As Donald Trump and his supporters ramp up their allegations that the U.S. presidential election will be rigged, an arrest in Kansas last week offers some disturbing evidence that fears about post-election violence and unrest may be warranted.
Curtis Wayne Allen, Patrick Eugene Stein, and Gavin Wayne Wright, members of a small militia group calling itself “the Crusaders,” were arrested on Friday and charged with plotting to bomb an apartment complex in Garden City, Kansas. That complex is home to a large number of Somali immigrants—most of them employees at a local meatpacking plant—with one apartment being used as a mosque. The men had been surveilling the building but weren’t too subtle about it: According to the criminal complaint:
STEIN at various times yelled at Somali women dressed in traditional garb, calling them “fucking raghead bitches.”
The men were allegedly planning to use bombs similar to those used by Timothy McVeigh in the 1995 Oklahoma City attack, and the attack was planned for Nov. 9, the day after the election. According to the complaint, the men had hoped their terrorist action would “wake up” the country. From the Washington Post:
“The only f—— way this country’s ever going to get turned around is it will be a bloodbath and it will be a nasty, messy motherf—–,” Stein said in June.
“Unless a lot more people in this country wake up and smell the f—— coffee and decide they want this country back . . . we might be too late, if they do wake up . . . I think we can get it done. But it ain’t going to be nothing nice about it.”
As the Southern Poverty Law Center notes, Stein left a lengthy trail of vitriol online, directed at both Muslims and the U.S. government. Stein claimed, among other things, that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the U.S. government, a common charge from far-right figures including Trump advisers like Roger Stone and Michele Bachmann.
According to the SPLC, he also wrote in July that he was “angry we allow one of the most corrupt, deceitful, lying, caniving, treasonist, POS (Hillary Clinton) on the planet to run for president while under investigation by the FBI” and that “elections are rigged by the elitist (FYI: YOUR VOTE DOESN’T MATTER ANYMORE).”
Four in 10 Americans now believe that the election may be rigged, and obviously most of them aren’t as willing to be violent or as extreme as these men. But given the pitch of the rhetoric right now, it’s hard to believe these three are the only ones who might feel the urge to take matters into their own hands if they think the election has been stolen. For instance:
