Following deadly attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando that left 49 dead and many others seriously wounded, cheers erupted on alt-right websites like The Daily Stormer. Not only was this an attack on the LGBT community — a group reviled by many white nationalists — but the shooter, Omar Mateen, was a Muslim man of Afghan descent.

In the days following the deadliest shooting by a single perpetrator in American history, the hashtag #ShootBack became a rallying cry for Islamophobes, most of whom never lifted a finger to support gay rights in the past. Elsewhere, white nationalists decided to exploit the tragedy to push for a ban on Muslim immigrants.

Over at The Right Stuff, the website that gave birth to the anti-Semitic echo meme, an article by Butch Leghorn advocated using the shooting to fracture the left’s “coalition.” As Leghorn wrote, “The Democrats are pro-Islam and, objectively, to be pro-Islam is to be anti-Gay.” Therefore, the bloodbath in Orlando serves as a “very valuable wedge issue.” The alt-right, he said, must “hammer this issue.”

“Meme magic is real boys, so spread this meme. Drive this wedge. Smash their coalition. Make it cool to be anti-Muslim because Liberalism.”

Since the shooting can be used to justify a ban on Muslim immigrants or a mass expulsion of Muslims from American soil, Leghorn advocated that the alt-right “exploit this sentiment,” and drive “this wedge as deeply as possible to break off the pro-Gay coalition into the Trump camp.” He suggested using images of a rainbow flag with phrases such as “Fuck Islam” and “Trump.”

Exactly who would be suckered by such an obvious ploy is beyond me, but that didn’t stop alt-right figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos from attempting to rally the LGBT community to the anti-Muslim, pro-gun side. At a June 15, 2016 speech in Orlando, Yiannopoulos declared:

Gay people need an end to gun free zones. Gay people need and end to the pointless pacifism of the left because we have a threat on our shores, in our communities, in our societies, in streets not far from here, that requires a response from the minorities the left has given up on. It refuses to protect us, instead it pits us against each other. It creates a victimhood hierarchy with Muslims at the top, well the problem with putting Muslims at the top is they want to kill everyone else on the list.

A month later, during the RNC, the conservative troll held a “Gays for Trump” party, which saw guests the likes of Pamela Geller and Geert Wilders — both well known anti-Muslim activists. Prior to this, however, Yiannopoulos has never been particularly friendly to the LGBT community. He is fond of mocking transgender people, said straight people should be able to use anti-gay slurs, and admitted that he wishes he were born straight. It would be foolish to interpret these stunts as anything other than an excuse to bash the American Muslim community.

On the July 12, 2016 episode of Radio 3Fourteen (a popular white supremacist podcast hosted by Lana Lokteff), Seventh Son and Mike Enoch — two hosts of The Right Stuff’s Daily Shoah — discussed the adoption of the echo meme by Jews, and the implications of the Orlando massacre. Jews “definitely thought they were taking some term back” by using the echoes, said Seventh Son, which is “ridiculous because all you’re doing is helping us now.”

The point of the echo meme, he said, was to identify journalists and others who advocate “positions that are anti-white, that are anti-American,” and help people make the connection to their Jewish heritage.

SeventhSon added that taking the echoes back isn’t the same as “the N-word that, you know, the rappers can start using it and it becomes cool.” Mike Enoch wondered whether Jews and their allies were “expecting to have the same success that blacks had when they took back the word ‘nigger,'” and joked that since African-Americans reclaimed the N-word “it’s been a smashing success for blacks, I mean, look at the accomplishments they’ve had since they did that.”

Later on in the episode Lokteff brought up the Orlando shooting, or “Allah gay bar” as she derisively put it. “Whether they blame, they blame Islam, people blame Zionists, false fags [sic], you know, they want muh guns, you got immigration, you’ve got multiculturalism,” she said. “I mean really, to me, the problem is just Leftists. They use all these things against white people to destroy our civilization, right? It’s like an amalgamation of degenerate forces, what do you guys think?”

Mike Enoch called the tragedy a “narrative smorgasbord for us” that “doesn’t stop giving” because it pits “one Leftist client group” against another. The Left is nothing but an “anti-white coalition” made up of “marginalized” groups that are used “as a club” against white people. “The wedge that we’ve been trying to drive — and I’ve done this, people might’ve seen me doing this on Facebook and elsewhere — you drive that wedge, you say…’Look, pro-Islam is anti-gay,'” he advised.

“Push that slogan and you’ll see, you see they don’t know what the fuck to do with it because, again, you see people, you see that the people who are interested in maintaining the Leftist coalition and the Leftist consensus of every non-white, non-traditional identity against white people, people that are really interested in that, and that’s, like, ideological Leftists — be they Jews or just, like, you know, elites — that wanna maintain that, and that that’s what they’re more interested in.”