“We’re already fucking domestic terrorists. They’re just looking for an excuse to come snatch you up.”
It was about a month before Donald Trump was elected president, and Patrick Stein was in a hilly field in western Kansas near a lake and an outhouse. Stein, a right-wing militia member who thought Trump was “the Man,” dubbed himself “Orkinman.” Muslims were “cockroaches,” he thought, who needed to be exterminated. The weapon dealer he was meeting in this remote field, Stein believed, would help him pick a poison.
“I’m sick of seeing these motherfuckers coming into this country,” Stein told the man, referring to Muslim refugees. “They’re here for one reason and one reason only.” Unless they did something soon, Stein said, the Muslim takeover would begin.
The weapon dealer was an undercover FBI agent. Days later, the feds would indeed snatch Stein up, charging him with a litany of federal offenses in connection with a bomb plot targeting Somali refugees residing in an apartment complex in Garden City.
Eighteen months later, Stein and his alleged co-conspirators Gavin Wright and Curtis Allen are on trial in Wichita in a case that touches on some of the hottest issues of the day: Islam, Facebook, guns, terrorism, the FBI and Donald Trump.
