For all of Patrick Stein’s life, Southwest Kansas — “God’s country,” he called it — had looked basically the same. Golden fields, white grain elevators, blue sky. But lately it was starting to look different. “Here come a couple of fucking raghead bitches,” Stein announced as he spotted a group of dark-skinned women in long, colorful robes and gauzy scarves walking up the avenue named for the great frontiersman Buffalo Jones. His buddy Dan Day, with whom he had attended a Garden City gun show that day — February 27, 2016 — slowed his truck. Stein, who was sitting in the passenger seat, poked his head out the window, and by the time he spat those last two words — raghead bitches — he was close enough that the women, startled, lifted their eyes toward the vehicle.
Men like Stein and Day — with drink-ruddy faces and ISIS HUNTING PERMIT bumper stickers — are a common feature of the landscape in Southwest Kansas, although Garden City has perhaps fewer than its neighbors Dodge City, the infamous gun-slinging town, and Liberal, which isn’t. As locals like to point out, there’s something a little different about “Garden,” which despite feeling like the middle of nowhere is populated by people from seemingly everywhere. The seat of rural Finney County, Garden City is situated in almost the exact center of the country, with attractions like the World’s Largest Hand-Dug Swimming Pool (built 1922) and the World’s Largest Hairball (discovered in the belly of a cow circa 1993). It has been a modest but consistent boomtown, host to a rotating crop of industries — sugar beets, cattle, wind turbines — that require a lot of land and a lot of people to work it. As a result, the area has always attracted immigrants, from the Mexicans who laid the tracks of the Santa Fe railroad in the early-20th century to the Japanese who arrived after the Second World War. And while there was some initial trepidation on the part of the locals, they usually found, in working side by side with the newcomers, that they shared those values considered to be midwestern: belief in God, family, and hard work. “All equal, regardless of wealth, color, or creed,” one resident boasted to Truman Capote when he visited the area in the 1960s to report In Cold Blood. “Everything the way it ought to be in a Democracy, that’s us.”
This egalitarian spirit prevailed through the 1980s, when big meatpacking companies relocated to the area, bringing with them a wave of workers from Vietnam and Cambodia. Members of the police department underwent cultural-awareness training, learning to do things like take their shoes off when entering Asian households. When the International Rescue Committee opened an office in Garden City in 2014, headed by a no-nonsense former refugee named Amy Longa, and resettled over 200 transplants from war-torn countries like Somalia into jobs at the meatpacking plants, the police reached out to the elder males in the groups, to earn their trust. “To make sure that everybody is part of a community,” as Chief Michael Utz put it. Garden City became what NPR called “an unlikely progressive town.” Newspaper headlines regularly referred to it as an exemplar of “America’s future,” and although the area had long suffered its share of “brain drain,” its reputation drew a new class of educated millennials. Like John Birky, a young physician, and his wife, Lisa, Kansas natives who had spent time in Africa and moved back specifically to work with the refugees; and Benjamin Anderson, the 30-something CEO of a nearby hospital, who sold incoming interns on “the idea of America as a mission field” and espoused a philosophy of “unconditional radical love.” Thanks in part to their efforts, moonfaced med students could be found slurping pho in the area’s Vietnamese restaurants and trying on guntiino at one of two stores selling African goods. Main Street, which had languished after the arrival of chains like Buffalo Wild Wings, was showing new signs of life, and the Chamber of Commerce had come up with a logo that reflected the town’s multiculturalism: THE WORLD GROWS HERE, accompanied by a picture of a yucca plant with leaves the colors of the rainbow.
But not everyone was willing to accept this vision of America’s future. Most famously: Donald Trump, then running for the Republican nomination for president, who had made it clear that he saw immigrants, particularly Muslims, as the enemy.
As Stein and Day rolled through town, a speech Trump had given a few days earlier — praising the (apocryphal) methods of a U.S. general in dispensing with Muslim opponents in the Philippine-American War — was still playing on conservative radio. “He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” he’d told the crowd. “And he had his men load their rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: ‘You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened.’ ”
Looking out the window, Stein caught the eye of one of the Somali women. On the seat next to him was a pistol and next to that an automatic rifle with ten rounds of ammunition. If he wanted to, he could splatter her and her friend’s brains all over the sidewalk right then and there. Raghead bitch.
The moment passed. The woman averted her eyes. Stein relaxed his grip on his gun. There was no upside in acting impulsively, he reminded himself. Whatever they decided to do had to be carefully planned. And when the world saw it, they would be hailed as heroes.
A few blocks away, Ifrah Ahmed was sitting cross-legged on a cushion in her apartment, packing a hookah pipe with sweet strawberry tobacco. Ifrah wasn’t supposed to smoke hookah, because she was a woman, but as Ifrah — and Beyoncé, of whom she was a fan — liked to say, she was an “independent woman.” She had been so ever since the day her mother told her, at age 14, that she was engaged to be married. You’re going to be happy, her mother said, as Ifrah cried her eyes out. That’s what you are born for. Everybody does it.
Not Ifrah, who later that night stole her mom’s keys and sneaked out of the house in Nairobi, where they’d lived since the Somalian government had collapsed in 1991. She spent the night in a mosque near the bus station and, through the charity of the imam and his congregation, bought a bus ticket to Uganda, where she bribed her way across the border, ending up in Nakivale, considered to be one of the nicer refugee camps in the world. “Everybody is just humble and kind and nice,” she recalled. “You don’t eat, you eat with the neighbors. The neighbors don’t eat, they eat with you.”
Ifrah’s people skills and proficiency with languages — in addition to Somali, she speaks Swahili, English, and some Arabic — made her useful to the camp’s administrators, and she was working as a translator for the U.N. when she got a call, at age 21, informing her she could come to America — specifically, Kansas City — as a refugee. From there, she made her way to Garden City, where her cousin worked for Tyson Foods. Ifrah got a job there, too, as a quality-control inspector. But it wasn’t long before her supervisors recognized in her the same traits the U.N. had, and soon she was being called off the production line to help them communicate with their African workers.
Their conversations were often about injuries. Meatpacking is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, physically and, perhaps, mentally. Tyson slaughtered thousands of cows every day. Some of the refugees had been through unspeakable horrors, and being around all that blood couldn’t be the healthiest thing. Then again, what else could they do, far away from home, unable to speak the language?
Ifrah’s shift at the plant was 3 to 11 p.m., but this part of the job — the helping — was more of a lifestyle. Ifrah had been elected a community leader by a council of elders, and this meant someone was always knocking on her door, needing something. Women whose genital mutilation left them with horrible recurring urinary-tract infections wanted her to help communicate their symptoms to doctors. Mothers asked her to talk to their children’s teachers. People needed rides to Western Union, to send money to relatives, or the African Shop, one of the hubs of the community, to watch Law & Order: SVU and eat sambosas with ranch dressing, a local delicacy that Somalis had taken to.
Unlike many of her neighbors, who were skittish about strangers, Ifrah didn’t limit her own relationships to other Africans. At her cozy apartment, adorned with inspirational sayings like DREAM and JOURNEY, she hosted friends of all kinds — Dominican, Burmese, white Kansans — making them tea and inviting them to sing on the karaoke machine. When a transgender Turkish-Iraqi with a long glossy wig under her hairnet appeared on the floor at Tyson, some of her co-workers tittered and stared, but Ifrah thought she was beautiful. “We are not God,” she admonished them. “We are not here to judge.”
A few of the older Somalis disapproved of these friendships and that Ifrah was still, at the ancient age of 28, unmarried. “Don’t lose your roots,” they warned.
“You cannot lose your roots!” she responded. She would know. She still heard regularly from her mother, who had recently called from Nairobi to complain about Ifrah smoking hookah — she’d heard about it from Ifrah’s neighbors.
Garden City was a small town, but she liked it. It was peaceful, and friendly. But in the lead-up to the presidential election, the atmosphere started to feel a little different, the way it had right before Ifrah saw her first tornado darken the sky. Down at the African Shop, detectives Benson and Stabler solved crimes on mute while people fretted over the things Donald Trump was saying about Muslims. Ifrah didn’t want to think the people she’d lived among believed him. At the same time, she’d noticed a shift in the way she was treated. Like the suspicious employee who’d followed her through Target, where she’d long been a regular. And Mimi, the trans woman, and her cousin Ghasak, who liked to go to the club and dance on the weekends, said one night the DJ had trained his spotlight on them and said he hoped Trump would “make America great again.” They’d laughed about it, but Ifrah was worried. Many of her supervisors supported him. Even this veterinarian she worked with — a nice vet, who’d been to Africa — had gone to one of his rallies and taken a picture with the guy.
“He doesn’t really mean all immigrants,” he’d said as he inspected a cow. “He just means illegal immigrants.”
“Just because they are illegal doesn’t mean they are going to harm you,” said Ifrah, thinking of a friend from Mexico. “They’re here because they want a better life for their kids.”
The vet shrugged. “He just talks,” he said. “It’s not like he’s gonna do it.” Then he patted the cow on the hindquarters and sent it out to meet its fate.
