Former White House strategist Steve Bannon on Thursday discussed the imagined beheadings of infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray, saying he would like to put their “heads on pikes” outside the White House as a “warning.”
Bannon described his outrageous scenario on his podcast “War Room: Pandemic” by first characterizing Trump as a “kind-hearted man” who presumably would be opposed to such an action.
But as for Bannon: “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put the heads on pikes. I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats,” he explained, as Media Matters for America first reported.
“You either get with the program or you’re gone ― time to stop playing games,” Bannon added. “Blow it all up.”
Bannon’s co-host Jack Maxey appeared to agree, indicating that the men were “traitors.”
“You know what, Steve, yesterday there was the anniversary of the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia,” Maxey said. “These were Quaker businessmen who had cohabitated, if you will, with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia. These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors.”
“That’s how you win the revolution,” Bannon said. “The revolution wasn’t some sort of garden party. It was a civil war.”
Twitter permanently suspended one of Bannon’s accounts, and YouTube removed his video about the severed heads of federal officials.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has urged the public to follow strict measures to combat the coronavirus.
In August, he said that Tucker Carlson’s rhetoric on Fox News had prompted “some of the crazies in society to start threatening me.” Fauci is currently protected by extra government security after receiving death threats.
He went on to cite “divisiveness in the country” for further abetting those making threats against him, even though he is just “trying to promote public health principles to save people’s lives,” he said.
Fauci could not immediately be reached by HuffPost for a response to Bannon’s remarks.
The coronavirus has killed nearly a quarter of a million Americans.
Bannon is currently out on bail on federal fraud charges for allegedly using hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations on personal expenses. The money was raised to fund the private construction of a section of Trump’s southern border wall.
