Steve
Bannon appeared to endorse violence against Anthony Fauci, the US’s top
infectious diseases expert, and the FBI director, Christopher Wray. Photograph:
Andrew Kelly/Reuters
Steve Bannon banned by Twitter for calling for
Fauci beheading
Former Trump adviser falls foul of Twitter rules with
‘heads on pikes’ comments
Peter
Beaumont
Fri 6 Nov
2020 11.30 GMTLast modified on Fri 6 Nov 2020 15.32 GMT
Twitter has banned the account of the former Donald
Trump adviser and surrogate Steve Bannon after he called for the beheading of
Dr Anthony Fauci and the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the posting of
their heads outside the White House as a “warning”.
Speaking on
his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of
social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence
against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.
“Second
term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step
farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,” Bannon said.
“I’d
actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads
on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a
warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re
gone.”
Twitter
banned Bannon’s War Room account permanently, saying it had suspended the
podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.
The same
video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.
There has
been mounting concern over the risk of violence following this week’s US
elections, amid highly inflammatory rhetoric from Trump and his allies, who have
falsely said Democrats are trying to “steal the election”.
Philadelphia
police arrested two men who were allegedly involved in a plot to attack the
Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday night. Police were tipped off,
possibly from a concerned family member of one of the men, who had driven 300
miles (480km) from Virginia.
The moves
against Bannon came hours after Facebook banned “Stop the Steal”, a group
involved in organising protests this weekend throughout the US against the
presidential vote count.
One post,
shared by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, declared: “Neither side is
going to concede. Time to clean the guns, time to hit the streets.”
The
increasingly heated language around the election has also included
interventions from more mainstream figures, including the former Republican
House speaker Newt Gingrich, who appeared to call for election workers in
Pennsylvania to be arrested.
Speaking to
Sean Hannity on Fox News, Gingrich amplified Trump’s false complaints of
election rigging and mused about what he believed was the solution.
“My hope is
that President Trump will lead the millions of Americans who understand exactly
what’s going on,” Gingrich said. “The Philadelphia machine is corrupt. The
Atlanta machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt. And they are
trying to steal the presidency. And we should not allow them to do that.”
“First of
all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law,”
he continued. “You stop somebody from being an observer, you just broke federal
law. Do you hide and put up papers so nobody can see what you’re doing? You
just broke federal law. You bring in ballots that aren’t real? You just
broke federal law.”
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