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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 its 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. Dont touch speech.

Todds 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 Newss 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.

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Chuck Todd: GOP using First Amendment to appease the white supremacist movement - The Hill

The defamation trial between actors and former partners Johnny Depp and Amber Heard is close to its conclusion. Both Depp and Heard have taken the stand. Right now, Heard's team is in the midst of presenting her side of the story.

Depp, widely known for his role in the Pirates of Caribbean franchise, is suing Heard, his ex-wife, for defamation over an opinion piece she wrote for The Washington Post and is seeking $50 million. Heard is also countersuing for $100 million.

Here's what else you should know about the trial.

Heard, 36, is a model and actress who starred in 2018's Aquaman. She was married to Depp, 58, from 2015 to 2016. The pair divorced in August 2016.

In December 2018, Heard wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post titled, "I spoke up against sexual violence -- and faced our culture's wrath. That has to change." She said in the article that she had become "a public figure representing domestic abuse," but didn't mention Depp's name.

Depp alleges Heard defamed him in the op-ed. During opening statements, Depp lawyer Benjamin Chew said Heard's article clearly refers to Depp, and that Heard's "false allegations had a significant impact on Mr. Depp's family and his ability to work in the profession he loved."

Benjamin Rottenborn, a lawyer for Heard, said that the First Amendment protects what she wrote. "The article isn't about Johnny Depp," Rottenborn said. "The article is about the social change for which she is advocating and that the First Amendment protects."

Rottenborn also said evidence in the trial will show that Heard did suffer domestic abuse at the hands of Depp, and it was physical, emotional, verbal and psychological.

Depp is faced with proving Heard knowingly made false claims. Heard has filed a countersuit against Depp, which will be decided as part of the trial. She's claiming Depp defamed her when his former lawyer referred to her allegations of abuse as a hoax.

Depp testifies.

Depp lost a defamation case that involved Heard in 2020. He had sued British tabloid The Sun over a headline calling him a "wife beater." Depp filed his current defamation suit in 2019, the year after she wrote the op-ed.

Heard just finished taking the stand this week. When asked about the first time Depp allegedly hit her, she described an instance when she'd asked Depp about what one of his tattoos said, and he'd replied "wino." "I just laughed because I thought he was joking, and he slapped me across the face," she said. Heard also testified that Depp sexually assaulted her shortly after they were married.

During his testimony earlier in the trial, Depp said that Depp he never struck Heard but that she displayed violence during their relationship. Depp alleged she threw a vodka bottle at his hand during an argument, cutting off a part of his middle finger.

There are some reports that Johnny Depp could take take the stand again. Heard's time taking the stand is likely over and her team will most likely continue to call more witnesses.

Both teams are expected to deliver closing arguments on May 27. After that the jury will deliberate on its decision.

According to sources, Elon Musk is no longer expected to take the stand.

More here:
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard Trial: What You Need to Know - CNET

In an execution an expert has characterized as botched, Arizona Department of Corrections personnel failed for 25 minutes to set an intravenous line in Clarence Dixons arms on May 11, 2002 before performing a bloody and apparently unauthorized cutdown procedure to insert the IV line into a vein in his groin. It was the first execution the state had carried out after a nearly eight-year hiatus following the botched two-hour execution of Joseph Wood on July 23, 2014.

Fox News media witness, Troy Hayden, reported that the execution team had trouble inserting the IV line and that Dixon appeared to be in pain and grimaced during the insertion process. He said that after about 25 minutes the execution team cut into Dixons groin to place the IV line there. Associated Press reporter Paul Davenport, who also witnessed the execution and saw the incision being made, said at the post-execution news conference that execution team members had to wipe up a fair amount of blood from Dixons groin. Taylor Tasler, a media witness from Phoenix NBC affiliate KTAR, reported that Dixon gasped after the drugs were administered, before losing consciousness.

Lethal-injection experts said the amount of time it took to set the IV line was indicative of serious problems. Its a sign of desperation (on the part of the execution team), and its a sign of an unqualified executioner, Fordham Law Professor Deborah Denno said. Austin Sarat, an Amherst College professor and author of Gruesome Spectacles: The Cultural Reception of Botched Executions in America, said the repeated efforts to place the IVs were serious problems in the execution itself. Sarat noted that Dixons execution appeared to have violated Arizonas execution protocol, which, he said, allows peripheral IV catheters or a central femoral line as determined by the Director acting upon the recommendation of the IV Team Leader but does not include a cut-down to insert an IV in the groin.

