One of the joys of being born in Oklahoma is that I occasionally see the posts of childhood friends still in Oklahoma in my facebook feed...

They are usually innocuous saccharine motivational religious memes, or alt-right talking points...

This time it was a link to a Breitbart article on recent 'massacres of christians' by muslims in Nigeria- framing it as liberal hypocrisy that the NZ massacre is getting all this press and no one is talking about the Nigeria atrocities...

In googling this it quickly became apparent that this talking point was being distributed en masse on every right wing media platform-

Here is my response to him:

1) When you get your talking points from Breitbart you have already lost whatever ill-informed argument you were trying to make.

2) The press HAS covered this conflict, repeatedly- it has been going on for many years, thousands on both sides have been killed- so the question is why- ALL OF A SUDDEN - it has become important to YOU, and why has it become important to you NOW?

3) The warring between these groups has been going on for well over a decade, and while it may have some religious component, it is primarily a war between farmers and herders over scarce resources in the area.

4) The slaughter in New-Zealand, however, was the first mass shooting in that country in decades.

5) The incident is also indicative of the spread of white nationalist terrorism to areas it had not been seen before.

6)White nationalist terrorism is on the rise in the US and world-wide.

7) Right wing terrorists were responsible for %73 of domestic terrorism deaths in America between 2009 and 2018, accounting for nearly %100 in 2018.

So the question, again, is why- ALL OF A SUDDEN - it has become important to YOU, and why has it become important to you NOW?
And why are alt-right organizations suddenly shouting at you about it trying to get you outraged about it RIGHT NOW!?

As I said, its been going on for decades. So why are you suddenly scrambling for something else to point to, rather than doing the human thing and expressing sorrow at the slaughter in New Zealand? What makes you so uncomfortable about the fact that the slaughter of 50 innocent people in a normally peaceful country gets media attention?

Is it because it has made you defensive, because the rhetoric this murderer in NZ spouted so closely resembles that spewed by the president and other republicans in this country?

You are better than this... aren't you?

I then posted numerous links to articles from the past decade in the 'liberal' media covering the growing violence, warning that it was getting worse.