Steve Bannon Might Regret Calling for Acting Government Officials to Be Murdered

Washed-up former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon isn’t taking Donald Trump’s increasingly certain ouster from the presidency well. In an episode of his interminable WAR ROOM: Pandemic podcast on Thursday, he called for the nation’s top infectious disease official and the director of the FBI to be murdered and for their bodies to be displayed as a signal to any other real or imagined dissenters.

“Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci,” Bannon said, referring to a theoretically possible timeline that sucks. “Now I actually want to go a step farther but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man.”

“I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. 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,” Bannon added. “You either get with the program or you’re gone—time to stop playing games. Blow it all up, put [Trump campaign official] Ric Grenell today as the interim head of the FBI. That’ll light them up, right?”

“You know what Steve, just yesterday there was the anniversary of the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia. These were Quaker businessmen who had cohabitated, if you will, with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia,” co-host Jack Maxey responded. “These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors.”

“That’s how you won the revolution,” Bannon concluded. “No one wants to talk about it. The revolution wasn’t some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war. It was a civil war.”

Twitter promptly banned the podcast’s account. Gizmodo reached out to Facebook, Spotify, Apple, Soundcloud, and Stitcher, all of which host Bannon’s podcast or in Facebook’s case, allows its distribution through Bannon’s personal page and Instagram. All of these sites have identifiable policies around calls to violence and/or harassing or bullying content (Gizmodo couldn’t locate any publicly-accessible content rules for Stitcher, but archived versions of its content provider agreement prohibit this kind of incitement.) We’ll update if any respond.

YouTube, which has a three-strikes policy, said that the specific podcast episode has been removed. The podcast’s account remains active on the site. “We’ve removed this video for violating our policy against inciting violence,” YouTube spokesperson Alex Joseph told Gizmodo. “We will continue to be vigilant as we enforce our policies in the post-election period.”

Update: 11/5/2020 at 11:09 p.m. ET: Facebook has also removed two posts from Bannon’s page, though it stopped short of any more significant penalties such as a ban.

 “We removed these videos for violating our policy against violence and incitement,” a Facebook spokesperson told Gizmodo.