A young woman was brutally murdered on public transportation in a blue city, and the corporate media thinks that the only story worth reporting is that some Americans are angry about it.
On Thursday, a convicted felon named Decarlos Brown Jr. was arrested in Charlotte, North Carolina on the charge of killing 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a light rail train August 22. Shortly after Brown’s arrest, the Charlotte Area Transit System released a video of the killing. The suspect appeared to stab the woman unprovoked as she sat in her seat.
The story has exploded on social media and coincides with President Donald Trump’s message that crime in America’s big cities is both unacceptably high and is something that can be alleviated if authorities have the will to do so.
Trump weighed in Monday on Truth Social, saying that Democrats in North Carolina “refuse to put people in jail” and that the media isn’t covering it enough.
The suspect in the Charlotte case has a long rap sheet of serious crimes. According to court documents reviewed by the New York Post, Brown “has more than a dozen convictions dating back to 2014.” The crimes Brown’s been convicted of include felony larceny, robbery with a dangerous weapon, and assault. He had also been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Whether evil, deranged or both, it’s outrageous that Brown was out on the streets and not in either prison or some kind of institution.
The brutal incident caught on tape was what many fear and frequently encounter when they ride public transportation. Is the homeless man spazzing out and screaming on the subway train “harmless,” or is he going to suddenly do violence to fellow passengers? Given the crackdown on crime successfully taking place in the District of Columbia after Trump called out the National Guard, the Charlotte story seems very much worth bringing attention to.
If you are active on social media, you’ve probably been following or have heard about Zarutska’s murder. For those who get their news from legacy media, they’ve likely heard nothing about it.
And when one national outlet finally picked up the story it went exactly as you would expect.
Instead of focusing on the terrible and enraging crime that took place, it became one of their “conservatives pounce” spin jobs.
Axios put up a post on X, saying, “The gruesome video of the fatal knife attack on Iryna Zarutska on a light-rail car in Charlotte is drawing attention from MAGA influencers seeking to elevate the issue of violent urban crime—and accuse mainstream media of under-covering shocking cases.”
A woman was brutally murdered in the most heinous way and the first thing they mention is how annoying it is for them to be talking about the “MAGA” issue of stopping violent crime.
The story, written by Axios White House reporter Marc Caputo, is framed around the idea that the Charlotte murder shouldn’t be a story at all.
In a section called the “big picture,” Axios reported that “the rising number of surveillance cameras in public spaces, including on Charlotte’s light rail, has become a big accelerant in these cases.”
Axios further reported that videos are now “easily shared or leaked, and can instantly pollinate across social media—a visual counterpoint to statistics showing crime decreases.”
Oh, those pesky cameras catching horrible crimes on camera that are definitely not a problem that you should ever think about.
What I’d like to know is if the media is so worried about ubiquitous cameras putting a spotlight on what they insinuate is an outlier, why did the George Floyd case receive almost nonstop media attention? After all, police killings are extremely rare. Or how about the Daniel Penny case in the New York City subway, where a young Marine restrained a man acting erratically and menacingly and unintentionally killed him. That also got massive national media attention.
In both cases, the media emphasized that it was a black victim and a white perpetrator.
The answer to this double standard, of course, is that they wanted to spark a “national debate” about “systemic racism.” So, their coverage was wall to wall.
Now that there’s a murder case that goes against their narrative on crime, they want nothing more than to ignore it, or grumble that alternative media is strong enough to break into a “national conversation” without their blessing.
They want to be the gatekeepers of what counts as “newsworthy”; it annoys them to no end that X users, alternative media, and Trump have the ability to sidestep their filters.
Americans have a good reason to be concerned about violent crime in this country, most of which is carried out by a small number of people who should have never been in a position to carry it out. They can bleat on and on about crime going down, but these were the same outlets that desperately tried to convince us that crime was never going up.
The spin isn’t working any more.