As far as Patrick Stein was concerned, Donald Trump was “the Man.” Stein had grown up in Wright, Kansas, a tiny town outside Dodge City (“Maybe 450 to 500 people, if you count cats and dogs”) where “everybody knew everybody” and “you could always count on your neighbor.” His parents ran a farm and expected their six children to help out with the chores while they worked day jobs. In between, there was church, lots of it, including a Catholic Mass every morning before school. Stein was an altar boy. “It was a pain in my ass,” he said in his flat drawl. “But it was all right. You get good morals and good values.”
One could argue that when it came to Patrick, these didn’t stick. He was bright and charming: a good-looking kid, with sandy hair, a snub nose, and roguish blue eyes. But the slow country life didn’t suit him. He had a taste for action — fast cars, loud music, big guns. Marriage and two sons failed to settle him down, and in 1998, Stein allegedly forced his way into the home of a drug dealer who’d sold him some bum crystal meth and threatened “a bloodbath” if he didn’t get his money back. He left with the dealer’s mother’s gun as collateral, and when she called the police and told them it was missing, Stein was arrested. For a long while, the cops had taken it easy on him, “on account of everyone knowing each other,” he says. But it wasn’t clear he’d be able to avoid jail much longer: “Between the cops and a vindictive female, I couldn’t sneeze in the wrong direction.” It was time to, as they say, get out of Dodge. He went to Nebraska, where he “ran a ranch,” then moved to Colorado Springs before ending up working construction in Arizona. That’s where he was when his mother called early on September 11, 2001, and told him to turn on the television.
“That was my game-changer,” he said. “That’s what started me paying attention to the political world, our so-called representatives, and educating myself on the individuals that threw themselves into the planes, what the ideology is.”
When the U.S. invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, Stein was happy for the chance at retribution. “I knew we were going in to kick some ass and not take names neither,” he said. He might have gone and kicked some himself had his family not, around that time, summoned him back home to Kansas. His sons were getting older, and they needed their father around. Stein didn’t care for his ex-wife — “If she was standing on a ledge or something, I might push her off” — but he acknowledged his masculine responsibility. “Better get my ass back to Kansas,” he said.
The family farm was as money-losing as ever, but Stein soon came up with an idea that he thought could reap a major windfall. President Bush had just signed the Energy Independence and Security Act, and investors were scrambling to invest in renewable fuels. Stein had done some research online, and it turned out that on the farm, they had everything they needed to produce them. “The conversion process is actually quite simple,” he told his father and brother. “If we grew our own soybeans and processed them into biodiesel, it wouldn’t cost us a dime.”
They formed a company, Torsten Energy — the name was a reference to their family’s Nordic roots — and by 2008, had raised a substantial amount from local investors, according to Stein, who claims he was on the verge of making a deal that would take him the rest of the way toward his vision: four $40 million plants silhouetted against the Kansas sky, monuments to his ingenuity. “I felt like I finally made it,” he said. “We were going to be riding on cloud nine, peaches and cream.”
Then, one morning in 2008, Stein turned on the TV. “And it was another day like 9/11,” he said. “There’s Bernanke and Bush and everyone saying the markets are crashing, the world is coming to an end, there was no more money coming, nobody was doing nothing in terms of new projects. I knew at that point we were done.”
After the company collapsed, his father may have found solace in going to church, but Stein felt only the accusing eyes of the neighbors whose money they’d lost. “To have to see those people on a daily basis, those people who’d invested a good chunk of their lives …” he said. “It sucked.”
The next few years, he was in and out of rehab, struggling with alcohol and amphetamine addiction, after which he repaired to his trailer on his parents’ property to nurse his rage. “How many other companies across the country went bankrupt, they didn’t get a bailout?” he seethed. “Why should the banks?”
When they were setting up the company, Stein had made a few trips to the nation’s capital to meet with elected representatives, and the dismissive way they treated him still stung. “I really saw how disgustingly corrupt, how wasteful, our system is,” he said. “If you got money, if you know people, you get everything you want done. It’s a disgrace, if you ask me. It is everything our Founding Fathers feared. It literally makes me sick. And it’s ‘We the People’ who are responsible. Our system relies on the people to keep the government in check. But most people don’t pay any attention.”
Now Stein was paying attention. Back in his trailer, he developed a new addiction: content produced by right-wing media outlets, whose outrage matched his own. Stein was a fan of Fox News, and when this corporate entity failed to provide the high of extreme indignation, there were news sites like Breitbart, Infowars, and Reddit, plus Veterans Today, JewsNews, et. al, which Stein, whose mind was already addled by the information he’d mainlined elsewhere, took to be purveyors of the “real” truth. Among the things he came to believe: that the U.N. had built secret tunnels underneath all of the country’s Walmarts that linked to underground military bases. That there were Chinese troops lined up at the Mexican border readying to launch a communist invasion. That Cuba was going to invade Florida. “Been telling people for years it was all a hoax,” he wrote above a headline he posted on Facebook: “Sandy Hook Redux: Obama Officials Confirm That It Was A Drill and No Children Died.”
