The corporate media have finally been shamed into covering the brutal stabbing of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zaruska by a mentally ill black man in Charlotte, and predictably, they’ve turned it into a “Republicans pounce!” story. In between gasps of horror that the Trump administration has “seized on” the story, print outlets and TV talking heads have been hard at work identifying the real culprit of the gruesome murder: insufficient public health funding.

First, let’s address this idiotic comment by CNN’s Abby Phillip on Monday: “People are murdered every single day… but this particular one, I’m trying to understand why this has become such a flashpoint on the right.” 

This story matters because it exists at an intersection between two major political topics that have long dominated policy discourse in the America. Iryna Zaruska, a Ukrainian refugee, came to this country seeking safety from the death and destruction wrought by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — only to be done in by a violent felon who was released onto America’s streets by a social justice ideologue.

Zaruska’s killer, Decarlos Brown, was released onto the streets after a January, 2025 incident with police, despite his extensive criminal record and diagnosed mental illness. The question being asked is, why was he not already behind bars? 

Of course, that question is rather inconvenient for a corporate media who are currently hard at work trying to label the Trump administration’s crime crackdown as unnecessary and authoritarian. So here’s how they’ve chosen to cover the incident instead: