Racist groups have been quick to latch on to murders of young white women by black and Hispanic men in recent years, and Wednesday’s killing of Alison Parker and her colleague Adam Ward is no exception, becoming a major point of discussion in online communities devoted to race hate.

Amid criticism on those websites over a media focus on gun control and (to a lesser extent) mental health in coverage of the killings, there is a chorus of racially charged sentiment demanding attention and sympathy from policymakers, especially the president.

The chatroom run by moderators of the race hate forum Coontown (formerly a hub for racist users at Reddit, where it was banned, now a fixture at Reddit competitor Voat under a different name) featured a link to the livestream of the grieving WDBJ7 newsroom where Parker and Ward worked on Wednesday and Thursday.

Immigration policy, a pet issue for conservatives and a much more important one for white-rights groups, has become central to the current election and is a major feature of these online discussions. Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s aggressive comments on the issue have given him a leg up with racist groups, earning him even the dubious endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

“There have been a whole series of these kinds of crimes that are picked up by white supremacists and converted into racial hate crimes,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “The claims are complete and utter hogwash – yesterday you could at least pick out something – there was a tiny hint of racial motivation. But in other cases, there was nothing.”

The grieving parents of Kathryn Steinle, a young white woman who was allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant in San Francisco, were regularly promoted by conservative commentators as they demanded a phone call from Barack Obama apologizing for the killing.

By contrast, Parker’s father’s call for stricter gun control laws on CNN and Fox News Thursday morning has been dismissed by many in those circles. Commentators and Republican presidential candidates took to new media and old to quell calls for harsher firearms regulation: “It’s not about the guns. It’s about mental instability,” said Trump. Conservative pundit Dana Loesch said that the killings weren’t indicative of broader trends.

Just want to remind everyone again —> Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware http://t.co/yTAbKeQiIw #2A — Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 27, 2015

Instead, commentators and commenters – including syndicated talkshow host Michael Savage – have said for months that any violent crimes committed by black people indicate that the America’s problem with racial violence is black-on-white and not the other way around.

After the killings of Parker and Ward and the release of parts of gunman Vester Flanagan’s manifesto, in which he mentioned Charleston church killer Dylann Roof’s desire to spark a race war, racists were on high alert. One non-incident in Mississippi early on Thursday afternoon nearly started a panic in the Coontown chatroom, with one poster asking: “Lots of shooters race war now?”

A number of websites keep running tallies of black-on-white violent crimes, but of particular interest to them are incidents in which the perpetrator appears to be a black man (or men) and the victim is female and white, especially when there has been focus on violence against black people in the area.

A five-year-old Charleston girl named Allison Griffor killed during a suspected home invasion in 2011 became a rallying point for racist bloggers after Roof killed nine people in a church in that town earlier this year.

The sense of white culture under attack is deep-seated enough that conservative outlet Breitbart’s headline on the Parker/Ward murders read simply: “Black, Gay Reporter Murders Straight, White Journalists – Media Blame the Gun,” and wrote: “Had a white straight man killed a black gay man, released first-person tape of the shooting, and then unleashed a manifesto about being victimized by affirmative action and anti-religious bigotry from homosexuals, the media would never stop covering the story.”

Potok said that the rhetoric around these crimes has become more vitriolic since Dylann Roof’s killing spree. “Charleston really did ignite a kind of ideological battle,” Potok said. “It wasn’t just horror at the murders of these nine people; the attack on the Confederate battle flag made these people cry and moan and describe themselves as the victims of cultural genocide and ethnic cleansing.”