Michael Radelet, a University of Colorado-Boulder sociologist and longtime death-penalty researcher, said, I would classify it as a botch, recognizing that not everyone would agree with that. But things did not go right. Dixons execution, Sarat said, shows yet again that lethal injection is by no means a humane process.

Dixons execution reflects continuing serious problems in Arizonas execution process. Lawyers for Frank Atwood, whom the state is scheduled to put to death on June 8, 2022, reviewed 14 prior Arizona lethal-injection executions and found that IV insertion took from 7 to 54 minutes, with IV placement in half the executions taking 23 minutes or more.

Defense lawyers say that these problems are exacerbated by the lack of transparency about Arizona executions. Dixons lawyer, assistant federal public defender Amanda Bass, said [s]ince Arizona keeps secret the qualifications of its executioners, we dont know whether the failure to set two peripheral lines in Mr. Dixons arms was due to incompetence, which resulted in the unnecessarily painful and invasive setting of a femoral line. The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry did not respond to media requests for information about the training of the execution team members tasked with inserting the IV.

Arizonas execution protocol was the subject of litigation after Woods botched execution, in which he reportedly gasped and snorted more than 640 times as executioners injected him with 15 doses of the two drugs used at the time. The state reached a deal in 2017 to abandon that two-drug protocol, replacing it with a single drug, the barbiturate pentobarbital. In 2020, the state settleda media access lawsuit after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that the media had a First Amendment right to witness executions but not to know the identity of the states drug supplier. Under that settlement, the state agreed to allow witnesses to see and hear the entirety of the execution, while keeping the identity of its drug suppliers secret.

In April 2021, a heavily-redacted invoice obtained by The Guardian showed that, in October 2020, Arizona ordered 1,000 vials of pentobarbital. Each one-gram vial cost the state $1,500, for what the newspaper described as a jaw-dropping total of $1.5 million. Two months later, another Guardianinvestigation revealed Arizona had refurbished its gas chamber and spent more than $2,000 to acquire ingredients to execute prisoners with cyanide gas, the same gas used by the Nazis to murder more than one million men, women, and children during the Holocaust.

Later in 2021, the Arizona Attorney Generals office sought to shorten judicial review in the cases of Dixon and Atwood after learning that the shelf life of the drugs it intended to use in the executions would expire before the executions could be carried out.

Atwood is challenging his June 8 scheduled execution, for which he must choose between cyanide gas or lethal injection. Atwoods lawyers argue that both methods would result in unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. They point to the lengthy IV insertion process and the possibility of femoral vein access as potential sources of excruciating pain in Atwoods execution, given Atwoods spinal condition, disability, and overall frailty.

Sources

Jimmy Jenkins, Arizona struggles to administer lethal injection drugs, Arizona Central, May 18, 2022; Austin Sarat, Time, the Execution Process, and the Botched Lethal Injection of Clarence Dixon, Verdict, May 16, 2022; Jacques Billeaud, Experts: Arizona executioners took too long to insert IV, Associated Press, May 12, 2022; Jimmy Jenkins and Chelsea Curtis, Arizona executes Clarence Dixon for 1978 murder of Deana Bowdoin, Arizona Central, May 11, 2022; Navajo man executed in Arizona prison, Indian Country Today, May 11, 2022; Clarence Dixon execution updates: Ducey says execution is justice served, Arizona Central, May 11,2022.

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Witnesses Report Problems Inserting IV in Arizona's First Execution in Eight Years - Death Penalty Information Center

Technology is tampering with freedom of speech, and we dont know what to do about it. At issue are the global platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the disturbing propaganda, disinformation and lies propagated on them.

The inclination, on the left and the right, is to censor. It is a terrible solution, more toxic and damaging to the body politic than the disease.

The left would like to shut down Fox Cable News and its principal commentator, Tucker Carlson. The right would like to have Twitter sold, presumably to Elon Musk, so that it stops blocking tweets from the right, notably those from former President Donald Trump.

How our society and others deal with the downside of social media racial incitement, disinformation, mendacity and opinions that are offensive to a minority, whether that is the disabled or an ethnic group is a work in progress. The instinct is to shut them down, shut them up. The tool that old monster solution is censorship.

The first trouble with censorship is that it has to define what is to be eradicated. Take hate speech. The British Parliament is struggling with a bill to limit it. The social networks seek to exclude it, and there are U.S. laws against crimes inspired by it.

How do you define it, hate speech? When is it fair comment? When is it satire? When is it truth taken as hate?

I say if you can untie that knot, go ahead and censor. But I also know you cant untie it without savaging free speech, doing violence to the First Amendment, arresting creativity and hobbling humor.