The nucleus of Stein’s rage was, of course, Barack Obama. “We are literally being run by a terrorist organization at the highest level, being the Oval Office,” Stein told people in the militia he joined during the president’s second term. “He is their leader. Their organization is called the Muslim Brotherhood, and of course it filters down through every other department and branch of the federal government.”
The Southwest Kansas Three Percent was a part of the Three Percenter movement, founded after Obama’s election by Chris Hill, a Georgia-based former Marine who goes by the name General Bloodagent. The group is named for what he claims is the actual percentage of Colonists said to have taken up arms against the British in the Revolutionary War (this figure is disputed by historians). Of its members’ many and varied fears, in early 2016, it was “radical Islam,” as Donald Trump was calling it, that perhaps loomed the largest. Down in Georgia, Hill’s Three Percenters had led an armed protest of a planned mosque, and a Kansas branch threatened to do the same thing when the Islamic Society of Wichita invited the sheikh Monzer Taleb to speak. They hadn’t had to — the event was canceled after then–U. S. representative Mike Pompeo warned the Society’s leaders that if they went ahead with the event, “they will be responsible for the damage.” Still, many of the militia’s members didn’t feel like their government was doing enough to protect them from the rising tide of fundamentalism. “Hell, it’s even getting down into the local governments now,” Stein pointed out. “It’s at the point where it’s got to be stopped or there is going to be no stopping it.”
When Stein talked like this, some people in the group looked at his wild eyes and thought he was crazy, maybe even dangerous. Others thought he sounded right on the money. Among them was Dan Day, whom Stein had met during a field exercise in Cimarron, Kansas. Day, a former probation officer with a goatee and glasses, lived in Garden City, which had been fairly overtaken by Somali refugees, who Donald Trump had warned might be terrorists in disguise. There were whole apartment complexes full of them, Stein said Day told him. Supposedly, the Somalis worked at the beef-packing plants, but Day thought they might be in cahoots with the Mexican drug cartels, which had been known to route product through the city. He’d watched them coming and going late at night, carrying duffel bags, which he suspected were filled with money that the Somalis — who seemed to use Western Union a lot — were funneling to ISIS. Not too long ago, he said, someone had found an ISIS recruitment flier at the Finney County Public Library. “I was blown away to find out that ISIS is recruiting in the public library,” said Stein. He and Day exchanged information and agreed to stay in touch to keep on top of this problem.
“If we don’t do it, who’s gonna do it?” asked Day.
They agreed to meet in Garden City the weekend of the gun show for a “surveillance mission.” After that, Stein told Day he had some other friends he wanted to introduce him to. “It’s such a relief to find like-minded souls,” he said.
Stein’s friends lived about an hour outside of Garden City, in Liberal, where, the story goes, the town’s original homesteader, Seymour Rogers, had allowed thirsty travelers to dip into his well free of charge. “And they’d say, ‘Well, that’s mighty liberal of you,’ ” said Earl Watt, publisher of the Liberal Leader & Times newspaper, who notes that, despite the moniker, “we probably haven’t voted for a Democrat since Woodrow Wilson.”
The band struck up the national anthem, and Watt stood up. We were in the high-school gym, where his daughter was playing in a basketball game. Although the school is “majority minority,” as Watt puts it, the team is called the Redskins, which reflects the town’s complicated relationship with its diversity, one that partly stems from economics.
Unlike Garden City, Liberal is “a boom-bust town.” Industries come there for a short time, then move on, leaving residents bubbling with resentment, like the oil wells the companies had capped and left in the fields. “It’s been hard on the community,” said Watt. The town is divided, literally, between the longtime, mostly white residents who participate in events like Pancake Day, and the immigrants who are there to work whatever’s working, which at the moment is beef. “There is zero assimilation,” admitted Watt. “It’s a real dang problem.”
What they need, he said, is “some kind of program, so that when people come in — I don’t care where they’re from or how they got here or whatever — but we need to let them know, ‘Hey, you’re welcome. We love you. We want you to be an active part of the community. Stay. Let’s be neighbors.’ ” It’s surprising to hear this from Watt, who has written editorials in support of Building a Wall. “But I’m also behind adding 10,000 more agents down there to get them through,” he said. “They’re human beings looking for a better life. Who isn’t?”
