Fact check: Fake claim about US purchase of 30,000 guillotines has circulated for years

Fact check: Fake claim about US purchase of 30,000 guillotines has circulated for years

Hunter Ingram

USA TODAY

The claim: The U.S. government prepared for mass executions by purchasing 30,000 guillotines.

For years, a claim has circulated online about guillotines making a comeback — and the U.S. purchasing 30,000 of them.

Social media posts cite no sources in stating that not only did the government buy 30,000 guillotines, but Congress lobbied for and approved them. Posts also don’t say where a government acquires 30,000 guillotines.

The most recent flurry of social media claim date back to 2013, the year after President Barack Obama was elected to a second term.

These allegations resurfaced this summer.

Instagram user @rachelceller posted a headline from a website called Evil.News, noting the social media platform was blocking the site’s link: “BREAKING: Thousands of guillotines pre-positioned across America for left-wing terrorists to execute conservatives, Christians and Whites in the unfolding CIVIL WAR.”

USA TODAY has reached out to that user for a comment.

A quick history of the guillotine

The device was invented in France in 1792, according to Britannica, which also notes: “During the French Revolution, the guillotine became the primary symbol of the Reign of Terror and was used to execute thousands of people.”

That includes King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

It was last used in France in 1977. Capital punishment there was banned in 1981.

Guillotine claims offer few details

The online commentators pedaling these rumors don’t cite any documentation detailing why the United States would take a page out of the French Revolution’s playbook, only saying they were being stockpiled for use by the government.

Some posts about the rumors also question whether beheadings in the Middle East are orchestrated to desensitize Americans to the practice so they won’t push back when the U.S. government starts sanctioning them stateside.

The claims originate among anti-government or partisan groups. They often go hand in hand with the extremist claims the United States is ready to fill concentration camps with those critical of its leaders.

Snopes addressed the 2013 rumors directly, acknowledging that similar claims were made during George W. Bush’s tenure as president. In 2014, PolitiFact investigated claims that the Affordable Care Act would usher in beheadings.

A more militant claim originated years before.

In 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that retired FBI agent Ted Gunderson was at the head of this conspiracy theory at the time, talking to supporters at events about stockpiled guillotines and caskets, as well as internment camps. SPLC notes talk like this was part of a resurgence of the militia movement.

As for actual legislation regarding this issue, there haven’t been any sessions of Congress where this was openly debated (at least not in this century).

The closest a politician has come to the issue was in 1996, when Georgia state legislator Doug Teper proposed an amendment to the state law to allow for execution by guillotine. This wasn’t intended to pave the way for mass executions and did not mention anything about the purchase of thousands of guillotines to have on hand. Instead, it was meant to be an alternative to electrocution or lethal injection should someone sentenced to death want to donate their organs and the other methods might compromise them. That legislation did not move forward.

Our ruling: False

There is no evidence the government approved and purchased 30,000 guillotines for possible use on dissidents, nor is there documentation they are being held in Georgia and Montana. We rate this claim as FALSE.

Our fact-check sources:

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Those Guillotines Are Awfully Close to Your Neck

Photo: HomeDespotShop for Etsy/HomeDespotShop

Calls for violent public execution began mere hours into the New Year, as they often do these days, via Twitter. Conservative lawyer Lin Wood proclaimed that Mike Pence would be killed by firing squad for treason. Five days later, Donald Trump’s tornado of zealots blew through the Capitol, erecting gallows and holding posters that read “Make Guillotines Great Again.”

I wasn’t surprised by the violent effigies, but I was, frankly, perplexed to see the Trumpists invoke the guillotine. Their sham-billionaire leader seems exactly the kind of despot the machine was intended for, but most recently, guillotines, as an anti-capitalist symbol, have belonged to the radical left. If you follow anybody interested in income inequality, you may have encountered one or two of them on social media — mostly as a shorthand for class rage. Maybe you’ve seen the recent memes about how to build a guillotine using the $600 stimulus check. They’re darkly funny. And not.

