They couldn’t suffocate it with a pillow, and now they’re infuriated that they’re being forced to cover a story that’s reinforced everything conservatives and normal voters have said about rising crime. There’s a reason there’s no backlash against the National Guard being deployed in Washington, D.C.—those benefiting from the increased law enforcement presence support it. Don Lemon found out Maryland residents want troops in Baltimore. Chicago residents want them patrolling their streets.
The brutal murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, 23, by DeCarlos Brown Jr., 34, was exceptionally vicious. Brown stabbed Zarutska three times on public transit in Charlotte on August 22. He’s now facing federal charges, which carry the possibility of being sentenced to death if convicted. Brown is a career criminal with at least a dozen prior arrests before this horrific murder. So, how does the media cover it? If they’re not blaming surveillance cameras for capturing acts of criminality, they’re claiming this story feeds and breeds…narratives that are totally true about urban crime. The New York Times’ headline for their story on this crime is beyond atrocious: A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right.
Actually, everyone is appalled by the crime. Also, they went there, folks, dropping in some cockamamie nonsense about how black crime was exaggerated in the Jim Crow era, some of which led to white supremacist riots. You cannot make this up—it’s on video, you clowns:
White woman is butchered on a train in the year 2025 by a 14x arrested animal.
— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) September 9, 2025
New York Times: “Exaggerated stories about black criminality” led to a “White supremacist uprising” in North Carolina 130 years ago!
You don’t hate the media enough. pic.twitter.com/BxMeDpCdix
The video, captured by a security camera in Charlotte, N.C., shows a 23-year-old woman named Iryna Zarutska sitting on a light-rail train one night in late August, dressed in the uniform of the pizza parlor where she worked.
She is looking at her phone when suddenly, a man sitting behind her stands up, gripping a knife in his raised right hand. Moments later, the police say, he stabbed and killed Ms. Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, in what appeared to be a random and unprovoked attack.
The police arrested Decarlos Brown Jr. soon after and charged him with first-degree murder. But the brutal killing did not capture widespread attention until the security footage was released on Friday, at which point it became an accelerant for conservative arguments about crime, race and the perceived failings of big-city justice systems and mainstream news outlets in the Trump era.
The outrage over the Charlotte killing is a part of a pattern in which President Trump and his allies highlight horrific crimes to bolster their case that the country is plagued by “American carnage,” as Mr. Trump put it in his first inaugural address, despite statistics that show crime is dropping. In Charlotte, overall crime was down by 8 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, according to the police, while violent crime was down by 25 percent.
[…]
The idea that mainstream news outlets downplay crimes committed by Black people has become more of a talking point in some conservative circles in recent years. The critique has emerged even as liberal critics of the news media have argued that crime coverage by American news outlets is distorted by anti-Black bias.
In North Carolina, as in other Southern states, newspapers in the Jim Crow era often egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality. Among other things, such stories served as a precursor to a white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, in which at least 60 Black men were killed.
No, you people absolutely bury these stories, or any that make Democrats look bad. The Minneapolis school shooter was an anti-Trump transgender who went haywire. What happened there? That story got deep-sixed within days. We’re right. It’s okay to huff and puff and be wrong—the legacy media is wrong about everything. But this article, which is loaded with liberal talking points and messaging bits, once again makes the case for why no one listens to these people anymore.