Not everyone in Liberal feels this way, of course.
“They’re taking our jobs,” Curtis Allen complained to his neighbors. Pale, with dark eyes, a sullen mustache, and close-cropped hair, Allen, a native of Wichita, had washed up in Liberal a few years after being convicted on a domestic-assault charge. He told people he was a veteran of the war in Iraq, which was true, his brother later said, noting that he hadn’t been quite the same since returning home: He had anger issues and, sometimes, trouble processing his thoughts. He lived in a trailer packed with survival gear on the far side of town, where he liked to drink beer and skin animals, and he had some paranoid ideas about the government, although he lived mainly off disability checks, which he supplemented with work installing security systems.
This was how he met Gavin Wright. Wright, a single father with bushy gray hair and lonely eyes, was also relatively new to the area, having moved there from Manhattan, Kansas, after the death of his father, to help his brother set up the new branch of their family business, G&G, which sold modular homes. “He was an awfully sweet man,” said Tammy, the pretty blonde bartender at the VFW. “The other one I wasn’t so sure about.”
She meant Allen, with whom Wright hit it off: He ended up hiring Allen as a salesman at G&G, and together they joined a militia, the Kansas Security Force 3%, which is how they’d become acquainted with Patrick Stein, who was also a member. Militia etiquette has it that you aren’t really supposed to be in more than one, but Stein was, after all, a man of action.
Stein knew that Allen would be particularly incensed by Day’s news about ISIS fliers in the library. Allen hated Muslim refugees, or “cockroaches,” as Stein called them. It was all over his Facebook. “If anyone hears they are bringing these refugees into our state we have to spread the word imeadiatly [sic]!” Allen had written. “This just might get you killed, or worse your kids!!”
“They bring these fuckers in by the goddamn planeload,” Stein told him on a call that included Wright, Day, and other interested members of the KSF that June. “I mean, there’s gotta be a fucking line somewhere. And when that line is crossed, there’s gotta be action taken. I mean, am I wrong?”
“Not in my eyes,” said Wright.
“Say there was an ISIS attack in Garden City,” Day said. “Someone went into Walmart and mowed down 100 people. What would we do?”
“In my mind, I’m ready to just start fucking taking them out,” Stein said. “Kick in doors. Start cleaning this fucking state up.”
“I mean, we gotta have a plan,” said Day. “You know?”
They agreed to form a splinter group to deal with the problem, for which they communicated through an encrypted app, on a channel Stein named “Crusaders.” The group they formed wasn’t a secret, at least not at first. “They’d be all, ‘You gotta join our group, you have to know what’s going on with your government,’ ” said Tammy, rolling her good eye. Their meetings took place at the town library, or the Branding Iron, the bar inside the Liberal Inn and Suites, where Allen was friendly with the waitress, a bouncy, busty blonde named Cora. “He was fun,” she said. “A little racist, I’m sure. But at the time, I put it down to him being an asshole. I mean, he was a friend, but he was kind of an asshole, you know what I mean? I set him up with a Spanish woman and he had a great time, you know what I mean?”
Over the spring and summer of 2016, the fun-loving asshole she knew started to change. At the time, Cora attributed it to the sudden appearance of Donnette, Allen’s ex-wife — or maybe girlfriend, it wasn’t clear — who’d arrived in town out of nowhere. She was the jealous type, and eventually Curtis told Cora they couldn’t be friends anymore. She still saw him around occasionally. “It was so strange,” she told me. “He went from like a clean-shaven, good-looking guy to unshaven, kind of twitchy-looking.”
In hindsight, it makes sense. Allen was spending the bulk of his time at the G&G offices, where the group had started holding its meetings. “ ’Cause we couldn’t talk like this at the fucking restaurants,” he’d pointed out. Meaning they couldn’t say things like “Make sure if you start using your bow on them cockroaches, make sure you dip them in pig’s blood before you shoot them,” which was a suggestion Stein had made when discussing their Plan in public.
It’s not clear how the idea for the Plan progressed from something that was reactive to, as Allen put it, “preemptive.” But later, Stein would say the idea to move things forward had originated with Day.
“I can’t let what could happen a year from now, or six months ago, dictate what we fucking do now,” Day said, in August. “I mean, you just can’t.”
They were at G&G, listening to AC/DC, which they’d taken to playing to cover the sound of their discussions. “I think it needs to be something big,” Wright said.
“Something that’s going to accomplish something,” Stein affirmed.
“We need to come up with a manifesto,” said Day.
“To trigger the other like-minded people across the nation to fucking stand up and start doing the same thing we’re doing,” added Allen.
