These Pro-Trump Extremists Had A Plan To Kill Muslims. How Were They Radicalized?
25 April 2018
A jury in Kansas this week is deliberating whether three militia members
should spend the rest of their lives in prison.
By Christopher Mathias
Ryan J. Reilly
LIBERAL, Kan. — Kay Burtzloff, a 61-year-old small-business owner who's lived
in this area for nearly 20 years, likes to joke that she's one of Liberal's
only liberals. The county, after all, went to Donald Trump by more than 30
points, and in the runup to the 2016 election, Burtzloff decided against
putting a Hillary Clinton sticker on her car, fearing vandals. Tensions were
high, she said.
It's a conservative place for sure, but also a diverse one. For years,
immigrant workers — from Vietnam, Mexico and eventually Somalia — have moved
to this flat stretch of prairie and farmland on the Oklahoma border to work at
the meatpacking plants. For the most part, people got along, Burtzloff said,
but something changed when Trump entered the political scene.
"I will be the first to tell you I do not fear getting killed by a Muslim,"
Burtzloff said. "I fear getting killed by an angry white guy. That is much
more likely to happen."
It's here in a trailer in this town of 20,000 people that three white men —
fueled by a steady diet of anti-Muslim online memes and conspiracy theories,
and captivated by presidential candidate Trump, who proposed a Muslim ban and
proclaimed that "Islam hates us" — appeared to discuss a plot to massacre
Somali Muslim immigrants who lived and worked nearby.
Patrick Stein, 49, Curtis Allen, 50, and Gavin Wright, 52, are accused of
plotting to bomb an apartment complex that housed many Somalis and its on-site
mosque. The three are believed to have gathered fertilizer to make a bomb
while they added to their arsenal of weapons and ammunition. But the FBI says
it foiled their plans with arrests four weeks before the 2016 election. The
men have been in jail ever since.
Their trial began last month. They face up to life in prison if convicted on
charges involving weapons of mass destruction and civil rights violations.
Evidence presented in the trial painted a picture of an all-American brand of
homegrown terrorism: angry white men radicalized by Islamophobic memes and
fake online news articles whose path to violent extremism was accelerated by a
divisive election cycle and a candidate who sounded like them.
For the last five weeks, the defendants have shuffled into a federal
courthouse in Wichita shackled at the ankles. They've listened day in and day
out as their own attorneys called them "knuckleheads" whose talk of mass
murdering Muslims was just bluster. And they've heard prosecutors portray them
as sinister would-be terrorists.
Closing arguments took place on Tuesday in the case. A nearly all-white jury
is expected to deliver a verdict at any time.
Jurors were played hours of tapes made by an FBI informant who had masqueraded
as a militiaman, recording the three defendants as they discussed plans and
spewed genocidal hatred of Muslims.
"The Crusaders," as they called themselves, splintered off from a larger
Kansas militia group whose members testified that they thought the three men
were too extreme. In the recordings, the men followed a familiar script of
Islamophobia.
First there are the conspiracy theories. In one recording they referred to
"civilization jihad," the paranoid idea that American Muslims are secretly
conspiring to take over the U.S.
Most Muslims aren't going to behead people, one of the men said in the
recording. Instead, "they sit back and fuck their brains out. Four kids per
fucking man per year," he added, referring to the idea that Muslims are trying
to grow the size of their population as quickly as possible. "Their objective
is to breed us out of existence."
Another familiar part of the Islamophobic script was taking Islamic scriptures
out of context. In another recording, the jury heard one of the men talk about
"taqiyya," an obscure Islamic concept that white supremacists have willfully
misinterpreted to accuse Muslims of lying to non-Muslims in their quest to
take over the world.
Because of taqiyya, one of the militiamen explained, Muslims can "deceive and
lie. They can go out and drink at the bar, just like you and I, and then the
son of a bitch would cut your throat."
Ultimately, the recordings capture the three men in an ideological frenzy:
America was on a crash course with the so-called Muslim world, and they had to
prepare for what they called "Crusades 2.0."
All of these outlandish lies and distortions about Muslims and Islam were
abundant online, and a scroll through the three men's social media profiles
showed they devoured this propaganda with abandon — retweeting, liking,
sharing and posting.
And they started to hear the messages of these anti-Muslim memes echoed in
Trump's stump speeches, possibly taking inspiration from their favorite
candidate's soundbites.
On the campaign trail, Trump often told the same widely discredited story of
how an American general ― over a century ago ― dipped bullets in pig's blood
to kill Muslims (most of whom don't eat pork). The three men talked openly of
dipping their bullets in pig's blood.
