The Left’s response to the brutal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on the Charlotte Light Rail train on August 22 is destined to become Republican ad gold in next year’s midterms. Called out by the Right for their initial silence on one of the most shocking murders in recent memory, the legacy media’s delayed coverage — and the tone deaf statements from local politicians — may ultimately prove more damaging than if they had said nothing at all.
Because the crime was captured so vividly by the train’s surveillance camera, there was no way to spin it. The footage showed Decarlos Brown Jr. — a large black man with a lengthy rap sheet — pulling a knife from his pocket and, without provocation, savagely stabbing his unsuspecting victim multiple times before walking away, blood dripping onto the floor as he muttered, “I got that white girl.”
Axios was among the first liberal outlets to acknowledge the story. But instead of confronting the horror, they twisted it into yet another ‘Republicans pounce’ narrative. Their headline read: “Grisly Charlotte stabbing video fuels MAGA’s crime message.”
The article opens: “MAGA influencers are drawing repeated attention to violent attacks to elevate the issue of urban crime — and accuse mainstream media of under-covering shocking cases.” Before even acknowledging the tragic — and preventable — death of a 23-year-old woman, Axios trains its fire on those “opportunistic” Republicans. That framing might please its regular readers, but the author’s barely concealed contempt gives the game away to everyone else.
Joel Berry, managing editor of the Babylon Bee, sees the Axios article and similar ones from the outlets that followed their lead as gifts to MAGA. “They [the Democrats] can’t help themselves,” he wrote. “They’re just giving MAGA the easiest, most winning political issue without a fight. They’re letting MAGA become the official party of ‘not getting stabbed on a bus by a psychopath.’ They love their evil criminals and murderers that much.”
Berry is right.
Conservative podcaster Stephen L. Miller had the same reaction to a Politico piece headlined, “Ukrainian refugee killed in North Carolina gets dragged into political messaging war.” The article framed Zarutska’s murder as a weapon for Donald Trump and his MAGA allies to attack Democrats as soft on crime.
Miller wrote, “They can’t help Themselves. It’s engrained in who they are. They will never change.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter was extremely upset over how big the Iryna Zarutska story had become because most murders don’t become national news.
According to Stelter, this story garnered attention because of the release of “that gruesome video” and the “energy of pro-Trump activists.”
“It is Trump-aligned influencers who are posting up a storm about this on social media.” He said people like Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk “succeeded in making this senseless death a symbol of big-city crime.”
Stelter noted that “some of the comments around this story are baldly racist, stoking fear of African Americans because this man attacked a white woman. The open racism on sites like X today, it’s eye-popping.”
In fact, many murders do become national news — especially when the victim is black. The death of Michael Brown in 2014 triggered riots, dominated the headlines for months, and arguably reshaped race relations in America. Brown’s death turned him into a martyr.
The 2023 death of Jordan Neely — a mentally ill homeless man who was threatening riders on a New York City subway car before passenger Daniel Penny subdued him in a chokehold — remained a national story for more than a year.
The reason these stories remained prominent is that they fit the Left’s narrative — that America is a systemically racist country.
But the Left’s most useful, timely, and consequential hero was George Floyd, a drug-addicted career criminal who died in May 2020 after then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. The fact that Floyd was black and Chauvin was white provided the New York Times with the opportunity it had been waiting for since the previous summer.
During an August 2019 staff meeting, then-Editor-in-Chief Dean Baquet shared management’s plan to make “race” a top issue in the 2020 election. He told staff that the New York Times intended to “shape” political discourse in America by portraying then-President Donald Trump as a racist and by reshaping American history with slavery at the center of the narrative. This marked the introduction of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project.
Although the New York Times moved forward with the 1619 Project immediately, advancing race as a primary matter proved more challenging. But Floyd’s death and the race-fueled riots that followed thrust systemic racism to the forefront of debate.
Just as Baquet anticipated, it took about a nanosecond for the Democratic Party, the rest of the legacy media, and Big Tech to follow the New York Times‘s lead. And so, in the midst of a pandemic and a deep recession, America’s “systemic racism” became the most pressing matter of the day. Baquet couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome.
It was the right crime at the right time. The truth is that liberals didn’t care one whit about the life of George Floyd; it’s just that his death fit their narrative so well.
After a decade of hoaxes, the public has caught on to the Left’s game. Downplaying the barbaric murder of a young woman at the hands of a predator who never should have been released from jail, and trying to turn it into a “Republicans pounce” story is not a good look.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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