[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
The Lynx Blue Line light rail system in Charlotte, North Carolina, where a career criminal in dreadlocks killed Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who was returning home from her job at a pizzeria, should be renamed “The Culmination of Left-Wing Ideology” Line.
Zarutska had her throat slashed by a man who should have been off the streets but was released at least 14 times for previous crimes by DEI judges who saw the black offender DeCarlos Brown as a victim of systemic racism.
These judges no doubt saw the perpetrator as someone who had inherited a legacy of persecution and disadvantage. Only reparations — the leftist dream under a Kamala presidency — could have resolved this injustice and deterred him from murdering the girl on the train whose blondeness exemplified society’s ultimate beauty standard.
When video of the attack was released, we saw her clutch her throat and cover her face as she reeled in shock and disbelief. She then became every mother’s young daughter, every brother’s younger sister, and every young man’s terrified wife.
Just as terrifying was the way the released criminal walked away, murmuring, “I got that white girl.”
But more terror was to follow when the surrounding passengers, all black, looked on with what appeared to be apathy. Nobody offered to help; nobody came to her aid until it was too late. Classify it as a new low for humanity.
This was really a “gateway” tragedy pointing to the unleashing of another demonic force that took the life of Charlie Kirk.
Zarutska was murdered on August 22; Kirk was assassinated on September 10. The two events will always be framed together as heralding a changed world, a world that today somehow feels different.
Let’s consider Charlotte and the conditions in that city that nurtured a man like DeCarlos Brown to attack and kill a white girl.
In that case a leftist judge, Teresa Stokes — who doesn’t have a law degree, by the way — nominated by a clerk in North Carolina’s Superior Court, Alyssa Gary, a DEI consultant and racial equity organizer in favor of reparations, allowed Brown out on a no-cash bail bond despite his violent record.
Liberal defenders of Stokes’ decision, like attorney Bradley P. Moss quoted in Newsweek, said that magistrates cannot “simply hold someone in pretrial detention for the fun of it.”
Yet Stokes was certainly an enabler, as Elon Musk concluded on X: “Let’s change the law. Name and shame the DAs and judges who enable murder, rape and robbery. But especially shame those who funded the campaigns of the DAs and judges. That will make the biggest difference.”
Outrageous statements from the news media, like CNN’s Van Jones who said, “Hurt people hurt people” when referring to DeCarlos Brown, pretty much sums up the left’s reasoning when it comes to political violence. (Charlie Kirk was killed by a leftist who was “hurt” by Kirk’s words defending traditional values and Christianity.)
DeCarlos Brown’s Charlotte is a city where 42% of the vote is Democrat, and 17% Republican. The mayor of Charlotte, Mayor Vi Lyles, is black, and presumably to some degree, woke. She won the Democrat primary with more than 70% of the vote and is seeking her 5th term as mayor. Clearly she has the city in her pocket.
Several years ago McClatchy Media published a piece announcing that so many black people were moving to Charlotte that the city was becoming known as “Black Mecca,” with blacks accounting for 35.2% of the population. This news was announced in a celebratory way with no mention of how Charlotte officials, keen on puffed-up public relations, were sweeping police stats under the rug when they insisted that crime in the city had declined.
The Associated Press contradicted Charlotte officials when it reported that Charlotte had 105 homicides in 2024 compared to 88 in 2023, and that the rate of vehicle thefts per 100,000 people more than doubled there from 2020 through 2024.
Other stats proved even more troubling.
Blue City Crime had the city’s total crime rate at 77% higher than the national average, “with violent crime about 746 per 100,000 residents, and property crime roughly 73% above average.” Another news outlet reported that “residents face a 1-in-26 chance of becoming a victim of a property crime. “
After the killing of Charlie Kirk, liberal bot Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Guardian: “In their humane responses to the killing of Charlie Kirk, Democrats are observing the old norms. Things are different now: anger and division rule.”
Freedland blamed President Trump for pinpointing the assassination of Kirk on “the radical left,” a charge that Freeland says only continues to divide the nation while citing how presidents in the past, when commenting on political violence, stressed calls for unity while avoiding specific blame.
The Left doesn’t want unity, and it wouldn’t respond to calls of unity anyway. The Left only wants the suppression of thought and opinions they don’t agree with and have made it plain in order to get their way they will resort to murder and violence.
Freedland loses all credibility when he states:
It’s become poor taste to point out Kirk’s actual views. It’s as if the belief that no one should be killed for their opinions requires you to withhold any judgment of those opinions. But Kirk did not hold back. He was happy to tell people that he would be nervous getting on a plane flown by a Black pilot, and to talk of “prowling Blacks”; to tell Taylor Swift to “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband … You’re not in charge”; to deny the truth of the 2020 election…
Like many liberals, Freedland takes Kirk’s statement about black pilots out of context, conveniently forgetting that Kirk prefaced his remarks by saying he had no trouble about black pilots prior to DEI but since DEI placed racial identity over job qualifications, then obviously unqualified black pilots were being hired just because of their skin color.
As for “prowling blacks,” Kirk was referring to people with criminal records like Brown who are permitted to roam free in cities because liberal judges gave them a pass (cashless bail, minimal sentences) because they saw them as victims of lifelong “systemic racism.”
Before his assassination, Kirk congratulated Swift and her fiance on their engagement and made his wishes known that they should be happy and have lots of children. Freedland’s swipe at the traditional Christian view that wives be submissive to their husbands — a view that millions hold — exposes his anti-Christian prejudice, although you can be sure he’d bite his tongue when it came to criticizing Islam for similar beliefs.
Reaction to both deaths did a lot to reveal the rot in the soulless Left.
At Kirk’s death, thousands of leftists in a variety of professions celebrated the fact that he was killed in videos and social media posts. Some were fired or put on leave when their posts were exposed, but most presumably escaped detection and punishment.
Today, there are “I love Tyler” t-shirts selling on Amazon, just as GoFundMe fundraisers were set up for the murderer of Iryna Zarutska (“Hurt people hurt people”).
GoFundMe, thankfully, removed the fundraisers, citing its policy against raising money for the legal defense of anyone formally charged with an alleged violent crime. That there were even donors whose contributions had to be refunded is truly astonishing and sad.
The two killings have indeed changed the world. As so many have said, “It feels different now. Something has changed.”
That change, as Peter K. Sterling wrote on X, has to do with rousing the ire of “middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens” who are now politically active.
“After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society….These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys (the Left) for everything that just happened.”