Did Decarlos Brown End the Civil Rights Era in America? | The American Spectator

This week looks an awful lot like a tipping point in America.

Most people up in arms about the shocking, brutal, and utterly senseless slaughter of a beautiful 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee on a light rail train in Charlotte by a deranged predator who bragged “I got the white girl! I got the white girl!” after he’d plunged his knife repeatedly into her neck don’t realize that the murder happened three weeks ago. (RELATED: She Fled the Ukraine War for Safety. America Delivered Her to a Killer.)

It was only over the weekend, when the video, not just of Decarlos Brown’s heinous act of racial animus, but of its aftermath, surfaced, that the case of Iryna Zarutska lit the country on fire.

You shouldn’t be surprised that the legacy corporate propaganda press tried to suppress the Charlotte train murder story. It’s the kind of ultra-sensational case that breaks apart narratives and forms new ones — and the new narratives are entirely the wrong ones from the standpoint of our status quo media elites. (RELATED: Charlotte Murderer Who Killed Ukrainian Refugee Shares Family Ties to Another Convicted Killer)

Everything about the case is a disaster for those elites.

There is Zarutska herself — a Ukrainian refugee working a humble job at a pizza shop while studying to work as a veterinary tech. She had fashion-model good looks, a friendly personality and the kind of charming naivete — not only did she trust her safety to Charlotte’s utterly negligent public transportation and criminal justice systems enough to ride public transportation home, but an image of her in her bedroom that appeared on her social media featured a Black Lives Matter poster on the wall — which the American Left depends on.

And there is Brown. When he was pinched for the train murder, it was his 15th arrest, the most serious of an extensive list of crimes. The previous arrest in January saw him kicked without bail by a magistrate who hadn’t even passed the bar.

Everyone associated with Brown’s most recent judicial interactions is black, so any discussion of his treatment by the legal system can’t even touch the question of race. The black community, and more importantly, the black governing class, owns Decarlos Brown and his murder of Iryna Zarutska lock, stock, and barrel. (RELATED: Facing up to Black Crime in America)

And there is Charlotte’s miserable failure to secure its city assets. The light rail system in that city is an absurd failure, as a local reporter notes…

The debate is expected to intensify in the Charlotte metro, where voters later this year will decide on a one-cent sales tax hike to fund a $25 billion light rail expansion and other transit projects.

WBT Radio news director Mark Garrison rode the light rail Sunday and reported that security was absent and tickets were unchecked for nearly 75 percent of his trip, highlighting the way homeless individuals take advantage of CATS’ weak enforcement.

“It was interesting to see that when they did check tickets at the train door …. several people would not even attempt to get on. That’s because so many people have been accustomed to a free ride. Many homeless have ridden the train, some for hours at a time, never paying the fare,” Garrison told Carolina Journal. “The plan from CATS is to have 219 officers. They are 35 short and last week told city council that they’re having trouble finding people who want the job.”

Garrison acknowledged there were times when riding the light rail left him feeling uneasy.

“Riding the train, I felt a bit edgy. Especially when we passed stops in rougher areas of town, and the train platform had an assortment of homeless pan handlers. No security effort to move them away from the train,” said Garrison. “On a personal note, my grandson loves trains. He and I used to ride light rail for fun every now and then. At this point, I’d be reluctant to take him on it until security is improved.”

Brown didn’t buy a ticket before bringing his weapon onto that train, and he paid his fare in Zarutska’s blood while the others in the train car, who all appeared to be black, blithely stood by. Nobody attempted to help her until two white people got on the train at its next stop; by then, it was too late. (RELATED: Alvin Bragg Bears Blame for Iryna Zarutska’s Murder)

So you can see why the legacy media, which is a puppet of a Democrat Party centered in and utterly dependent on big blue cities, would want this case not to see the light of day.

