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.
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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.
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Somali men gather outside the International African Grocery Store in Liberal, Kansas. Employment at the local National Beef plant has brought a wave of Somali immigrants to southwest Kansas.