Years of looking the other way at Left on Right violence, excusing shootings by mentally disturbed transgender assailants, and shrugging off black on white crime may be ending with the assassinations of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk and Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska.
Fed up with being victims and the political correctness that required silence, pollsters are finding that more are speaking out, and the killings signaled the start of a massive blowback.
“I think what happens is people get complacent, they get comfortable, and then things get bad, and so people are called to action,” said Rasmussen Reports pollster Mark Mitchell.
“Imagine people out there talking about a new ‘white lives matter’ movement,” he said. That “happened just because of the North Carolina killing just in the last two or three days, and it’s completely changed the social media landscape permanently. People are talking in ways they were not talking about a year ago, about black crime statistics and things like that, and then to have this happen on top of it,” he said, pointing to Kirk’s killing in Utah yesterday.
And just like that, there was a White Lives Matter movement. https://t.co/5qW61bYzbm
— Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports (@honestpollster) September 10, 2025
Cygnal pollster Brent Buchanan said he expects the political Right to be more forceful in calling out left-wing hate speech of Washington Democratic political leaders and media, as well as those on social media cheering Kirk’s death.
“The Right has been awakened. The attack on Charlie Kirk is felt as an attack on all of us. Expect for this moment to be like that of MLK to the civil rights movement,” said Buchanan.
“When you constantly tell one side of the political aisle that everything the other side is doing will destroy our country and our ‘democracy,’ what do you think will happen? This is a brainwashing and sickness of the left that must be toned down and addressed,” he added.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said that the backlash following Kirk’s death will also be against liberals who have mocked traditional family life celebrated by conservatives.
“It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence,” he wrote on X Thursday. “The fate of millions depends upon the defeat of this wicked ideology. The fate of our children, our society, our civilization hinges on it,” he added.
There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and…
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) September 11, 2025
Mitchell told Secrets that he saw the politically correct bubble burst after Zarutska’s killing on a Charlotte, North Carolina, commuter train by a black man repeatedly released after being charged with other crimes.
“People on X now have permission to speak openly about stuff that was formerly verboten,” he said. “That genie isn’t going back in the bottle.”
Yesterday, appearing on The Great America Show podcast with host John Fawcett, Mitchell said, “I think a Rubicon has been crossed.” He added, “This is about how we frame discourse and what we tolerate. This isn’t about an uprising or a revolution that’s going to happen. This is about society reordering itself, and people are different now, how they talked about things just a week ago, are going to be different now.”
Mitchell cited the backlash to the pro-transgender movement as an example, especially after recent mass shootings were blamed on transgender shooters.
He said if the Kirk shooter is linked to the transgender movement, that clash will get hotter. Some reports on Thursday said the bullets found in the shooter’s rifle had pro-transgender messages scratched into them.
“There is absolutely going to be blowback,” he said.
Assassination culture is spreading on the left. Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump.
In California, activists are naming ballot measures after Luigi Mangione.
The… pic.twitter.com/xiGAAvoPHy
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 7, 2025
Cygnal’s Buchanan said that the same will happen against liberal threats of violence on Republicans and conservatives, many of which have been highlighted on social media since Kirk’s slaying.
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“Political violence is much more a problem on the left. On April 7, 2025, Charlie Kirk foreboded this radical leftist violence saying, ‘Assassination culture is spreading on the left. Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump,’” he told Secrets.
“The right is not just up against a political ideology of different opinion; we’re up against a force of evil that is accepting of death as a means to their twisted ends,” Buchanan added.