Former Trump chief strategist and conspiracy podcaster Steve Bannon recently got himself permanently banned from Twitter. This may have been a long time coming, but he officially crossed the line by encouraging extreme violence against Dr. Anthony Fauci. And he tweeted a clip from his podcast-y online program, War Room: Pandemic, in which he called for the beheading of Fauci and FBI Director Chris Wray: “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.”
In the aftermath of that hot mess, Bannon’s attorney dumped him (on those still-pending federal mail fraud charges), and Fauci said nothing. A week later, the NIAID director addressed the matter (as “unusual,” albeit “stressful”) while speaking with an Australian morning program: “When you have public figures like Bannon calling for your beheading, that’s really kind of unusual, I think.”
“People calling for you to be beheaded, fired, thrown in the fire pit or whatever, that's just noise. You don't pay attention to that.” – Dr Anthony Fauci tells @leighsales that battling the pandemic with @realDonaldTrump as president has been “very stressful”. #abc730 pic.twitter.com/MTxJzGtsSK
— abc730 (@abc730) November 11, 2020
Here’s more of Fauci’s response:
“That’s not the kind of thing you think about when you’re going through medical school to become a physician. It’s noise, it’s meaningless. You know, people calling for you to be beheaded, fired, thrown into the fire pit, or whatever, that’s just noise. You don’t pay attention to that.”
Unfortunately, Fauci has had to pay some attention to threats of this nature, given that he recently had to beef up security for his family as people continue to lash out at him for advocating mask-wearing. Making matters even worse, the president has been trashing the doctor right and left, and threatening to have him fired, and so on. We all know what happened last week during the election, though, yet what remains less certain is what the heck Bannon will do without an attorney, since he likely violated bail conditions. Aaand that’s Steve Bannon’s problem.