America is on fire now over a shocking murder on a tram in Charlotte, North Carolina. A young Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, took a seat on the tram in front of a large, hooded black man, Decarlos Brown. After a few moments, Brown took a knife from his pocket, leapt up, and slashed helpless Zarutska in the neck. Brown, a schizophrenic with 14 criminal convictions on his record, staggered off muttering, “I got the white girl.”
Zarutska bled to death on the floor of the train, in full view of others, who did nothing to help her. At last someone—a black man, note well—ran to her aid and tried to stanch the bleeding, but it was too late. She was pronounced dead by emergency personnel when they arrived.
The murder happened in August, but the tram security footage was only recently released. The delay was caused because the Charlotte city council, which is majority black, tried to suppress it. No wonder: the image of a large, monstrous black man slashing the throat of a small, birdlike white woman is the stuff of urban nightmares. And it goes against the preferred narrative of America’s liberal media and urban governing class, which expects everyone to pretend that they didn’t see what they actually saw, lest they draw unwanted conclusions about race and crime in America.
Not every young black male in the United States is a violent criminal, but a wildly disproportionate number of violent black criminals are young black males. Look at this chart, based on U.S. Government (Federal Bureau of Investigation) statistics:
In fact, black females ages 15 to 64 have a higher murder rate per 100,000 people than white males. There is something undeniably violent about the culture of black Americans.
We are not supposed to notice that. According to the Official Narrative, blacks are uniquely demonized by white-dominated American society. When George Floyd, a petty thief and fentanyl addict, died in a police chokehold in 2020, the media and every other institution interpreted it as a condensed symbol of the black experience in America at the hands of the police. American society went berserk. Cities burned. Institutions—academic, corporate, and the rest—adopted openly racist programs to privilege blacks and disadvantage whites. This was called “racial justice.”
Even in Europe, leftists got in on the performative progressivism. In Budapest, the left-wing mayor of one district commissioned a statue marking the Floyd killing. When a journalist asked her what the point was, as Budapest has few if any blacks, she responded that everyone has a responsibility to fight racism.
Crime, unsurprisingly, shot up in America, as police were discouraged from engaging blacks. It should be pointed out for European readers that the most victims of black criminals are other blacks. But activists in the black community, and their liberal allies, prefer to focus on the handful of police shootings of black men.
Polls show that Americans have a wildly exaggerated view of the numbers of blacks killed by police. For example, a 2020 YouGov poll found the average American believed that between 1,000 and 5,000 unarmed black men were killed each year by cops. The real number is between 25 and 40.
In 2023, a crazed black man on the New York subway began threatening to kill passengers. A former soldier, Daniel Penny, subdued the criminal, who died during the altercation. Penny, who is white, was charged in Manhattan in the death of the thug, Jordan Neely. He was ultimately acquitted, but Penny’s ordeal showed what can happen to a white person trying to protect the public from black criminality.
The horror of the image of Iryna Zarutska’s last moment is itself a condensed symbol not only of black crime in America but also the failure of liberal government. Charlotte is a major city, and it is governed by black Democrats. The magistrate judge who let Brown run free after his most recent appearance in court is an activist who is not licensed to practice law in the state of North Carolina. She was appointed by a black female judge who is on record saying that one of her chief professional goals is to advance the cause of ‘reparations’—that is, the U.S. government paying money to black Americans in penance for slavery, which ended in 1865.
The U.S. media tried to sweep this case under the rug. But thanks to Elon Musk’s X, millions of Americans saw what happened and expressed outrage. When The New York Times, America’s paper of record, finally roused itself to report the story, it did so from the angle that Trump supporters were exploiting this case for political gain.
It’s early yet, but I have a feeling that the killing and the security camera images of the event will be a turning point for American society. Most Americans have had enough of the liberal race narrative that has been jammed down their throats during the decade-long Great Awokening. They don’t believe it anymore, and they are tired of pretending that they do.
President Trump already made an Oval Office address talking about the murder and blaming failed Democratic governance for it. We can expect even more involvement from the federal government to attempt to return order to America’s crime-ridden cities.
It will be much, much more difficult to solve the issue of the total, apocalyptic breakdown of the black underclass. Seventy percent of black children born in America are born to single mothers. The lack of socialization of black males by fathers has a lot to do with this chronic crisis. Whites and other non-black minorities are sick of being told they have to endure fear of violent crime or stand accused of being racist.
