BANNON: Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. 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. You either get with the program or you're gone -- time to stop playing games. blow it all up, put Ric Grenell today as the interim head of the FBI, that'll light them up, right.
JACK MAXEY (CO-HOST): 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. These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors.
BANNON: That's how you won the revolution. 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.
>The call to replicate actual specific events in the American Revolution really makes it feel real, along with the mention of a civil war being on.
Let’s say someone was calling for the gassing of Jews, would you also defend their position with a sentiment of: “ but that’s ok, because obviously a state can’t just start rounding up Jews and gassing them”?
Or perhaps his speech should be judged on his stated intent ?
Which part of the words "Calling for Execution" is a playful, fun idiom that former White House officials get to use?
How about Kathy Griffin, who posted a video of herself beheading Trump in effigy? She still has a Facebook account as far as I can tell.
Corporations have broad rights to self-regulate their platforms.
No one is saying Bannon broke the law. It's just interesting how Twitter and FB are making different decisions about the kind of platforms they want to have.
So how come if the US government doesn't censor it, it doesn't make the US a pro-beheading country? Empirically, compared to other countries the US manages to be pretty anti-beheading despite tolerating speech about beheading.
Do you think that any failure to censor speech constitutes an endorsement of that speech? Is it not possible to allow speech you disagree with? Does Facebook the company have to endorse every opinion someone posts on it?
I don't like censorship and I don't like public speech that encourages violence. Unfortunately, those two stances are at odds sometimes and there are warnings from history on both sides.
Are you equating being suspended off Twitter to being thrown in Jail? For the record, people commonly do get suspended for harassments for sending death threats to public figures. Unfortunately they aren't as high profile as bannon, so they don't get op-ed's written about them.
>How about Kathy Griffin, who posted a video of herself beheading Trump in effigy?
Why would you bring up Kathy Griffin when she got Twitter account suspended as well for that stunt? The answer to your question is "no I don't think Bannon should get better treatment then Kathy Griffin".
My point here is that people on one end of the political spectrum are given the benefit of the doubt when they make statements like this that they are not meant to be taken literally. Meanwhile, people on the other end of the political spectrum are treated as though they actually intend to carry them out.
By your own example this isn’t true. Kathy was suspended from Twitter for what she did. Most targeted calls for violence lands you a suspension on Twitter.
The reason you feel like one side is given the benefit of the doubt isn’t rooted in reality, at least on Twitter - it’s just far more likely for the other side of the political spectrum to whip up a media frenzy about free speech. And your point about one side being more likely to carry acts of violence out also seems ignorant of what’s happening today. There is only one political leaning that has resulted in people showing up armed to pizza places or trying to kidnap a governor.
It’s difficult to understand why you bend over so hard to make excuses for Bannon, when the guy who he was “joking” about has had to literally hire bodyguards for much of the past year.
Hold on a second here. Am I the only one that remembers this summer? There is also a party that excused, if not encouraged, arson, rioting, dragging people out their cars and beating them in the street, and one outright murder that was explicitly predicated on the victim being of the opposing political party:
https://nypost.com/2020/08/30/blm-activists-celebrated-as-tr...
Here people are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to "prove" what Bannon really meant. "You see he mentioned Tudor England so therefore that conclusively proves that this was not a figure of speech..."
I don't care about Bannon, I care about a free and open exchange of ideas. We can't have that if some parties appoint themselves the arbiters of permissible speech.
Are you a free speech absolutist? So calls for violence isn’t a line you are willing to draw in the sand? If Bannon was distributing child pornography should Facebook allow that too, or should Zuckerberg not appoint himself as an arbiter is that situation? This is an insane premise, so I’m not sure what to say to this. Even the current law doesn’t let you recklessly abuse free speech like this (e.g. fire in a movie theater). You do realize Fauci and his family doesn’t even feel safe anymore leaving their home without security detail? Why should someone like Bannon be afforded such great benefit of the doubt given Fauci’s situation. Someone like Bannon would and has cried about “cancel culture” but in this case he’s free to essentially force a man into hiding.