And when that video surfaced, what we got was a scramble. We got the “Republicans Pounce” narrative, first courtesy of Axios’ Marc Caputo…

The gruesome video of the fatal knife attack on Iryna Zarutska on a light-rail car in Charlotte is drawing attention from MAGA influencers seeking to elevate the issue of violent urban crime — and accuse mainstream media of under-covering shocking cases. https://t.co/OIj3FYfDLE

— Axios (@axios) September 8, 2025

And then the New York Times proceeded to regale us with warnings about North Carolina race riots fueled by sensational coverage of black-on-white crime…

…in 1898.

They worked excessively hard to tamp down the outrage over Iryna Zarutska, the Times’ most ignored Ukrainian since Walter Duranty was partaking of Soviet cocaine and whores in exchange for ignoring the Holodomor. And when they couldn’t, it was all about how terrible MAGA is for insisting that the world notice.

Including this failed political hack who’d like to be in the Senate after all the damage he did as North Carolina’s governor…

Only a cynical Democrat hack would attempt to evade accountability by claiming outrage about this needless, senseless racially-motivated slaughter is “political.”

Why is it political? Better put, why would there be political purchase in highlighting it? Is it because ordinary…

— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) September 10, 2025

All of the Democrat Party’s policies fail. They can’t push an economic plan because it failed when it was tried. They can’t push foreign policy; also a dismal failure. They have nothing to offer spiritually, patriotically, nobody buys their environmental policies, they’ve lost the plot on health care.

All they have left is race, and specifically, they’ve wrapped themselves up in the flag of the civil rights movement.

But even that they’ve ruined, and the problem is that the civil rights movement and era are over.

Black conservatives have been warning since Barack Obama was president that the end was coming, and that White America wouldn’t tolerate what they were tolerating any longer. Naturally, no one listened.

And then there was the senseless murder of Austin Metcalf at a North Texas track meet by a young black man, with an immediate outpouring of financial support to… the murderer. By the black community. Which was spent on cars and a McMansion by his family rather than on legal fees.

Now, Decarlos Brown.

And White America, to the extent there is such a thing, because Hispanic and Asian America are just as pissed off about black criminals in our cities as ordinary white people are, has had enough.

I can’t recall this amount of outrage and rejection, ever. It feels like the aftermath of the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, but it’s different — the O.J. Simpson trial was surreal; it was Hollywood and celebrity and viewed through that filter as much as a racial one.

But the Iryna Zarutska murder carries no celebrity. It carries no tint of domestic violence, infidelity, or anything else. It was a senseless murder between strangers with an overt racial motive.

“I got that white girl! I got that white girl!”

Attempts to tamp that down aren’t going to succeed.

And the worst part about this is it buries the truth — which is that culture is what matters, not race. The black community has a failed culture, which is perpetuated by a corrupt leadership, not because it’s made up of black politicians but because they’re Democrats.

And Democrats coddle criminals not because they’re incompetent on crime but because those criminals are useful. They’re a weapon of oppression.

Black on black crime prevents black prosperity. It fosters black dependence on government. It prevents black ambition. And most of all, it destroys black civilizational trust.

So there is no black community conceivable to that community’s leadership apart from the tired civil rights movement narrative. The black community must ever be mired in poverty and crime, with racism as an excuse for the lack of progress, and the civil rights elite, the “Talented Tenth” in the parlance of ancient communist W.E.B. Du Bois, who created the NAACP, the appointed savior and redeemer of American race relations through economic and political redistributionism.

Interestingly enough, of course, there is progress. Blacks do escape that vicious cycle. When they do, they move to white, or whiter, neighborhoods, and they culturally and politically go to ground. They abandon the culture of the black community because that culture doesn’t serve them — it’s a culture of behavioral and attitudinal pathology.

But the black middle class is ignored and not held up as an example. Instead, it’s the radicals, the phonies, the clowns, and the Useful Idiots.

This has worked for a very long time. But I think it’s over. I think people have had it. I don’t think you can call someone a racist for questioning the ancient civil rights narrative, and I don’t think you can raise the specter of 1898 race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina, to shut people up about train murders in Charlotte.

I think they’d better come up with some new narratives. The old ones bled out on that train.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Baseball Karen and the End of Western Society

Peter Navarro, Lawfare, and the Death of Executive Privilege

They Don’t Really Want To Stand Behind Lisa Cook, Do They?