“Against the U. N.?” asked Stein.
“Muslims,” Allen said definitively. “Cockroaches. But we have to do it in a way to where they don’t play it off, like some fucking redneck with a fucking goddamn hundred pounds of fertilizer just, you know, hates his wife or something.”
They discussed targets. Sitting at the computer, Allen pulled up Google Earth to note where “cockroaches” were. “Do you know how to drop pins?” Stein asked.
“I mean, I’m just figuring it out,” Allen said.
“It’s harder than shit.”
Day, who had been quiet, spoke up. “I was thinking,” he said. “The Somali mall. That’s where we start this. No cameras back there. You can drive right up the back.”
The Somali Mall, in Garden City, isn’t actually a mall. It’s a store selling African imports and a popular Somali hangout, though its location on a back road makes it harder to see and for some people maybe a little bit scary. “The first time I went there, to be downright honest, my fear was some guy might come out with a machine gun and say ‘Allahu akbar!’ and shoot me,” said John Birky, the doctor. He laughed, embarrassed, because, of course, he went in and it was just a handful of Somalis drinking tea.
“For my people, it’s the solution to everything,” said Ifrah, who took me to the store one day for a cup made by an older, gold-toothed woman, who filled it with carefully foamed milk and an unconscionable amount of sugar. “Lots of sugar,” said Ifrah, who loves the stuff; I have seen her put maple syrup on scrambled eggs.
It’s a real problem in that community, according to Birky. “I tell them all the time, ‘That stuff will kill you.’ ”
The crusaders never actually set foot inside the mall. They ended up deciding on a new target: an apartment building on Mary Street, near where Stein and Day had seen the Somali women the day of their drive-by. As it turned out, Wright was loosely related to the owner of the building, but never liked him, and they discussed killing him and maybe raping his daughter to send a message before someone remembered they’d heard the building contained a mosque. This would make it the ideal target, in that it would “make an impact,” as Allen put it, in terms of casualties. “We can find the prayer times online,” he said. Hopefully, they said, it would be the first of many similar “projects.”
“If you’re a Muslim, I’m going to enjoy shooting you in the head,” said Stein. “When we go on operations, there’s no leaving anyone behind, even if it’s a 1-year-old. I’m serious. I guarantee, if I go on a mission, those little fuckers are going bye-bye.”
The group took this in.
“I think I would just sit there and toss a cell phone in there with a wire coming off the ringer,” said Wright.
But how would they get ahold of explosives? Allen, who had watched a few YouTube videos on the subject, suggested they get a chemistry set.
“Like a kid’s?” said Stein.
“No, man,” said Allen.
Day interjected. He had some cousins, drug traffickers, who knew some “bad motherfuckers,” he said. They’d have access to real weapons.
Money was a problem — none of them had any, but perhaps they could trade something. As for a date, September 11 would be ideal, Stein said, but at this point it was only a week away. Plus they didn’t want to give ammunition to the Hillary supporters. It was decided they’d wait until the day after the election. Stein agreed to liaise with the Bad Motherfuckers. In the meantime, they’d try making their own explosives. Day was tasked with acquiring a mortar and pestle, Stein a rock tumbler for crushing cans into aluminum powder. Allen said he’d get to work on the manifesto. “I can get the beer bottles,” Wright belched. “Probably tonight, after I’m done with this.”
On October 11, 2016, Gavin Wright was in his office when his work was interrupted by the sound of a woman shrieking. Donnette. She’d stormed into the office and was screaming at Allen — maybe accusing him of sleeping around? Wright wasn’t sure. Embarrassed, he ducked into the bathroom and was getting up the nerve to come out and tell them to take it somewhere else when it got quiet. They were gone. When Allen returned a few hours later, he didn’t seem to want to talk about whatever had happened, so they went over some numbers instead.
Donnette, on the other hand, did want to talk. Back at their trailer, she called the Liberal Police Department and told them Allen had beaten her. He was dangerous, she said. He had guns. Lots of them. He was part of a militia, and he and a group of his friends were plotting an attack against Muslims.
Donnette said a lot of other crazy things, like that she’d been brought to Earth by aliens. But the dispatcher was sufficiently disturbed to send a car out to the trailer, and when Donnette opened the door to the room where Curtis kept his guns, the cops saw that maybe she wasn’t so crazy after all. Inside was close to a metric ton of ammunition. The officer eyed a belt of bullets, like the kind worn by Rambo. That’s for his machine gun, Donnette boasted.
In addition to the small armory, the cops also found Allen’s half-written manifesto. “America, I want to share some information with you,” it began. “Over the last few years the mainstream media and government has been telling you veterans, Christians, and assorted groups are domestic terrorists. I am basically all the above and I am a threat to no person.”