This is not fire in a crowded theater either. Bannon made a clearly hyperbolic statement about something he would do in some hypothetical fantasy scenario where he is in the White House and it is some kind of alternate reality where putting someone's head on a pike is a real thing that could actually happen.
Bannon is not in the White House. It is very unlikely that he will ever again be in the White House. Trump fired him over two years ago. Even if he were in the White House, I can't believe I have to explain this, putting someone's head on a pike out in front of the White House is not a real thing that even has the slightest, remotest possibility of happening. Even if Bannon were President, that is not something he could do. Do you understand that? He may as well have said "I'd incinerate Fauci with laser blasts from my eyes" that is about as realistic.
Fauci is a highly visible figure in the midst of a global crisis. It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that he needs security. Even minor celebrities get stalkers and death threats. At some point you become known by enough people that it is a statistical certainty that some of them will have a form of mental illness that may cause them to unhealthily fixate on you. That will happen regardless of anything Bannon says.
Then don't use TwitFace. Go use 4chan or 8chan or someplace with looser standards.
No, I think Bannon is actually pining for (and has, in fact, had notable success in producing, though not to the extent he clearly prefers) a regression of social norms in the area of politics, including and especially around political violence.
EDIT: As noticed below, I have edited this comment to include Reuters.
It is equivalent to an official YouTube channel or Twitter account. It is not a "fan page" in the sense that you mean.
Edit: It looks like you may have edited your comment. I think it's important to emphasize that this isn't some random Facebook "fan page", but the official page of Steve Bannon, and it's a verified business page.
The fact is, these were headlines on other sites, that were then linked to populist.press (I assume Steve Bannon has some affiliation with the site).
https://web.archive.org/web/20201106150453/https://populist....
The second headline, "Calling for Execution", links to this article: https://www.thewrap.com/steve-bannon-suspended-by-twitter-af...
As such, the headline is, without question, someone else's description of the events.
You might come down on either side of the censorship / free speech argument, but Bannon knows exactly what he's doing with his words here, and it went beyond a one-off bad-taste metaphor.
Facebook have previously removed, for example, suggestive posts from Ramzan Kadyrov, which, while they did not make direct statements, were threatening: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2016/02/02/instagram-removes-...
While Kadyrov has a more established history of following through on his threats than Bannon, I don't think it's unreasonable to come to the conclusion that Facebook does have a double standard: if you or I post "<prominent government official>'s head should be on a spike", do you think their moderation team would apply the same leniency?
I wager they would not: what we see here is part of an established pattern where Facebook's executives, and Zuckerberg in particular, do not want to be seen as biased against the right wing sentiment, because remaining in the good graces of those with political power is more important than actually upholding their supposed community standards.
How do we interpret this next sentence as a continuation of the figure of speech? I can't seem to wrap my head around it sounding anything other than explicit.
The part everybody is missing is "I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England", which provides the context to understand the stuff people is having a meltdown about. This is not "heads on pikes" by a bunch of salvages; it is "heads on pikes" as part of the official policy of an absolutist State.
The way I read it, Bannon said: "I would have them face the death penalty, if there was a legal way to do so. And I would use their cases as deterrence from other would be traitors."
I don't see it as a call to have civilian supporters attempting against the lives of those two high ranking officials; but could be interpreted as a declaration of intent to pursue and extend draconian powers for the (Executive Branch of the) US Government. I will let you decide which of the two interpretation is gravest.
It’s not an uncommon phrase at the very least. I know I’ve heard people use it in business settings, just like folks sometimes use phrase “heads will roll” in otherwise polite conversation.
That's not a figure of speech though.
> 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.
It’s silly to summarize this as Bannon urging Fauci to literally be beheaded. To “put [someone’s] head on a pike” is a figure of speech meaning to punish someone publicly as a warning to others, and the next line corroborates that intent.