‘War Room’ Bannon shunned by Twitter, FB for violent rant against Fauci and FBI

Twitter last week 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, Bannon appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s senior-most 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,” he 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.”

Bannon’s War Room account was banned permanently on the social platform, citing the suspension to the violation of its policy on the glorification of violence.

The same video was up on Facebook for around 10 hours before it was also taken down.

Following the incident, William Burck, an attorney for Bannon in a fraud case in New York City, told a federal judge he was withdrawing. Bannon is accused of misappropriating money from a group which raised $2m donor funds to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and has pleaded not guilty.

There has been mounting concern over the risk of violence following the recent US election results, amid highly inflammatory rhetoric from Trump and his allies, who have falsely claimed that the Democrats “stole the election”.

Philadelphia police arrested two men allegedly involved in a plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday night while the vote count was still on.

The move against Bannon came hours after Facebook banned “Stop the Steal”, a group involved in organising protests over election 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.

“First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law,” he decried in an interview with Fox News, “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.”

In a counter statement, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf reaffirmed his commitment to counting every vote, saying “no amount of intimidation will stop our dedicated election officials in our municipalities.”

“As a country and a commonwealth, we must reject efforts to intimidate election workers and prevent votes from being counted,” he said.

[Sourced from Agencies]