Iryna: The inconvenient martyr

Much has been written about the way the mainstream media treated - or deliberately concealed - the murder of Iryna Zarutska. The atrocious end of the young girl at the hands of a criminal, arrested a thousand times over, released back on the streets time after time to continue to exercise his existence, had almost no media coverage until it came to the knowledge of Elon Musk, who gave it worldwide visibility.

President Trump, several members of his administration, and many people on social networks began to wonder why this death did not have the same coverage or media/political/activist call for performative outrage as that of George Floyd.

Floyd, a felon arrested in a suspicious situation, became the global symbol of woke struggle, generated massive demonstrations perfectly coordinated worldwide, leveraged projects to defunding the police, obtained monuments, the world knelt, weeping for him, and his death unleashed riots of murder, violence, arson and vandalism. Something similar happened with the death of another criminal, Jordan Neely, when an exemplary citizen like Daniel Penny tried to stop him from committing another fatal crime. Why had the death of two long-time criminals raised so much progressive empathy and the case of Iryna Zarutska had not?

The contrast is striking; Iryna was a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who had found refuge in Charlotte, North Carolina, fleeing the war in her country, scraping by with a shoddy job and no privileges. She had never committed a crime, nor was she in a suspicious situation, disobeying the police or causing insecurity to the community like Floyd or Neely. She was sitting alone on the subway, checking her phone, while behind her a man, Decarlos Brown, much older in age and build, with a long criminal record, attacked her from behind and plunged a knife into her neck. How did the horrible death of this little girl not cause outrage among activists and journalists?

Without social media, this story would not have even been made known and it turned out that then the news, beyond the brutal crime, is that it was not news. The traditional media and organized wokism not only passed by, but made an effort to hide the fact. Paradoxically, Iryna's death, for this reason, has become the news that exposes the moral rottenness of the woke agenda.

Every detail of the murder contradicts the Woke worldview and the narrative of oppressors and oppressed. It was logical that they wanted to cover it up, to report the case was to feel that one was functional to the right. Zarutska did not trigger progressive protective instincts because intersectionality played a dirty trick. She was a poor helpless woman, yes. But her attacker had more hierarchy in the system of "oppressed DEI" (DIVERSITY-EQUALITY-INCLUSION) and there was no obvious way to make her murder intelligible within the racial narrative in a way that favors leftist narratives.

The silence is neither accidental nor the product of an isolated editorial decision. It is the inevitable result of the convergence of two ideological currents that have colonized progressive media thought: the Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the anti-psychiatry movement turned woke-ism. These two narratives, operating simultaneously, create zones of silence where certain crimes simply cannot exist in public discourse without challenging the theoretical underpinnings of contemporary progressivism.

But to understand how these ideological filters operate, it is necessary to examine each narrative separately and then observe how they converge to create the impossibility of the Zarutska case.

CRT, which has become dogma in universities, media and corporations, installed the idea that all conflict must be read in a racial key, even when there are much more relevant social, cultural or economic variables. This single lens conditions the media and political narrative to the point of absurdity. The problem is that racialization operates as a Pavlovian, automatic reflex that reduces any discussion to a binary game of oppressors and oppressed. In this insane binary in which they are trapped, Decarlos Brown could not be the victimizer.

Claiming racialized disparity was the claim that drove the Black Lives Matter protests and subsequent calls to "defund the police." Under this scheme, George Floyd's death was a perfect fit for constructing a narrative of systemic oppression. The mass coverage, the memorials, the global protests, all made sense within the theoretical framework that sees in every interracial interaction the reproduction of historical structures of domination. The murder of Iryna Zarutska presents the opposite problem: this role reversal makes it impossible to make the case without contradicting its basic foundations.

TCR has taught progressive media that reporting crimes where black perpetrators attack white victims contributes to racist stereotypes and reinforces structures of oppression. Therefore, silence is not censorship, but a form of social responsibility. Racialization has become a filter that determines not only how a story is told, but whether it is told.

