Twitter has permanently suspended an account belonging to former White House Chief Strategist Steve Banon after he suggested that Dr Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded.
His comments were made in a video posted to his Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter accounts.
Bannon falsely claimed President Trump had won re-election, despite several key states still being too close to call, and said that he should fire both Fauci and Wray.
He then said he would go further: “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.”
The comments came during a livestream of Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic” online show.
The video was live on Bannon’s Facebook page for about 10 hours Thursday and had been viewed almost 200,000 times before Facebook removed it, citing its violence and incitement policies.
Earlier Thursday evening YouTube removed the video for violating its policy against “inciting violence.”
Twitter said it had permanently suspended the account of Bannon’s “War Room” podcast for glorifying violence.
Bannon’s comments came as other supporters of President Trump also used violent and militaristic rhetoric to back Trump’s baseless claims of a rigged election and to condemn his perceived political opponents.
In a tweet this Thursday, Donald Trump Jr. called for his father “to go to total war over this election.”
“It’s time to clean up this mess & stop looking like a banana republic!” he added.
Trump Jr. also repeated multiple baseless claims undermining the integrity of the election in the tweet, which was labelled by Twitter as “disputed and might be misleading.”
Earlier on Thursday, Facebook shut down a pro-Trump group called “Stop The Steal,” which amassed hundreds of thousands of members and had been coordinating protests that sought to challenge the election’s legitimacy.
CNN
