One of the most enduring—and horrifying—sights of the Jan. 6 insurrection was an actual gallows erected on the west side of the Capitol. Yesterday, People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch revealed that plans to erect the gallows were underway almost as soon as The Messiah, Lord Donald Trump, The Most Merciful, issued his now-infamous call to arms on Twitter.

According to analysis from the nonprofit research group Advance Democracy, literally within hours of Trump calling for his followers to come to Washington on Jan. 6 and “be wild,” posters at TheDonald.win—successor to the r/The_Donald subreddit—took it as an order. One poster, CaptainChrisBacon, posted a picture asking, “Who Is Bringing The Gallows On January 6th, 2021?” The picture depicted the hanging of a Confederate war criminal—ironic given the number of Confederate flags on display at the insurrection.

Another poster, sunlessmage743, started a thread about the details of building a gallows, saying it could easily be done “with the right plan and the right people bringing pre cut materials to the site.” Respondents were positively giddy. One claimed that the scene would be “so 1776.” When user DJT2020 suggested they should also build a guillotine, user webthing offered to build it. User jc99ta mused that a guillotine could be used to slice watermelons when it wasn’t being used to behead people.

Talk about a gallows dominated TheDonald.win for days afterward.

One user swiped Home Depot’s logo to show just how easy it was to find the materials for a gallows. Another offered to bring a 500-foot paracord as a rope—and warned that they would be on the hunt for insufficiently loyal Republicans, as well as Black Lives Matter and “antifa.” He initially backed off on using a paracord when told it could decapitate the person being hanged, but later mused that it would at least keep the person being hanged from thrashing about on the gallows. Among those on the list of targets were the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Maxine Waters, Chuck Schumer, and Mitt Romney. 

There’s more where these came from. Check out Advance Democracy’s archive here.

These people were dead serious about killing a lot of people. Consider that many of these sans-culottes were heavily armed, and some of them were carrying zip-ties. Simply put, these were not just “tourists.” (I’m looking at you, Rep. Andrew Clyde.)

For the better part of the last three years, the Republicans have called Democrats an angry mob. And yet they believe it’s too soon to investigate how an actual mob attacked the Capitol. This is yet more evidence that we need to get to the bottom of how this horror happened—with or without the GOP.