NBC political director and host of “Meet The Press” Chuck Todd said Tuesday that leading Republicans are using First Amendment protections to “appease” white supremacists in America.
“Look at the way the right try to weaponize the idea that DHS was going to essentially try to attempt to monitor hateful rhetoric. They want to make it seem likes it’s some sort of big brother,” Todd said speaking to NBC reporter Garrett Haake during his daytime show “Meet the Press Daily.”
“This is always what the right does to appease the white supremacist movement — by saying, ‘hey, free speech. Don’t touch speech.’ ”
Todd’s comments come after a mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., over the weekend carried out against shoppers in a predominantly Black neighborhood. The suspect is a white teenager who had allegedly espoused white supremacist ideology in a manifesto posted online before the attack.
Leading Democrats have blamed Republicans’ language on immigration and race relations for bringing the fringe “replacement theory” into mainstream discourse.
Other critics have called on social media companies to do more to monitor and curb hateful content online.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee earlier this month raised concerns about Nina Jankowicz, head of the new Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security, blasting her as overseeing what they have described as a an “Orwellian ministry of truth.”
Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential voices in conservative media, warned on his show Monday that Democrats and President Biden would use the attack in Buffalo as a “pretext” to censor speech.