When Trump justified his Muslim ban by citing a discredited poll, Stein shared
a meme on Twitter based on that same poll.
Muslims were "cockroaches," according to recordings of the three men. "You
have to kill all of them. They keep coming back," Stein said. "You have to
exterminate them all."
The men mapped out Muslim targets on Google Earth, dropping "pins" on a map of
Garden City, Kansas, a slightly larger town an hour and a half drive north of
Liberal. Each pin was labeled "cockroaches."
According to testimony in the trial, as Trump warned Americans of Somali
refugees being terrorists in disguise — "the great Trojan horse of all time" —
the men decided on their main target: a Garden City apartment complex home to
many Somali Muslims, and the mosque where they prayed.
The men were conscious that this planned massacre might somehow hurt Trump's
chances at becoming president, according to prosecutors, so they scheduled the
attack for the day after the election: Nov. 9. This act of terrorism, they
said, would "wake people up."
They started gathering materials for bombs. They did drive-by surveillance of
the apartment building they wanted to target. They planned to blow it up as
people were praying in the building's mosque when, as Stein put it, the
Muslims were "packed in like sardines." The shock wave from the bombs, he
said, would make "Jello out of their insides."
The men met with an undercover officer, who they thought was a like-minded
arms dealer. Stein grew to trust him.
"We must win this battle because I refuse to go down in history as the
generation who lost the best country on the planet," Stein wrote in an
encrypted text to the undercover officer. Stein said he was ready to "take out
as many of those bastards as I possibly can till my last breath."
The three defendants haven't really denied that they engaged in hateful
anti-Muslim talk, which their attorneys have dismissed as blowing off steam,
"locker room talk," as one attorney put it. So instead they've been leaning on
an entrapment defense, arguing that the plan never would have been possible
without the federal government's involvement.
The defense has argued that the three men were manipulated by fake news but
that ultimately all their talk of killing Muslims amounted to angry rants and
that they never would've carried out their plot had it not been for the FBI's
meddling.
Although Stein, Wright and Allen would ultimately bear responsibility for
their alleged terrorist plot, there's a growing body of evidence showing how
Trump might be radicalizing his followers.
Anti-Muslim hate crimes rose dramatically in America in 2015 and 2016,
according to FBI statistics, rising to levels not seen since 9/11. Experts
have attributed this rise to the divisive election and the hostile rhetoric of
Trump.
A recent study found that 83 percent of "hate violence" incidents aimed at
South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Middle Eastern and Arab communities in U.S.
from November 2016 to November 2017 were anti-Muslim in nature. One in five
perpetrators of these violent hate crimes, the study noted, "invoked President
Trump's name, his administration's policies, or his campaign slogans" during
the attacks.
Last month, authorities arrested three militia group members in Illinois for
the 2017 bombing of a Minnesota mosque. They were Trump fans. One of the men
admired Trump so much that he submitted a detailed bid to build the
president's wall on the Mexican border.
Alexandre Bissonette, the Canadian man convicted of killing six men inside a
Quebec mosque in January 2017, searched Trump-related content online over 800
times in the month leading up to his act of terror, prosecutors revealed
during a sentencing hearing this week.
Bissonnette told police he was upset over Canadian Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau's message of welcome to refugees after Trump implemented his ban on
immigration from Muslim-majority countries.
A conviction in Kansas this week isn't a sure thing. "Even if they're not
convicted, I'm not convinced I want them in my community," said Burtzloff, the
Liberal businesswoman.
She rented out a storage unit to one of the three militiamen, where FBI agents
found a notepad scribbled over with the names of chemicals needed for bombs.
She also once owned the trailer park where another of the men kept his
trailer, and where FBI agents found nearly 2,000 pounds of ammunition.
That trailer, and the other trailer in Liberal where the men allegedly hatched
their plan, have both since been moved, their contents carried away by federal
agents. Among the evidence collected was a manifesto the men had started.
"This is a call to action by all Americans," they wrote. "Please do not just
sit idle until we lose this once great nation."
Killing Muslim refugees, their manifesto suggested, would make America great
again.
Stein, the alleged ringleader of the group, once told the undercover agent by
text that he worried about leaving a country that "is nothing resembling what
I grew up in to my kids and grandkids." When the agent pointed out the attack
would kill children, Stein replied that he did not care. He thought an attack
would help save America.
"We are dedicated patriots with love of country that doesn't end," Stein
wrote, "and we are willing to die for this country if that is what it takes to
get it back."
HuffPost has been in Wichita, Kansas, to cover this domestic terrorism trial.
Follow reporters Christopher Mathias and Ryan Reilly for updates. Here, and
above, is HuffPost's coverage of this case:
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