How were they radicalized?

We always want to hold Muslim clerics responsible for Islamist extremity.  Should Trump, et al., be held responsible for these shitheads? What's good for the goose...

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, [Kay Burtzloff, a 61-year-old small-business owner who’s lived in this area of Kansas] said, but something changed when Trump entered the political scene.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

  HuffPo

No word of whether the "nearly all-white" jury, which found in the prosecutors' favor also believed them to be knuckleheads.

Jurors were played hours of tapes made by an FBI informant who had masqueraded as a militiaman.

[...]

Most Muslims aren’t going to behead people, one of the men said in the recording. Instead, “they sit back and fuck their brains out. Four kids per fucking man per year,” he added, referring to the idea that Muslims are trying to grow the size of their population as quickly as possible. “Their objective is to breed us out of existence.”

Anybody else grow up in rural American fundamentalist terroritory? That's what they said about the Catholics.

In another recording, the jury heard one of the men talk about “taqiyya,” an obscure Islamic concept that white supremacists have willfully misinterpreted to accuse Muslims of lying to non-Muslims in their quest to take over the world.

Because of taqiyya, one of the militiamen explained, Muslims can “deceive and lie. They can go out and drink at the bar, just like you and I, and then the son of a bitch would cut your throat.”

I'm sure they believed that.

Ultimately, the recordings capture the three men in an ideological frenzy: America was on a crash course with the so-called Muslim world, and they had to prepare for what they called “Crusades 2.0.”

[...]

All of these outlandish lies and distortions about Muslims and Islam were abundant online, and a scroll through the three men’s social media profiles showed they devoured this propaganda with abandon — retweeting, liking, sharing and posting.

[...]

And they started to hear the messages of these anti-Muslim memes echoed in Trump’s stump speeches, possibly taking inspiration from their favorite candidate’s soundbites.

Possibly? He spewed violent rhetoric at his campaigns urging his hordes to do violence.

On the campaign trail, Trump often told the same widely discredited story of how an American general ― over a century ago ― dipped bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims (most of whom don’t eat pork). The three men talked openly of dipping their bullets in pig’s blood.

When Trump justified his Muslim ban by citing a discredited poll, Stein shared a meme on Twitter based on that same poll.

Muslims were “cockroaches,” according to recordings of the three men. “You have to kill all of them. They keep coming back,” Stein said. “You have to exterminate them all.”

[...]

According to testimony in the trial, as Trump warned Americans of Somali refugees being terrorists in disguise — “the great Trojan horse of all time” — the men decided on their main target: a Garden City apartment complex home to many Somali Muslims, and the mosque where they prayed.

[...]

“We must win this battle because I refuse to go down in history as the generation who lost the best country on the planet,” Stein wrote in an encrypted text to the undercover officer. Stein said he was ready to “take out as many of those bastards as I possibly can till my last breath.”

[...]

Although Stein, Wright and Allen would ultimately bear responsibility for their alleged terrorist plot, there’s a growing body of evidence showing how Trump might be radicalizing his followers.

Might be.

Anti-Muslim hate crimes rose dramatically in America in 2015 and 2016, according to FBI statistics, rising to levels not seen since 9/11. Experts have attributed this rise to the divisive election and the hostile rhetoric of Trump.

A recent study found that 83 percent of “hate violence” incidents aimed at South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Middle Eastern and Arab communities in U.S. from November 2016 to November 2017 were anti-Muslim in nature. One in five perpetrators of these violent hate crimes, the study noted, “invoked President Trump’s name, his administration’s policies, or his campaign slogans” during the attacks.

Like cleric desciples shouting "Allahu akbar"?

Last month, authorities arrested three militia group members in Illinois for the 2017 bombing of a Minnesota mosque. They were Trump fans. One of the men admired Trump so much that he submitted a detailed bid to build the president’s wall on the Mexican border.

[...]

[A trailer where FBI agents found nearly 2,000 pounds of ammunition] and the other trailer in Liberal where the men allegedly hatched their plan, have both since been moved, their contents carried away by federal agents. Among the evidence collected was a manifesto the men had started.

“This is a call to action by all Americans,” they wrote. “Please do not just sit idle until we lose this once great nation.”

Killing Muslim refugees, their manifesto suggested, would make America great again.

[...]

“We are dedicated patriots with love of country that doesn’t end,” Stein wrote, “and we are willing to die for this country if that is what it takes to get it back.”

It's interesting to me how prevalent that sentiment - that they're willing to die for their country - is among those who go forth to do its killing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.