As I wrote earlier this summer, there is strong evidence emerging that young white men are being radicalized to the race-conscious right. These are men who were raised in a popular culture in which every institution told them that they are what is wrong with the world. Racist and antisemitic agitators are exploiting their understandable rage. Twenty years ago, in my journalism, I began warning the Left that their determination to make America more conscious of racial identity, but to deny the same thing to whites, was going to summon demons from the white population that would not be easily controlled. That is now happening.
The same thing is happening in Europe, of course, regarding migrants and migrant crime. It seems that everybody has a story. In Italy last weekend, I met three young Italian men who have become right-wing radicals. One told me that he was once beaten up in school by Moroccan classmates, simply because they wanted to demonstrate their social dominance. When he complained to school authorities, they told him he should simply accept it, because to do otherwise would be racist.
The other two young men said similar things had happened to them and their friends. As the conversation continued, I learned that they have intense contempt for European institutions because of things like this.
David Betz, a civil war expert who teaches in the war studies department of King’s College London, has been warning all year that all the factors that social science recognizes as needing to be present for civil war to kick off are present in western European countries—Britain and France most of all. He will appear on a panel discussion in Budapest on Thursday night at MCC to discuss his findings.
In the audience will be a friend of mine, a French woman from Paris who migrated to Budapest to escape the daily sexual harassment she suffered at the hands of male migrants and even female Muslims. She told me that though she loves her home city, it’s not worth living there with the fear of being sexually assaulted—and knowing that the French state either cannot or will not protect French people like her.
A violent reckoning is coming, both to Europe and to America, over things like this. At some point, ordinary, law-abiding people are going to get sick of the lawlessness and disorder protected and excused by their degenerate liberal governing elites. We had better hope that the crises will be solved peacefully and orderly by electing courageous, decisive politicians. If not, what then? French intellectual Renaud Camus bluntly articulated the alternatives: submission—or war.
Samuel Paty. Father Jacques Hamel. Iryna Zarutska. How many more victims like that can we endure without acting? Build more prisons, and throw inside them those men who are incapable of living peaceably in society, forever. Open insane asylums, and store the untreatably mentally ill there for the rest of their lives. There is no other way, because policies based on sentimental liberalism have failed.
Rod Dreher (@roddreher) is a columnist for The European Conservative and author of a daily newsletter,Rod Dreher’s Diary.
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America is on fire now over a shocking murder on a tram in Charlotte, North Carolina. A young Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, took a seat on the tram in front of a large, hooded black man, Decarlos Brown. After a few moments, Brown took a knife from his pocket, leapt up, and slashed helpless Zarutska in the neck. Brown, a schizophrenic with 14 criminal convictions on his record, staggered off muttering, “I got the white girl.”
Zarutska bled to death on the floor of the train, in full view of others, who did nothing to help her. At last someone—a black man, note well—ran to her aid and tried to stanch the bleeding, but it was too late. She was pronounced dead by emergency personnel when they arrived.
The murder happened in August, but the tram security footage was only recently released. The delay was caused because the Charlotte city council, which is majority black, tried to suppress it. No wonder: the image of a large, monstrous black man slashing the throat of a small, birdlike white woman is the stuff of urban nightmares. And it goes against the preferred narrative of America’s liberal media and urban governing class, which expects everyone to pretend that they didn’t see what they actually saw, lest they draw unwanted conclusions about race and crime in America.
Not every young black male in the United States is a violent criminal, but a wildly disproportionate number of violent black criminals are young black males. Look at this chart, based on U.S. Government (Federal Bureau of Investigation) statistics:
In fact, black females ages 15 to 64 have a higher murder rate per 100,000 people than white males. There is something undeniably violent about the culture of black Americans.
We are not supposed to notice that. According to the Official Narrative, blacks are uniquely demonized by white-dominated American society. When George Floyd, a petty thief and fentanyl addict, died in a police chokehold in 2020, the media and every other institution interpreted it as a condensed symbol of the black experience in America at the hands of the police. American society went berserk. Cities burned. Institutions—academic, corporate, and the rest—adopted openly racist programs to privilege blacks and disadvantage whites. This was called “racial justice.”
Even in Europe, leftists got in on the performative progressivism. In Budapest, the left-wing mayor of one district commissioned a statue marking the Floyd killing. When a journalist asked her what the point was, as Budapest has few if any blacks, she responded that everyone has a responsibility to fight racism.
