[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
The Democrat Party has finally found a Ukrainian refugee they don’t care anything about.
By now, everyone who has an X account – as opposed to people who depend on network television propaganda for their news – has seen either the stomach-churning video footage or the terrifying still shots of the savage murder of a 23-year-old Ukrainian on a Charlotte, North Carolina light rail line by a career criminal.
The vicious, unprovoked stabbing of Iryna Zarutska actually occurred on August 22, 2025, but the rail car surveillance footage became available only a couple of days ago, igniting righteous fury across the nation – except among Democrat leaders and media elites, who predictably ignored the controversy entirely. I say “predictably” because the barbarian who stabbed the distracted Zarutska three times in the neck with a folding knife, and then left her to die as he walked away, is a 34-year-old black male, DeCarlos Brown Jr., who had a whopping rap sheet of 14 prior arrests.
Fourteen. How many times must a black male be arrested before progressive judges, prosecutors, police chiefs, and mayors are willing to deem him a threat to society? This toxic empathy for criminal elements has become a concern of the most serious order in America today. In this instance – and there are many others – the protection by progressive authorities of a member of their designated victimhood groups ended in one of the most brutal, senseless crimes on video, and everyone who has Iryna Zarutska’s blood on their hands for facilitating Brown’s destructive trail must be held accountable.
What the Left-wing media refuse to address is that the video footage shows Brown subsequently bragging in racial terms about his victim: “I got that white girl.” The Left can’t address this ugly reality because it demolishes multiple Democrat Narratives – that white supremacy is the nation’s greatest domestic threat, violent crime isn’t a serious issue in America, only whites commit hate crimes, the jails should be emptied and police defunded, etc.
And so they can only safely address it in terms of the Right’s response to the crime. Hence the Left-wing media, once they could no longer avoid reporting on the murder, fell back on the tried-and-true diversionary tactic of accusing Republicans of “pouncing,” in which they dismiss an inconvenient truth by blaming conservatives for making a big deal out of nothing. Axios, for example, grudgingly posted about the shocking crime with this headline: “Stabbing video fuels MAGA’s crime message.” Even CNN’s Van Jones, who on rare occasions has the independence of mind to critique his own party, claimed on a CNN panel that there was no evidence that Zarutska was attacked because she was white. “For Charlie Kirk to say, we know he did it because she’s white, when there’s no evidence of that. It’s just pure race mongering, hate mongering. It’s wrong.” Needless to say, for CNN propagandists to accuse anyone of race-mongering is the height of hypocrisy.
The crime and the Left’s willful blindness about it and about the elephant-in-the-room epidemic of black male violence even compelled President Donald Trump to weigh in, making a video address in which he rightly condemned Democrat pro-crime policies like catch-and-release and observed, “For far too long, Americans have been forced to put up with Democrat-run cities that set loose bloodthirsty, savage criminals that prey on innocent people.” He vowed to “Make America Safe Again.”
Imagine for a moment if the races in this incident had been reversed. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it. The instances in which blacks have been perceived to be victims of white “perpetrators” are legion: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and George Floyd, to name just the most well-known, and what was the Left’s response each time? Explosive, nationwide outrage from race-mongering Democrat leaders and media hacks who exploited those deaths to sow chaos and fear, racial resentment and division, rioting and looting, the destruction of inner cities across the country and the extortion of corporate America.
When white male Daniel Penny restrained mentally unstable black male Jordan Neely, another career criminal, who was threatening fellow train passengers, Penny potentially prevented the sort of death Iryna Zarutska suffered. When Neely subsequently died from a combination of factors including synthetic marijuana use, the Left called for Penny’s head, claiming Neely was murdered because he was black.
Every American who isn’t wearing ideological blinders can see that DeCarlos Brown Jr. is an inveterate threat to public safety who should have been removed from the streets long before he accumulated 14 arrests, and that he viciously and intentionally murdered a white woman at least partially, if not entirely, out of racial animosity – by his own confession. Where are the Democrat leaders and media elites calling for his head?
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.