White Hot Hate
A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America's Heartland
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
For fans of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, the thrilling true story of a would-be terrorist attack against a Kansas farming town’s immigrant community, and the FBI informant who exposed it.
In the spring of 2016, as immigration debates rocked the United States, three men in a militia group known as the Crusaders grew aggravated over one Kansas town’s growing Somali community. They decided that complaining about their new neighbors and threatening them directly wasn’t enough. The men plotted to bomb a mosque, aiming to kill hundreds and inspire other attacks against Muslims in America. But they would wait until after the presidential election, so that their actions wouldn’t hurt Donald Trump’s chances of winning.
An FBI informant befriended the three men, acting as law enforcement’s eyes and ears for eight months. His secretly taped conversations with the militia were pivotal in obstructing their plans and were a lynchpin in the resulting trial and convictions for conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.
White Hot Hate will tell the riveting true story of an averted case of domestic terrorism in one of the most remote towns in the US, not far from the infamous town where Capote’s In Cold Blood was set. In the gripping details of this foiled scheme, we see in intimate focus the chilling, immediate threat of domestic terrorism—and racist anxiety in America writ large.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer finalist Lehr (Dead Reckoning) delivers a dramatic chronicle of a domestic terrorist plot thwarted by the FBI. At the heart of the story is Dan Day, an out-of-work probation officer in Garden City, Kans., who in 2015 became an informant for the FBI on right-wing militia groups in southwestern Kansas. In retaliation for the ISIS-inspired attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., members of one of those groups, the local division of the Kansas Security Force, plotted to bomb an apartment building and mosque in Garden City where Somali Muslims lived and worshipped. Day recorded his conversations with the plotters and introduced them to an undercover FBI agent posing as a black-market arms dealer; thanks to Day's testimony, three KSF members were eventually convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. Lehr skillfully draws from Day's recordings to highlight the risks he took (at one point, he got sick and passed out at a militia meeting with a recording device in his pocket), and weaves in illuminating details about the cultural dynamics of the Midwest and moving profiles of Somali refugees who could have been killed in the attack. The result is a chilling and finely wrought portrait of the threat of political extremism.