Crime, unsurprisingly, shot up in America, as police were discouraged from engaging blacks. It should be pointed out for European readers that the most victims of black criminals are other blacks. But activists in the black community, and their liberal allies, prefer to focus on the handful of police shootings of black men.
Polls show that Americans have a wildly exaggerated view of the numbers of blacks killed by police. For example, a 2020 YouGov poll found the average American believed that between 1,000 and 5,000 unarmed black men were killed each year by cops. The real number is between 25 and 40.
In 2023, a crazed black man on the New York subway began threatening to kill passengers. A former soldier, Daniel Penny, subdued the criminal, who died during the altercation. Penny, who is white, was charged in Manhattan in the death of the thug, Jordan Neely. He was ultimately acquitted, but Penny’s ordeal showed what can happen to a white person trying to protect the public from black criminality.
The horror of the image of Iryna Zarutska’s last moment is itself a condensed symbol not only of black crime in America but also the failure of liberal government. Charlotte is a major city, and it is governed by black Democrats. The magistrate judge who let Brown run free after his most recent appearance in court is an activist who is not licensed to practice law in the state of North Carolina. She was appointed by a black female judge who is on record saying that one of her chief professional goals is to advance the cause of ‘reparations’—that is, the U.S. government paying money to black Americans in penance for slavery, which ended in 1865.
The U.S. media tried to sweep this case under the rug. But thanks to Elon Musk’s X, millions of Americans saw what happened and expressed outrage. When The New York Times, America’s paper of record, finally roused itself to report the story, it did so from the angle that Trump supporters were exploiting this case for political gain.
It’s early yet, but I have a feeling that the killing and the security camera images of the event will be a turning point for American society. Most Americans have had enough of the liberal race narrative that has been jammed down their throats during the decade-long Great Awokening. They don’t believe it anymore, and they are tired of pretending that they do.
President Trump already made an Oval Office address talking about the murder and blaming failed Democratic governance for it. We can expect even more involvement from the federal government to attempt to return order to America’s crime-ridden cities.
It will be much, much more difficult to solve the issue of the total, apocalyptic breakdown of the black underclass. Seventy percent of black children born in America are born to single mothers. The lack of socialization of black males by fathers has a lot to do with this chronic crisis. Whites and other non-black minorities are sick of being told they have to endure fear of violent crime or stand accused of being racist.
As I wrote earlier this summer, there is strong evidence emerging that young white men are being radicalized to the race-conscious right. These are men who were raised in a popular culture in which every institution told them that they are what is wrong with the world. Racist and antisemitic agitators are exploiting their understandable rage. Twenty years ago, in my journalism, I began warning the Left that their determination to make America more conscious of racial identity, but to deny the same thing to whites, was going to summon demons from the white population that would not be easily controlled. That is now happening.
The same thing is happening in Europe, of course, regarding migrants and migrant crime. It seems that everybody has a story. In Italy last weekend, I met three young Italian men who have become right-wing radicals. One told me that he was once beaten up in school by Moroccan classmates, simply because they wanted to demonstrate their social dominance. When he complained to school authorities, they told him he should simply accept it, because to do otherwise would be racist.
The other two young men said similar things had happened to them and their friends. As the conversation continued, I learned that they have intense contempt for European institutions because of things like this.
David Betz, a civil war expert who teaches in the war studies department of King’s College London, has been warning all year that all the factors that social science recognizes as needing to be present for civil war to kick off are present in western European countries—Britain and France most of all. He will appear on a panel discussion in Budapest on Thursday night at MCC to discuss his findings.
In the audience will be a friend of mine, a French woman from Paris who migrated to Budapest to escape the daily sexual harassment she suffered at the hands of male migrants and even female Muslims. She told me that though she loves her home city, it’s not worth living there with the fear of being sexually assaulted—and knowing that the French state either cannot or will not protect French people like her.
A violent reckoning is coming, both to Europe and to America, over things like this. At some point, ordinary, law-abiding people are going to get sick of the lawlessness and disorder protected and excused by their degenerate liberal governing elites. We had better hope that the crises will be solved peacefully and orderly by electing courageous, decisive politicians. If not, what then? French intellectual Renaud Camus bluntly articulated the alternatives: submission—or war.
Samuel Paty. Father Jacques Hamel. Iryna Zarutska. How many more victims like that can we endure without acting? Build more prisons, and throw inside them those men who are incapable of living peaceably in society, forever. Open insane asylums, and store the untreatably mentally ill there for the rest of their lives. There is no other way, because policies based on sentimental liberalism have failed.
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