Five years ago, the murder of Iryna Zarutska on board a Charlotte light rail train would have been swept under the rug with Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell," and that would have been that — just another narrative-busting story the public had no right to know.
Twenty-three-year-old Zarutska's killer — and please excuse me for forgetting to use "alleged" after watching the video — was 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr., a fare-jumper with plenty of time to kill after being caught and released by local authorities yet again.
Brown served a five-year sentence for a 2014 armed robbery, ending in 2020. Within five months of his release, he was arrested again for assaulting his sister at her Charlotte home. "Brown got into trouble again after making false emergency calls to 911," NDTV reported, "claiming that a 'man-made material' was controlling his body," but officers determined that Brown had a "medical issue" and that there was nothing else they could do.
Brown required some kind of incarceration — whether criminal or psychiatric — but progressivism's "toxic empathy" kept him on the streets.
Yet Judge Teresa Stokes released him yet again earlier this year, "based solely on his written promise to appear in court at a later date."
No bail, just a note from an insane homeless man with a long record.
Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles seems more concerned with her political image than justice.
Images...
"The still image of the moment the madman's knife begins its descent is the most damning optic I've seen in years," PJ Media's own Athena Thorne wrote (in a don't-miss piece) yesterday, "and it will now become the face of the modern Democrat party."
Give the progressives on the left some credit because they understand the stakes — they have the brooms, and they're furiously sweeping. But Zarutska's story will not die.
"Why are they so obsessed with something that actually happened?" sobbed the journos https://t.co/z4tcUJyhBI
— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) September 8, 2025
For years, I joked — a bitter half-joke — that Ezra Klein's Journolist never died; it just moved to a Slack channel. You remember the JournoList? It was a listserv for hundreds of progressive journalists and writers, a place that both determined and enforced mainstream media groupthink before imposing it on a nation that didn't know any better.
Once revealed, JournoList officially disbanded, but never went away — the hive mind endured, its enforcement mechanism moving to social media. But it seems that, thanks in large part to two figures so unlikely as to strain credulity, those days are over.
We have a 79-year-old president better attuned to social media than men half his age... would you believe, three-quarters?
Donald Trump did, after all, tweet his way into the White House almost a decade ago, and the company's new(ish) owner, Elon Musk — himself a credulity-straining figure — is one of Trump's most powerful allies. Yes, even if their relationship is one of those on-again/off-again things.
Trump read the story, watched the video — thanks to Musk's X platform, which stands over the JournoList's corpse with a smoking gun — and now there will be no ignoring it.
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant," we're told. How does the progressive project in cities like Charlotte or states like Illinois survive public scrutiny?
How does a mayor like Lyles or a judge like Stokes continue to serve?
Iryna Zarutska paid the price for the rest of us to have a chance to find out.
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