But using racialization is as superfluous in the Floyd or Neely case as it is in the Iryna case. The issue goes deeper, and while it is tempting to replicate that same framework of analysis in reverse, it would be a mistake: mimicking the vices of the left only entrenches the ideological poison that poisons the public conversation.

And here we come to the deeper plot underlying these three cases: the woke narrative regarding mental health, which has its roots in the anti-psychiatric movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, influenced by figures such as Michel Foucault and his critique of institutions of social control, and Thomas Szasz with his questioning of the very concept of mental illness.

This philosophical current, which theoretically sought to denounce abuses in psychiatric institutions, evolved into a more radical position: mass deinstitutionalization on the premise that psychiatric hospitals were inherently oppressive and that "madness" was simply a social construct to marginalize those who were different. Progressive politicians adopted this rhetoric, turning the release of psychiatric patients into a social justice cause, promising community support networks that never materialized. The result has been a global urban crisis where individuals with severe mental illness are left abandoned on the streets, using illegal drugs and committing acts of violence like the one that took the life of Iryna Zarutska.

The woke ideology has transformed this systemic failure into a taboo: criticizing deinstitutionalization policies or suggesting that some individuals require involuntary treatment is considered stigmatization, while the real victims of this ideological neglect pile up in morgues. This theoretical current sees "madness" as a form of resistance to the oppressive social order and the "mad" as victims of the system rather than potentially dangerous individuals.

Decarlos Brown represents exactly the kind of individual that anti-psychiatric theory has made untouchable for critique. In the Woke universe, Brown is not a dangerous criminal, but a victim of the system stigmatized by a racist and classist society. This narrative makes it impossible to hold the individual accountable for his actions, because to do so would be to "criminalize mental illness" and reproduce "racial stereotypes."

The Democrat-controlled judicial system had given Brown lenient treatment under precisely this logic. The Mayor of Charlotte, Vi Lyles, received numerous criticisms for her initial response to the attack, but her reaction was one of perfect ideological consistency. In her statement, she didn't even mention Iryna, she simply didn't care. She described her death as a mental health related situation and spent most of her statement expressing empathy for the criminal, in keeping with the Democratic view that criminals are the real victims.

This response masterfully illustrates how both woke narratives converge. From the racial perspective, mentioning that a white woman was killed by a black man reinforces "racist narratives." From the anti-psychiatric perspective, criminalizing Brown would be "stigmatizing mental illness." The only "correct" response according to both theoretical frameworks, is to invisibilize the victim and victimize the victimizer. Lyles prioritized ideology over facts; in neither case is the problem the criminal or his individual choices.

The case presents all the elements that the confluence of these theories has rendered unpublishable. It is the perfect narrative nightmare for a media system that has subordinated the truth. One wonders what the selection mechanisms are, and anyone can draw their own conclusions about how and with what ingredients the essence of "news" is elaborated. The media have shown their rottenness not only in how news is reported, but also in whether it is reported.

There is no debate, no explanation, no acknowledgement that there is even an editorial decision. This is more than bias: it is narrative engineering. The progressive media are not reporting reality; they are constructing an alternative reality where only stories that confirm their ideological presuppositions exist. It is the triumph of theory over facts, of dogma over evidence.

The news operates as a system of overlapping filters: the first filters by race, the second by mental health. When a case fails both filters, it simply disappears from mainstream media discourse.

It is a media system that has given up journalism to become propaganda. Iryna's tragedy is not only her brutal death, but her systematic invisibilization by an establishment that prefers to protect its theories rather than honor its victims. In the woke universe, some lives matter more than others, and some deaths simply cannot be counted.

The case of Iryna Zarutska is the epitaph of the progressive media paradigm, which has created an inverted ecosystem of oppression where real victims are sacrificed for self-perceived and convenient victims. The progressive media paradigm where compassion is selective.

Iryna, the inconvenient martyr, is the most eloquent symbol of its moral failure.