The Murder of Iryna Zarutska and the Pathological Race Ideology of the American Progressive Establishment

I have finally returned to blogging. In fact, I returned on Tuesday, with the firm intention of writing about Friedrich Merz’s spiralling political problems and the collapse of the French government, but I can’t bring myself to write about those things right now. I have to get something else out of my system first, and this something else is about the murder of that young woman in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the lies the media tell about black crime in the United States. I’m sorry if this post pisses people off, but these are true things that I have to say and I’m going to say them.

As everyone knows, Iryna Zarutska fled the war in Ukraine with much of her immediate family, entering the United States in August 2022. Exactly three years later, on August 22nd 2025, Zarutska was riding the train home from her job at a pizzeria when a 34 year-old black man with an extensive criminal history and at least 14 prior arrests named Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr. slashed her neck with a knife.

Zarutska died within seconds, and security footage captured the murder.

That video emerged last Friday and it has inspired a wave of outrage about the dubious, liberal approach to criminal justice that prevails in many US cities. Most of this outrage has been expressed on social media. The American establishment press first tried to ignore this story. It suppressed it so thoroughly that, as of Monday anyway, the average German on a totally different continent was probably better informed about this murder.

Of course, blunt suppression becomes self-defeating before too long. Late on Monday, everybody’s favourite paper of record, the New York Times, finally relented, deigning to inform its readers not that a crazy violent black man had killed a young Ukrainian refugee in Charlotte, but that “a gruesome murder in North Carolina [has] ignite[d] a firestorm on the Right”.

The article is typical of establishment coverage, which is to say that it is extremely bad. Beyond the opening paragraphs, its authors hardly mention Zarutska at all. They are far more interested in the “troubled history” of her killer, assuring us that Brown is “mentally ill”, that according to his mother he has schizophrenia, and that he was homeless. The excuses laced throughout all of this are so loud it is hard to call them implicit.

Then we get to the statistical deceptions. The New York Times wants you to believe that crime isn’t a problem in Charlotte specifically or in the United States more generally, because it is in decline:

In Charlotte, overall crime was down by 8% 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%. …

Today, Mr. Trump’s critics fear that he will use the death of Ms Zarutska to justify sending federal troops into American cities, as he has already done in Washington, despite statistics showing a downturn in violent crime nationwide.

You can smell the lie an ocean way. In truth, however the statistics might be trending at the moment, the United States has wildly high crime numbers compared to many other Western nations. And the Charlotte homicide rate hit a three-year high in 2024, surpassed in recent history only by the extremely violent Summer of Floyd in 2020. In 2025, city homicides have so far slipped back towards the mean, but they’re still hovering between nine and 12 per 100,000 residents. For comparison, that is at least 11 times higher than the German homicide rate. These are eye-watering numbers.

And as if all of that weren’t enough, our eminently progressive authors towards the end of their piece just have to squeeze in a gratuitous reference to a “white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, NC, in 1898, in which at least 60 black men were killed”. The ugly if plausibly deniable subtext is that it’s white people’s fault Zarutska got stabbed on the train. If only all that 19th-century racism hadn’t happened, the poor girl might still be alive.

Coverage like this is not just bad; it is openly deranged, particularly given the histrionic tendencies we invariably see whenever the races are reversed. In 2020, the New York Times and the rest of the Anglophone establishment lost their collective minds over the death of an unarmed man (allegedly!) at the hands of the police – something that happens about two dozen times a year in a country of 340 million people. Approximately the same number of Americans are killed every year in freak air rifle accidents. Zartuska’s murder is far more frequent occurrence, and the press hopes only to bury it.

What we are seeing here is an ideological and also a psychological reaction to a very dark truth at the heart of American society. This truth is that the American black population commits violent crimes at rates that are so high, many Ukrainian refugees would be safer staying home than fleeing to certain US cities.

Consider this: aside from Mariupol, the war in Ukraine has directly caused around 11 civilian deaths per 100,000 people every year since the Russian invasion in 2022. That is less than the intentional homicide rate of the city where Zarutska was murdered in August. (The total intentional homicide rate in Ukraine right now – war deaths plus civilian homicides – is hard to work out, because statistics are no longer being published since the invasion. Prior to February 2022, Ukraine had an intention homicide rate of nearly four per 100,000. Since the war, various indirect indications suggest it has plummeted dramatically. This is what we would expect, given that much of the young male population has been shipped off to fight, and that many cities are now under an enhanced security regime. It is very likely that Ukraine is more or less equivalent to Charlotte overall in terms of intentional homicide.)

And Charlotte is far from the most dangerous place our young Ukrainian could have fled to. Detroit (32 per 100,000), Baltimore (35 per 100,000), San Juan (37 per 100,000), Memphis (48 per 100,000) and New Orleans (54 per 100,000) are all vastly worse. To put it as bluntly as possible – and with as little racial sensitivity as I dare – the US black population is largely responsible for imposing on many American cities a civilian homicide rate equivalent to or far exceeding that seen in a modern country fighting a war on its own territory.

This fact has made the progressive American political establishment crazy, and it has developed an entire ideological system to avoid confronting this terrible, ruthless reality. Establishment types suppress stories of black violence and desperately promote quite rare and exceptional cases of white-on-black crime to invert the hated truths before them. When they are forced to acknowledge inconvenient stories like Zarutska’s murder, they insist that these are also the fault of white Americans because of things that happened generations ago and for which no living person bears any responsibility. All of this vile excuse-peddling, these blind rehearsals of anti-racist ideological nostrums, and these unceasing, desperate searches for responsible parties and factors beyond the obvious ones – all these are psychological reactions arising from cognitive dissonance, finally sublimated into a quite pathological ideology.

This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.