Pro-Trump website "The Donald confirms detailed plans to storm Capitol [View all]

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Pro-Trump website “TheDonald”confirms detailed plans to storm Capitol and kill members of Congress
Apr 16, 2021 6:00pm EDT by Dartagnan, Community

If there were any lingering doubts as to the violent intentions and motives of those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, those doubts may now be put to rest. From minute details, such as the most effective type of zip ties to restrain elected officials to the most effective methods of killing police officers, the rioters left a chilling and irrefutable electronic trail on a website dedicated to overturning the 2020 election on Donald Trump’s behalf. Prior to Jan. 6, that website, “TheDonald.win,” had generated over 1 million visits per day.

A research group called Advance Democracy, formed by former FBI analyst and Senate investigator Daniel Jones, collected thousands of messages posted by pseudonymous users of the now-defunct website in the days leading up to the insurrection. The posts were distilled into a report and provided to The Washington Post. Jones’ group had previously focused on the online effort to mobilize the riot, and it soon became evident that this particular website served as one of the rioters’ primary organizational hubs.

As reported by the Post’s Craig Timberg:

“The website, TheDonald, played a far more central role in the January 6th Capitol insurrection than was previously known,” he said. “There are thousands of posts — with tens of thousands of comments — detailing plans to travel to Washington and engage in violence against the U.S. Capitol. The ultimate end goal of this violence was, on behalf of Trump, disrupt the Congress and overturn the presidential election.”

Because the posters on this site used pseudonyms, Advance Democracy could not identify them; the logical assumption is that the website and its contents are now being analyzed by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to track the former users through more forensic means. As the Post explains, the website itself grew out of a Reddit forum that served for some time as a “safe space” for racists and conspiracy theorists. Eventually, chafing at Reddit’s moderation rules, the forum became a standalone site, with its web address owned by an Army Veteran named Jody Williams. Williams disbanded the site after the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol.

The Post article cites a treasure trove of intensely violent comments and discussions on the site in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 assault. Many of those comments clearly go well beyond the aspirational fever dreams of “keyboard commandos,” and involve meticulous and well-coordinated plans, including “shared diagrams of the tunnel systems beneath the Capitol complex,” discussion of travel and funding resources, and most notably, proposed methods to inflict violence, some of which were then employed by the rioters.


Dailykos.com