Or perhaps, like me, while searching for novelty holiday gifts on Etsy, you’ve stumbled upon the robust guillotine-accessories market. Sometimes it’s best not to question the algorithm, but lately it seems like these execution devices are everywhere.

The CancelEmpires shop on Etsy sells cheerful posters and pins that say things like “One Slicey Boi” or “Mean New Deal” underneath drawings of guillotines. According to Holly, one of the members of the collective who runs the store, the shop’s guillotine Christmas tree ornaments sold out faster than the group could make them. This came as a bit of a shock to Holly and her friends, who didn’t expect to touch such a nerve when they started the store as a place to share some of the DIY signage they’d been making for protests. She likens the effort to selling handmade stencil tees at a music show.

Once in the world of guillotine posters, I discovered the jewelry. Cast-metal guillotines, guillotines made of shrinky-dink plastic, DIY guillotines soldered from wire. They can be purchased as studs, or dangling pieces, some with heads, some without — customizable in size, available for single ears or to be worn as pendants. Like any great logo, the triangular blade at the top of the simple rectangle design is brilliant in its graphic simplicity. It reproduces well at all sizes — form and function easily understood on a visceral level.

I was slightly unnerved to find this niche, but it turns out that guillotine souvenirs were a thing almost as soon as guillotines were invented. Guillotine earrings were even sold to commemorate the death of Louis XVI in France in the 1790s. Children played with small replicas of guillotines. Country folk used them on their tables to slice bread and vegetables. Actually, I’m not sure that makes it less alarming, but at least Etsy didn’t invent the genre.

Guillotines have a ye-olde reputation as revolutionary equalizers, but their brutal history lies a little closer to fascism. Hitler used them to kill more than 16,000 people during his 12-year Reich. That makes guillotines comfortably remote enough to joke about but recent enough to maybe make one a bit queasy. But that’s the point. People who wear guillotine merch want you to feel uncomfortable.

Most leftist references I’ve seen to guillotines don’t actually seem like meaningful threats but social-media-rewards hyperbole. Guillotines can seem absurd in ways that threats of gun violence could never. Somehow it feels less scary to joke about a cumbersome, pre-industrial machine. Many of these jokes appear on Twitter in the form of clever usernames like Marie Ennui: Guillotine Operator, Artisanal Pop-Up Guillotines, and the inspired Guillotine-Worthy Zillow Listings (a.k.a. @zillotine).

Heather, a 32-year-old maker of abstract guillotine jewelry, estimates that half of the customers who’ve expressed interest see the jewelry as ironic but posits the other half seem very earnest about toppling the moneyed power structures that rule our country.

In that regard, the guillotine earrings fall within a rich punk tradition — meant to ruffle the right feathers in the right way. Another benefit: This is the rare trend that cannot be co-opted by brands. Unlike the way International Women’s Day (a holiday with socialist roots) has been overtaken by corporations and fashion brands, it’s difficult to imagine an “Eat the Rich” campaign for Ralph Lauren. Although one wonders if Urban Outfitters might try.

But it would be naïve to misconstrue every example of the guillotine as an ironic subversion of capitalism.

Marco, a 21-year-old self-described “queer Chicanx anarcho-syndicalist,” maker of elegant wire guillotine earrings, told me he and his friends oppose all unjust forms of hierarchy. He enjoys the thought that rich people might be intimidated by these images. When I asked him if people he knows could be moved to violence for their cause, a tremor ran through his sweet voice. He chose his words with care. “Some. We have theoretical conversations about killing people in power as a big, moral, community question.” He suggested I read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

In the first week of 2021, Americans watched as hypothetical violence manifested into real insurrection. The same day I talked to these Etsy sellers, five people were killed in Washington, D.C.

When I first saw the guillotine jewelry, I couldn’t fathom wearing a symbol of capital punishment around my neck. But then I thought about the fact that millions of people wear simulacrums of death every day in the form of simple graphic crosses — the gory origins of the crucifix having long been supplanted by the teachings of its most prominent victim. Perhaps the same will eventually be true of the guillotine. Norms, after all, are just a matter of taste.

*A version of this article appears in the January 18, 2021, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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