consider my eyebrow raised.
Before Mullin, there was Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy hyperventilating about almost nonexistent crime on the New York subway. And there was Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) claiming that he tells visitors to D.C. that “you need to be careful where you stay, you need to be careful where you walk, you shouldn’t be out after dark.” And, of course, there was Donald Trump calling various American cities Escape From New York–esque hellholes. “What I guess the mayor did, but whoever it was, they asked the numbers to be fudged so they would show less crime,” he said recently, denying police statistics about dramatically falling D.C. crime. “The fact is, it’s worse than it has ever been.”
This seems to be a core emotion of modern conservatism: wallowing in terror of largely imaginary dangers. But there is a very real project behind their trembling cowardice—the violent subjugation of liberal cities. Today, D.C. is the target. Trump has seized control of the D.C. police department, deployed FBI agents to wander around peaceful D.C. parks, and authorized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to send in National Guard troops.
I must emphasize that for anyone who has lived in any big American city, these Republican men are almost indescribably pathetic. I have lived in New York, D.C., and Philadelphia, and as a habitual walker who didn’t own a car for most of that time, I have spent literally thousands of hours walking and cycling all over those cities, usually by myself, and often after dark. The one time I experienced any actual crime against my person was when some dumb Philly pranksters shot me with an airsoft gun before speeding off. It did little more than startle me.
Now, I am a non-elderly man, which changes the risk calculus somewhat, and street crime does happen. I knew people who were mugged in D.C., and carjacking does happen there. (There was a substantial spike in 2022-2023, but it’s now trending back to about where it was before the pandemic.)
But fundamentally, crime of any kind is a minor risk for a white man in D.C., which classification applies to Mullin, Duffy, Scott, and Trump. Overwhelmingly, the largest source of danger for people who fit that description is vehicle traffic, which killed 110 people in the D.C. area in 2024—a danger that is considerably worsened when you aren’t wearing your seatbelt.
American cities, especially in blue states, are safer than they have been in decades. Baltimore, for instance, is seeing the lowest homicide rate since the 1970s (when it first started collecting statistics) thanks to the diligent efforts of Mayor Brandon Scott. A wealthy, passing-for-white male (Mullin has a Cherokee background) member of Congress flipping out about city crime today is like having a panic attack over fear of being assaulted by Goofy at Disneyland.
But cities really are full of everything that conservatives hate: liberals, feminists, diversity, LGBT people, immigrants, and so on—essentially, cosmopolitanism writ large. New York City in particular, with its millions of people from all over the world living cheek by jowl in relative harmony, is living disproof of JD Vance’s Volksgemeinschaft ideology. It proves that immigrants can be a vital part of the American fabric, and in fact always have been—and Republicans can’t stand it.
A consistent thread in the history of American conservatism is the enjoyment of inflicting sadistic violence on helpless members of disfavored groups. This stems from slavery, which required brutal violence to function at all, but was also the central pillar of the subsequent Jim Crow regime. Segregation was only the surface of a system in which “white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them … white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment,” as Hamdan Rice writes. “This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running.”
I think on some level, conservatives know perfectly well that liberal American cities are quite safe. That’s why they have to work themselves into such paroxysms of hysterical cowardice—to give themselves permission to inflict violence on the Americans they hate. It’s what happened in Los Angeles earlier this year, and it’s happening to Washington, D.C., today. Tomorrow it will be somewhere else, and unless Republicans are stopped, the violence will only escalate. “We’re gonna support doing this in other cities if it works out in Washington, D.C.,” Rep. James Comer (R-KY) said on Newsmax recently. “I think this is an experiment that’s probably needed in a lot of the Democrat-run cities in America.”