The censor is often as much clothed in moral raiment as in political garb. Take Thomas Bowdler and his sister, Henrietta, who in 1807 published an expurgated version of the works of Shakespeare. Henrietta did most of the work on the first 20 plays, later Thomas finished all 36. They expunged sex, blasphemy and double entendre. Thomas was an admired scholar, not a crackpot, although that might be todays judgment.

Oddly, the Bowdlers are credited with increasing the readership of Shakespeare. People reached for the forbidden fruit; they always do.

Likewise, many a novel would have avoided success if it hadnt been serially banned, like D.H. Lawrences Lady Chatterleys Lover. The moral censorship of movies by the Hays Office, starting in 1934, didnt save the audiences from moral turpitude. It just led to bad movies.

The censors often begin with specific words; words, which it can be argued, represent offense to some group or some social standing. So specific words become demonized whether it is the naming of a sports team or a colloquial word for sex, the urge to censor them is strong.

Jokes, like the English ones about the Welsh or the Scots ones about the English, became victim to a newly minted sensitivity, where political activists sell the idea that the joked about are victims. The only victim is levity, to my mind.

When you start down this slope there is no apparent end. Euphemisms take over from plain speech, and we live in a society in which the use of the wrong word can suggest that you are not fit for public office or to teach. Areas around ethnicity and sexual orientation are particularly fraught.

Until the 1960s and the civil rights movement, newspapers de facto censored people of color: They ignored them a particularly egregious kind of censorship. At The Washington Daily News where I once worked, a now defunct but lively evening newspaper in the nations capital, some of us once ransacked the library for photos of Blacks. There were none. From its founding in 1927 until the civil rights movement took off, the newspaper simply hadnt published news of that community in a city that had a burgeoning African-American population.

That was collective censorship as pernicious as the kind that both political extremes would now like to impose on speech.

Alas, censorship banning someone elses speech isnt going to redress the issue of the rights of those maligned or lied to or excluded from social media. In print and traditional broadcasting, libel has been the last defense.

Libel laws are clearly inadequate and puny against the enormity of social media, but they are a place to begin. A new reality must, and will in time, get new mechanisms to contend with it.

One of those mechanisms shouldnt be censorship.It is always the first tool of dictatorship but should be an anathema in democracies. For example, it is an open issue as to whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would have been able to invade Ukraine if he hadnt first censored the Russian media.

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Censorship Isn't the Solution to Social Media's Ills InsideSources - InsideSources

Voice of OC Publisher Norberto Santana Jr will be recognized this week by the nations top news editors for his leadership in training and hiring diverse news leaders.

Your unselfish contributions as an investigative reporter, editor, mentor, lecturer and now as editor and publisher of the Voice of Orange County stand out as a journalist who has worked to elevate others and serve his community. You were nominated by your staff, in itself a heartfelt recognition. said News Leaders Association President Manny Garcia, who serves as the Executive Editor of the Austin American Statesman newspaper, in announcing the Robert G McGruder Award for Diversity Leadership.

McGruder was a trail blazing African American journalist who spent his career breaking racial barriers and encouraging his industry to do the same. His career prematurely ended in 2002 after a 20-month battle with cancer. He is remembered for his excellence in journalism and his string of firsts: first black editor of the Daily Kent Stater, first black reporter at The Plain Dealer, first black president of the Associated Press Managing Editors group and first black executive editor of the Detroit Free Press.

I am honored and humbled to stand alongside Robert G. McGruder, advocating for a fair shot for all kinds of voices in Americas newsrooms, said Santana.

Santana is being recognized alongside S. Mitra Kalita, curator of a New York nonprofit newsroom, Epicenter NYC and co-founder of URL Media, who received the News Leader of the Year award.

The Diversity Leadership Award honors the spirit of McGruder by celebrating news executives that carry on his legacy of ensuring that news leadership jobs include people of color and that a diversity of voices is represented in training, promotion and hiring.

Past award winners include Miami Herald Publisher David Lawrence and Pulitzer Prize winning Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts and Peter Bhatia, editor at the Detroit Free Press.

The News Leaders Association represents the nations top editors and publishers. Founded in 1979 the NLA supports all aspects of open government and free speech.

They are best known for their sponsorship of the annual Sunshine Week activities throughout the country that remind local leaders of the importance of First Amendment rights.

Santana will be recognized in a virtual ceremony May 20 during their annual convention.

Voice of OC was also recently recognized by Cal State Fullerton University for its commitment to student journalists with the James P Alexander Internship Site of the Year award.

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Voice of OC Publisher Norberto Santana Jr to Receive Prestigious Robert G. McGruber Award From Nations Top News Editors for Diversity Leadership -...