Steve Bannon Banned by Twitter After He Calls for Trump to Behead Dr. Anthony Fauci

Steve Bannon’s “War Room Pandemic” account was permanently suspended by Twitter, after the ex-Trump strategist said in a video Thursday that the president should execute Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray.

According to Twitter, the company suspended Bannon’s @WarRoomPandemic account for violating its policy banning the “glorification of violence.” Facebook and YouTube also removed the video in question.

In Bannon’s “War Room” show Thursday, the far-right political commentator mused about what Trump should do in a theoretical second term. Initially, Bannon said Trump should fire the FBI’s Wray and Fauci, the U.S.’s leading infectious-diseases expert who has been at odds with Trump over the White House’s lack of an effective strategy to handle the COVID pandemic.

Then, Bannon said, “I actually want to go a step farther”: “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England,” he said. “I’d put the 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 program or you are gone.”

Bannon, a former producer and documentary filmmaker, was executive chairman at Breitbart News Network before Trump hired him as campaign CEO in August 2016. A year later, Bannon was fired as White House chief strategist under then chief of staff John Kelly.

In August 2020, federal prosecutors charged Bannon with counts of fraud and money laundering for his role in the “We Build the Wall” crowdfunding scheme. Bannon allegedly bilked more than $1 million from donors who believed they were for a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to officials.

During the 2020 U.S. election, social media companies have been on high alert with stepped-up efforts to stamp out misinformation and remove calls for violence from their platforms.

On Thursday, Twitter added a warning label to a tweet by Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, calling for his father to “go to total war over this election.” Trump Jr. had tweeted, “The best thing for America’s future is for @realDonaldTrump to go to total war over this election to expose all of the fraud, cheating, dead/no longer in state voters” — despite no evidence of any widespread voting fraud in the U.S. On the tweet, Twitter affixed a message saying “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”

With the outcome of the presidential race still too close to call, Twitter also has hidden multiple tweets by President Trump behind warning labels. Those include Trump’s baseless claim on Election Night that Democrats were trying to “steal” the election as well as the president’s false assertion in a post early Friday that “I easily WIN the Presidency of the United States with LEGAL VOTES CAST.”

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