Two years ago, three white Christian domestic terrorists were arrested for planning a bombing attack on a Kansas mosque and apartment complex, targeting a Somali refugee community there. Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright, and Patrick Stein were all members of a Kansas militia group that planned on bombing the Garden City complex the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Stein is facing life in prison, and on Monday, his lawyers decided that the best defense was to argue that Donald Trump’s rhetoric and lies should be taken into account in Stein’s sentencing.
"The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful and contentious presidential elections in modern history, driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president,” James Pratt and Michael Shultz, Stein’s defense attorneys, wrote in their sentencing memo, as HuffPost first reported.
The attorneys argued everything from the idea that Trump’s rhetoric had worked them up into a fervor to the idea that because Trump won, the three bigots would have not gone through with the bombing they’d been planning because …Trump won. According to the Washington Post, the sentencing memo also includes the argument that the entirety of Stein’s understanding of the Koran “came directly from the internet and conservative talk-show hosts such as Sean Hannity and Michael Savage.”
It’s important to remember that the defense in this case isn’t lying when it says that these men were emboldened and provoked by the hate-filled atmosphere brought into our daily lives by Donald Trump and his white supremacist message. All of these things are likely true. But you don’t get to plan and almost carry out a mass murder and then simply blame it on something akin to following orders.