I’ve been watching the arguments and counter-arguments over the murder of Iryna Zarutska unfold since last weekend when the media collectively decided to ignore the story as if it were just another local crime story that was beneath their notice.
If you’ve been around the culture wars more than a minute then you’ve seen this play before. Remember Kermit Gosnell? He’s the Philadelphia abortionist who performed his own variety of late-term abortions he called “snipping.” To this day it’s one of the most repulsive crimes I can think of. His clinic was finally raided in 2010 and he was arrested in 2011. He would eventually be convicted of multiple counts of first degree murder, but there’s every reason to think he was only prosecuted for a small fraction of his actual crimes. Over his long career, Gosnell had probably killed hundreds of late term babies, potentially making him the deadliest serial killers in US history.
Then as now there were a lot of outraged people on the right and a lot of blasé people on the left who claimed not to see what the big deal was. Remember this? This is what the press section looked like during his 2013 trial:
This is a photo of the empty press section during abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s trial.
The media tried to bury the story then — it continues to now.
The press and Hollywood tried to block @GosnellMovie.
Instead, “Gosnell” landed the box office Top 10 and broke expectations! pic.twitter.com/D6M3u111Qj
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) October 23, 2018
One particular reporter at the Washington Post, Sarah Kliff, pushed back on the idea that she should be covering a “local crime story” like the Gosnell case. Her point was she only only wrote about big issues like healthcare and abortion rights, not small issues like mass murder at an abortion clinic under the guise of abortion as healthcare. Kliff later apologized for her hot take, but then as now the media really had to be shamed into covering the case. This is from the NY Times in 2013:
The grisly details drew mainly local attention. But after an online furor that the case was being ignored by the national news media because of troubling accounts of late-term abortions, reporters from major newspapers and television networks descended Monday on the Court of Common Pleas. It was the latest example of the power of social media to drive a wide debate…
On Twitter, conservatives began a campaign to prod more coverage. Mollie Hemingway, a columnist for Christianity Today, asked individual health journalists directly why they were ignoring the story.
Politicians also weighed in. Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and 2016 presidential hopeful, wrote on Twitter, “Media’s forgotten what belongs on page 1.”…
Martin Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post, told a reporter from his paper writing about the controversy that he simply had not known of the story until readers e-mailed him last week. “I wish I could be conscious of all stories everywhere, but I can’t be,” he said. “We never decide what to cover for ideological reasons, no matter what critics might claim.”
The same arguments. The same defenses. Even some of the same people.
The murder of Iryna Zarutska has been the same thing all over again. The media didn’t want to cover Kermit Gosnell’s crimes because it seriously undermined their pro-choice boosterism. They didn’t want to cover the Zarutska case because it undermined their currently fashionable argument that crime is down in blue cities and we definitely don’t need Trump sending ICE or the National Guard or the FBI (or really anyone) in to handle it.
That’s why all last weekend you could feel the left-wing media collectively holding their breath to see if the outrage on X was going to force them to show up for this one or if they could ignore it as just another local crime story.
And let’s face it, race is also a big factor here. BLM spent years highlighting local crime stories, i.e. relatively rare cases of unarmed black people harmed or killed by white police officers. They frequently got the details of those cases wrong but the media never seemed to care very much. BLM only started to fall out of favor when the push for defunding the police became a disaster for Democrats and we learned how the group had squandered the tens of millions of dollars it had raised. You don’t hear about them much anymore.
Meanwhile, we just had a trial of a man who was charged for restraining a deranged homeless man in a New York subway. Daniel Penny was ultimately acquitted, which upset the Black Lives Matter protesters who were calling for a murder conviction. There was no lack of coverage of that trial of course.
In this case you have a similar scenario on a train except there was no Daniel Penny to restrain the deranged homeless man and, as a result, a beautiful young woman was murdered.
The right even seems to be adopting a bit of BLM’s flair in its approach to popularizing the case. There’s an effort brewing to paint murals of Zarutska in cities around the country. Just this morning, Elon Musk offered to donate $1 million to this cause.
I will contribute $1M
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 10, 2025
Say her name! That’s basically what this is. And why not? If BLM can use cherry-picked edge cases to drive nation-wide politics around criminal justice reform, surely other Americans can too.
I’ll draw the line at calling this effort White Lives Matter. We don’t need identity politics on the right to counter identity politics on the left. But the Zarutska case really does undermine one of the clear subtexts of BLM, which was that black people were victims of white violence. Clearly, sometimes those identities are reversed and the circumstances make a strong case for more aggressive policing and handling of criminals by the courts, not less.
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Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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