Apparently, the police didn’t agree. That afternoon, they pulled Allen and Wright over as they left G&G and arrested Allen for domestic assault and felony gun possession. They let Wright go, but after one of the cops mentioned that Allen had explosives, Wright was shaken.
“I’m just cutting ties for now,” Wright told Dan Day later. “I don’t want to even be in the group, ’cuz I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“It’s always a woman,” Day responded.
“I know, man,” Wright said. “I know.”
Stein was disappointed at Wright’s defection. Now they were two men down. Still, he felt the show had to go on. The following day, he met with Day’s cousin’s contact. As it turned out, the Bad Motherfucker was pretty cool. A like-minded individual. And when he opened his truck, Stein saw he hadn’t been bluffing about what he could get his hands on. Sure, the BMF said, as Stein regarded the gleaming line of weapons, he could try a few. Stein fired rounds from a few automatic weapons into the blue Kansas sky. “It’s going to be a bloody, nasty, Tory-fucking battle, brother,” he said when he was done.
The BMF nodded. “I’m not scared,” he said. “When it’s my turn to bow my knee, I’ll do it proudly before my God.”
“You and me both, brother.”
Stein had told the BMF about their group and what they were trying to accomplish — “We are on a tight budget and limited experience, but tons and tons of heart and drive,” he’d said — and perhaps because he was down for the cause the BMF had offered them a pretty sweet deal. He’d make the explosives if Stein delivered six 50-pound bags of ammonium nitrate to him — fertilizer that was easy enough to come by when your family owned a farm. They agreed to meet early the next morning, at the McDonald’s in Dodge City.
Afterward, walking out into the bright morning air, Stein felt a sense of accomplishment, like once again, he was on the verge of making it. “When we are done, people from miles and miles away will take note at the beautiful job we did,” he’d told the BMF. “Hell, if things go like we want them to, it will inspire others in a huge way.”
Dodge City looked the same as it always had. Same blue sky, same golden fields, same fast-food restaurants where he’d written bad checks back in his wayward youth. Then suddenly, everything was upside down. Stein was facedown on the ground, and the person strapping handcuffs on him wasn’t anyone he knew. It was the Feds.
Ifrah was on the floor at Tyson when she got the news that someone had been planning to bomb the apartment complex on Mary Street. The perpetrators had been arrested, and Chief Utz was convening a meeting of elders and community leaders to explain what had happened. She washed her hands and drove over to the apartments, whose residents were panicking. Some were having what seemed like post-traumatic flashbacks. “I was hoping when I get to United States I would not seen a gunshot, I will not hear an explosion, or suicide bomber, or car explosion,” said Ahmed Ali, who left Somalia after his father was shot and left in a Dumpster by members of the jihadi group Al-Shabaab. “And all of a sudden those guys were preparing a bomb?”
The next morning, the chief’s deputies played basketball with the kids while the two agents from the FBI walked them through what had happened: They’d been investigating the men for ten months, they said. They were bad people. Still, the crisis had been averted. It was over. They were safe. As Ifrah translated, she saw people beginning to calm down.
That night, a group from the local Presbyterian church organized a vigil in which is parishioners spent the night holding hands around the apartment complex, as a gesture of protection.
The next few weeks and months were like that. There were refugee-awareness rallies, and meetings, and Benjamin Anderson, from the “radical love” hospital, got college students to organize a dinner series in which people from different cultures went for a meal in one another’s homes.
“For those of us who are Christian,” said the IRC’s Amy Longa, “we call it a blessing in disguise.”
The next and last meeting of the Crusaders took place in a holding cell outside the courtroom in Wichita. Only when they looked around, one of them was missing. Dan Day. “Oh my God, what an eye-opener that was,” said Stein, whose mind raced back to all of their interactions. “He’s the one who fed us all the information, showed us how bad they were, doing this and that and the other. He was working for the Feds the entire time. It was all a setup.”
This time, Stein’s paranoid fantasy had turned out to be at least partially true. Day was a paid informant for the FBI. He’d been reporting on Stein since at least the day of the gun show. There had never been ISIS recruitment fliers in the Finney County Public Library. The Bad Motherfucker had been an undercover FBI agent. The guns he’d brought with him had been shipped to Kansas from Quantico, Virginia. Stein hadn’t been making choices, being his own man, that great American delusion. He’d been manhandled by economic and political forces, poisoned by media noise, and become the thing he feared most: a casualty of the Obama administration, specifically, its attempt to aggressively infiltrate right-wing militias the same way that Islamic groups had been targeted after 9/11. He was pawn, a stooge, a dupe. Still, he managed to think of himself as a hero. “We are on a cross, literally,” he told me.
