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As public outrage about the brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska spread like wildfire throughout the country, President Donald Trump was greeted by protesters as he sat down to dinner at a restaurant not far from the White House.
“Free DC, free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time!” they shouted. Let’s focus on just the first third of this chant for a moment: Free DC from what?
The answer is the federal crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital. And unlike other cities that may see an influx of ICE agents or National Guardsmen, DC is properly understood as a federal district and, as such, under the direct jurisdiction of the federal government, even if only 6.6 percent of its voters cast their ballots for Trump last year.
Zarutska’s murder has finally gotten national media attention with the now-public full footage of her grisly slaying by Decarlos Brown Jr. Perhaps unsure of how to make a month-old crime in Charlotte seem new again, outlets have covered it as a “Republicans pounce” or MAGA nightmare-fuel story.
But there’s a pretty good argument that it is progressives and liberal-dominated media that is shoehorning this particular tragedy and crime in general into the paradigm of race and Trump. The disparity in the coverage of this stabbing and Daniel Penny is not noteworthy because Penny is white and Brown is black. It is that Penny was vilified for attempting to prevent something like what happened to Zarutska while Brown stabbed this poor young Ukrainian woman to death. The context in which Penny and Brown ended up taking a human life was starkly different for reasons other than the “racial dynamics.” The footage out of North Carolina makes it plain that she could have used a Daniel Penny.
To paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., to say that Penny and Brown were engaged “in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.”
To look at the images of this tiny young woman brutalized by a career criminal in front of seemingly indifferent onlookers and think of how this might affect Donald Trump’s political agenda is sick, whether you are a MAGA influencer or a reporter attempting to do anti-MAGA counterprogramming.
There is a desire for public order and the protection of the innocent from violent people, whether they be evil or deranged, that cannot be explained away as racism or fealty to Trump. The left has talked itself into having lower standards for what is acceptable in American urban life than millions of Americans who will probably never venture near a city subway system.
The question is whether Democratic elected officials are going to continue to follow their left flank down this path to madness. The people most affected by high crime and a decreased quality of life in the country’s major cities are Democratic voters. Democrats are supposed to be the champions of public transportation.
Yes, there are racists who will take up this cause on the internet, and Democrats must confront the backlash against their policies that events like Zarutska’s murder will trigger (in many cases, wholly justified backlash). But the initial reaction of Democrats like the mayor of Charlotte (since revised) was awfully milquetoast about the role of government force in the face of violence for a party that not long ago reviled “thoughts and prayer” following a tragedy.
The belief that this is all a figment of MAGA imagination will doom the Democratic Party as surely as the notion that “law and order” had no meaning independent of an anti-civil rights backlash set the Democrats back decades. There are badder things than an Orange Man.
These horrific crimes and the permissive attitudes that enable them are the evils from which DC, Chicago, New York City, and Charlotte must truly be freed. Let the chants—and the work—begin.