By Editor,Maureen Callahan

Copyright dailymail

Editor’s note: This piece was published prior to reports of a shooting at a Utah Valley University event involving Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

Say her name.

The legacy media’s silence over the savage, unprovoked murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a violent, mentally unstable man — a repeat offender, well-known to law enforcement — on a North Carolina commuter train is appalling.

Of course, we know why they’re ignoring this most inconvenient crime, even if no one will say it. But conservative media will: Zarutska was a white woman and her murderer is a black man.

How else to explain why this three-week-old story, replete with graphic video of the attack, had been suppressed and ignored?

Why else would the New York Times continue to neglect this story? It wasn’t in the physical copy of Tuesday’s paper and, as of this writing, is not anywhere on their home page.

The right-leaning Wall Street Journal hardly did better. Buried on page 5, their brief coverage in Tuesday’s paper ran with this vague, cowardly, needlessly politicized headline: ‘Woman’s Stabbing Death Becomes MAGA Talking Point.’

MSNBC’s useless Jen Psaki, who cried on air (a no-no among journalists — it’s not about you) after the Annunciation School Shooting in Minneapolis last month, lead instead, on Tuesday night, with more Jeffrey Epstein.

Over on CNN, professional eunuch Anderson Cooper also declined to cover this crime, one with national implications, on this primetime show.

Perhaps that’s been for the best.

Sample, if you can, this exchange between the insufferable business journalist-turned-moral arbiter Kara Swisher and lefty pundit Van Jones, forced to address this undeniably newsworthy story — ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ exists for a reason — while insisting that the murderer, who seems to mutter ‘got that white girl, got that white girl’, was most definitely not animated by race.

Swisher: ‘Unfortunately, we don’t have services that they used to have for mentally ill people’.

Three counterpoints: Said ‘lack of services’ is the fault of the radical left, who long ago fought court battles to shutter state mental institutions, leaving these people out on the streets.

Two: Why are we assuming the killer is gravely mentally ill?

Brown’s mother told the New York Times that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Now a judge has ordered a mental acuity assessment. Let’s wait for those results.

But Brown is clearly seen, in this video, sitting behind Zarutska and eyeballing her, assessing how alert she was. We then see him stand up, raise his very long arm, and slice her throat with a knife three times.

Zarutska then looks up at him in disbelief, shock and horror. He quickly hustles off the train — proof, to me, that he was cogent enough to know that he had committed a violent attack, fleeing the scene to avoid arrest.

Mentally ill? That’s the left’s favorite excuse — except when there’s a school shooter. Then they blame guns.

Three: WHY is Swisher talking about the MURDERER? Why is she — and the mainstream media at large — not talking about the victim?

Imagine: This young, beautiful blonde living in war-torn Ukraine gets what must have felt like the Golden Ticket: Refugee status in the United States of America.

Free from war. Free from the threat of Russian bombs leveling her town, her home, herself or her loved ones. So she moves to North Carolina, where she gets three jobs: Taking care of the elderly, working at a pizza parlor and caring for animals.

This was a good person with a bright future. Just like Laken Riley, the 22-year-old nursing student raped and strangled to death by a violent illegal — another case ignored by the left.

What would have Iryna Zarutska contributed to her new country? We’ll never know.

But sure, CNN, let’s talk about the ways in which American society failed the murderer. Oh — and we can’t ignore CNN’s current headline: ‘How the lives of a Ukrainian refugee and a Charlotte man with a criminal history converged in a fatal stabbing’.

Converged? Are you kidding me?

There was zero ‘convergence’. The killer spotted her. He had opportunity and potential motive — ‘killed that white girl’. He slashed her throat three times, leaving her to bleed out and die on a commuter train’s dirty floor.

Iryna Zarutska would have been better off staying in Ukraine, and that is saying something. Why won’t the media discuss that?

Why won’t they truly confront why America has fallen so far, so fast, and why 85 percent of Republicans, according to a recent CBS News/YouGov poll, support Trump’s decision to send the National Guard into our most crime-ridden, Democrat-run cities?

Or — and this is the big one — why won’t they just admit that if the races had been reversed, that this would be 24/7 media coverage to rival George Floyd?

We’d be seeing days-long protests in the streets if a white man with a mile-long rap sheet stabbed a young black woman — let’s say she was a refugee, working three jobs in hopes of building a full, honest and free life for herself. We’d be subjected to Anderson Cooper, Jen Psaki and their ilk rending their garments nightly?

Just as they did over Jordan Neely, a homeless black man with a history of violence, who died after he was restrained by Marine veteran Daniel Penny in a subway car in May 2023.

Neely — much like the killer here — was well-known to law enforcement and had been kicked out by his own family, so terrified were they of his repeated, violent outbursts.

That same media spent day after day tarring Penny, who defended terrified passengers after Neely made physical and verbal threats against them, as a murderous white supremacist.

Despite their best attempts to poison that jury, 12 New Yorkers rightly acquitted Penny in December 2024.

The intellectual hackery on display is mortifying.

Swisher, back on CNN’s assembled brain trust: ‘The problem here — I’m guessing the Trump administration was looking for an example. This video was quite disturbing’.

Quite disturbing?

Kara Swisher spends way too much time in padded podcast studios and plush newsrooms, sanding down inconvenient, fact-based, caught-on-video savagery into politesse.

What a fraud. Sure, it’s Donald Trump’s fault. This is how legacy media thinks it’s going to save itself?

They, just like the Democrat party, have truly learned nothing.

To that point, Vi Lyles, the black, female, Democrat mayor of Charlotte, thanked her ‘media partners’ earlier this week after the video was finally made public after multiple FOIA requests.

Again, this story is nearly three weeks old. The public murder of Iryna Zarutska on August 22, caught on the train’s surveillance cameras — which belong to the taxpayers of North Carolina — had been suppressed for two weeks.

The mayor, it turns out, was facing reelection. Coincidence?

When finally forced to address this horrific crime on Monday, Mayor Lyles — a huge proponent of DEI who, in November 2021, sunk $250 million into what she called ‘The Racial Equity Initiative’ — expressed her sympathies.

For the murderer.

‘This is a tragic situation that sheds light on problems with social safety nets related to mental health care and the systems that should be in place’, she said.

Perhaps, more of those DEI earmarks could have been directed there then?

‘Those who are unhoused’ —ugh, that word — ‘are more frequently the victim of crimes and not the perpetrators.’

Not this time. This is sick.

Iryna Zarutska’s family should sue the city of Charlotte and sue this mayor. Not for nothing has Donald Trump’s DOJ charged this murderer federally.

If Charlotte won’t get the job done, Trump will. This guy will never see the light of day again — if he’s lucky. He’s facing the death penalty and let’s hope he gets it.

A message needs to be sent: To criminals, to soft-on-crime politicians and judges and to the American citizenry itself: We will not stand for this.

On Wednesday, Charlotte woke up to more good news: Mayor Lyles won her reelection.

Make no mistake: This will happen again. And Charlotte’s voters will have only themselves to blame.