A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right

The video, captured by a security camera in Charlotte, N.C., shows a 23-year-old woman named Iryna Zarutska sitting on a light-rail train one night in late August, dressed in the uniform of the pizza parlor where she worked.

She is looking at her phone when suddenly, a man sitting behind her stands up, gripping a knife in his raised right hand. Moments later, the police say, he stabbed and killed Ms. Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, in what appeared to be a random and unprovoked attack.

The police arrested Decarlos Brown Jr. soon after and charged him with first-degree murder. But the brutal killing did not capture widespread attention until the security footage was released on Friday, at which point it became an accelerant for conservative arguments about crime, race and the perceived failings of big-city justice systems and mainstream news outlets in the Trump era.

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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.

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After the video’s release, a number of influential conservatives also accused major news outlets, including The New York Times, of ignoring the story because the crime was committed by a Black man against a white woman.

“The reason for the media silence is racial,” Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing commentator, wrote in an online post on Sunday. “If the killer were white, this would get coverage. Of course if it were a white assailant murdering a Black victim, then it would be front-page headlines everywhere.”

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In North Carolina, as in other Southern states, newspapers in the Jim Crow era often egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality. Among other things, such stories served as a precursor to a white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, in which at least 60 Black men were killed.

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The White House noted that as governor, Mr. Cooper had established a “Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice” that had recommended diversion programs, eliminating cash bail for many misdemeanors and other reforms after the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Among other things, the White House also criticized the Charlotte City Council for an initiative to “reimagine” policing, and the Mecklenberg County government for hiring consultants to help address racial disparities in the justice system, such as Black and Hispanic people being overrepresented in the jail population compared with their share of the general population.

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