IF President Trump wins reelection, former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon said in a video posted Thursday that he should quickly eliminate Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray — by means of medieval execution.
“I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put the heads on pikes,” Bannon said during a live taping of his online show, “War Room: Pandemic.”
Twitter permanently suspended Bannon’s @WarRoomPandemic account on Thursday after he posted the clip, a spokeswoman told The Washington Post, citing the service’s prohibition on “the glorification of violence.” The move makes Bannon one of the most high-profile political figures to be banned.
Facebook, YouTube and Spotify also removed video clips and audio from the episode.
AD
Bannon’s menacing diatribe came amid a rise of violent rhetoric from prominent Trump supporters on Thursday as the president’s chances of winning key battleground continued to narrow. Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones, a Democrat who has endorsed Trump, said at a Thursday rally with Donald Trump Jr. that “we’re starting now to see the white in their eyes and we’re getting ready to start shooting.”
Trump Jr., meanwhile, urged his father on Twitter “to go to total war over this election.” Twitter flagged the tweet for making misleading statements about the election.
Bannon — who is out on bail after being arrested and then pleading not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering in an alleged scheme to defraud Trump donors to raise funding for the border wall — made his violent threat toward Fauci and Wray on his podcast, which has chronicled the coronavirus pandemic through a pro-Trump lens.
ng. Trump’s feud with Fauci reached a crescendo on Monday, when he responded favorably to a crowd at a South Florida rally calling for him to “fire Fauci!”
linton’s emails. Trump, The Post reported, had hoped the FBI would announce a similar last-minute announcement of an investigation into Biden and son Hunter.
t inciting violence and for making volatile threats against individuals. Although the podcast’s YouTube page is still up, the strike disables the user’s ability to upload content for a week.
“These are shocking calls for violence from ex-[White House] aide Steve Bannon,” he wrote on Twitter. “There is no place for these types of threats anywhere.”