Chuck Todd called out President Trump’s response to the white supremacist murderous spree in New Zealand on Meet the Press a few hours ago. Imagine if Trump was held to account before his misdeeds had become par for the course. His criminal behavior seems like such a norm that any new evil deed is equivalent to a yawn.
Chuck Todd played the presidents answer to a reporter who asked him if he thought white nationalism was a thread. The president answer was non-committal.
“I don’t really,” The president replied. “I think it is a small group of people that have very serious problems. I guess if you look at what happened in New Zealand, perhaps that is the case.”
Todd went on to point out the extremism on the Internet quoting the New York Times article, “A Mass Murder of, and for, the Internet” by Kevin Roose.
Now, online extremism is just regular extremism on steroids. There is no offline equivalent of the experience of being algorithmically nudged toward a more strident version of your existing beliefs, or having an invisible hand steer you from gaming videos to neo-Nazism. The internet is now the place where the seeds of extremism are planted and watered, where platform incentives guide creators toward the ideological poles, and where people with hateful and violent beliefs can find and feed off one another.
In what I think is a welcomed yet shocking statement given the source, traditional mainstream media, Chuck Todd’s called for a white nationalism extremism database.
“Let me just say this,” Chuck Todd said. “We work with New Zealand to worry about extremism with radical Islamist followers. It sounds like we need a white nationalism extremism database and start working with our allies on this.”
Chuck Todd finally seemed to provide equity for the evils of white nationalists to other forms of terrorism that are usually disproportionately covered and investigated. This is long overdue