Ed Robinson, Stein’s court-appointed attorney and a Christian himself, probably would not have likened his client to the Son of God. At the time, Stein’s notable quotables (“It Will Be a Bloodbath”) were splashed all over the front page. He would later be hit with child-pornography charges and accused of plotting to escape after his jailers found love notes, maps, and objects resembling handmade weapons in his cell. But as he looked into the transcripts, Robinson began to feel like Stein had a point about the Feds overdoing it. In addition to having Day record their every sneeze and fart, the FBI had used drones to record their meetings. At one point they’d blown up two trash cans, three cars, and 18 mannequins just to see what it would look like if the Crusaders managed things on their own. (When Curtis Allen did try to make explosives, he’d mostly succeeded in burning the hair off his finger.) And had Donnette not tipped off the Liberal Police about Curtis Allen’s arms stash, at which point the Feds had hurriedly arranged the ammonium-nitrate handoff — who knows how long they might have let the investigation go on.
Stein eventually fired Robinson. A new lawyer will represent him at the trial, currently scheduled for April. Robinson was a “libtard,” Stein said.
But the lawyer had made some interesting points. “I think it’s unfortunate that if the FBI thought these gentlemen were so dangerous, why would they let this investigation go on for ten months, with people they think are possibly murderers, with all these guns, all this ammunition?” he said during one pretrial hearing. “And what are they doing to protect these poor Somalis? As far as I can tell, it’s nothing.”
When I shared this perspective with Ifrah, she got really quiet. As a member of the Somali community, an attendee of the mosque that had been targeted, whose own building, a few short blocks away was likely on the Crusaders’ list of potential targets, she was not only one of their intended victims, but in her role as a community leader, one whom the police relied on to relay their message, she’d played a large role in assuring others they were safe. “Don’t be scared,” she told Mimi, who wondered aloud if she should get a Jesus necklace. Through what had happened, or hadn’t happened, she had learned, for the first time in her life, to have faith in law enforcement. “Where I am from we don’t trust them,’ she told me. “We run from the police.” So the idea that the investigation might have continued, even after all the awful things they’d said, that it might still have been going on if Allen had kept his fists to himself, was chilling. What if one or more of the Crusaders had decided to go rogue, to “start kicking doors down,” as Stein had threatened? Who would have stopped them? One of the judge’s reasons for not granting bail to any of the defendants was that in an area so spread out, with a police force so small, if one of them were to act out, it’s not clear anyone would be able to get there in time to stop them. And Liberal was only an hour’s drive from Garden City.
In fact, we were on our way there now. There was a “turkey shoot” at the VFW, where we hoped to run into Tammy, and then we were going to go to the Branding Iron to talk to Cora, the cocktail waitress. I’d planned to make the trip on my own, but when I told Ifrah, she wanted to come. She was interested in what motivated the would-be attackers, too. “I’m not scared,” she’d said, pulling on her pink silk Forever 21 jacket. I was a bit more nervous about how a teetotaling Somali would play in some of the most redneck venues in Kansas. Things may have changed for the better in Garden, but Garden was different. Trump was now president. Mike Pompeo was his CIA pick. A few months before, a white veteran had shot who he had thought were two Iranian guys at a bar in Olathe, screaming, “Get out of my country!” As it happened, neither of us blended in. It was pheasant-hunting season, and also Veterans Day, and everyone besides us was wearing fatigues. But I’d underestimated the town’s liberality. The veterans running the turkey shoot thought we were hilarious for being afraid of guns, and with the exception of Cora’s boss, who loomed creepily over our interaction, the people at the Branding Iron were warm, including Cora, who was wearing a low-cut camo T-shirt and a matching baseball hat bedazzled with the letters DD. (“Designated driver!” she informed us.) “I mean, I’m not like that,” she assured Ifrah when describing Curtis Allen’s racism. “But we’re all a little ignorant sometimes.”
After that, she got busy getting drink orders, and we were waylaid by a Crown Royal–drinking couple who showed us pictures of their dogs and children and parrots and railed against a law in Liberal that forbids the ownership of chickens (it does seem unfair). As we were leaving, we went to say good-bye to Cora and found her in a back room, crying. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know, he’s a monster, but he wasn’t a monster to me.” A pair of mascara tears rolled down her cheeks.
For a second, Ifrah looked unsure of what to do, then she figured it out. She reached out and put a comforting arm around her. Because that’s how you treat a neighbor.
*This article appears in the December 11, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.
