The Turning Point We Never Wanted
What the Murders of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk Reveal About America
The past three days in America have been nothing short of surreal.
First came the murder of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death by a black man on a train in Charlotte. Though she was killed late last month, most people only “saw her die” this week — as new, horrific video cuts spread across the internet. For many, it felt like her murder happened in real time, online.
Before the country could even process that horror, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot while speaking at a packed Utah Valley University event.
Two lives ended in senseless violence. Two very different victims. And yet both deaths revealed the same disturbing truth about where America is headed.
The Reactions
There were no “mostly peaceful” protests after Iryna’s and Charlie’s murders. No flash mobs. No looting. No rioting. No boarded-up shops or cities abandoned to chaos.
None of that happened — and nobody expected it to.
What did happen was an avalanche of mockery. Left-wing users flooded TikTok with clips of people laughing, dancing, and celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death. On X, 10-second soundbites of his debates were posted with captions like “good riddance” or “one down.” Others went further, openly speculating about who “should be next” — with conservative, pro-Israel commentator Ben Shapiro seemingly being everyone’s favorite target. Here’s a quick compilation I came across. Click to zoom in if you want a closer look.
That was disturbing enough. But then it hit closer to home.
I was knee-deep in the filth online when my phone buzzed. It was my aunt in Europe. The conversation soon turned to recent events. She had barely heard of Charlie Kirk before — probably not even his name — but with full certainty declared he was a racist, a far-right extremist, even a defender of slavery.
Now, she wasn’t justifying the murder, but the way she spoke made it clear she thought he had it coming. When I pressed her on where she got that impression, she admitted it came from something she’d seen on TV.
Of course, I thought to myself, remembering a recent headline I’d come across in the Belgian press.
Translation: American citizens who disagree with Republican ideas are speaking out more often.
(Apparently, in the media’s eyes, the brutal murder on Wednesday qualified as nothing more than “speaking out.” They later changed the headline and softened the language, but the core framing stayed the same: his death was presented as the natural result of his rhetoric).
Or here’s a screenshot from the Spanish show Más Vale Tarde (MVT) on La Sexta, where they gleefully rattled off Charlie Kirk’s supposed positions — some real, others fabricated — on abortion, slavery, Israel, and race, painting him as a monster whose assassination was no tragedy at all.
Now, toward the end of our conversation, I asked my aunt if she’d heard anything about Iryna’s murder. She hadn’t.
That tracks.
Much like their American counterparts, European liberals care about Ukrainians — just not about all of them.
The Media
When Iryna was murdered, the media’s first response was silence — despite it looking like a racially motivated hate crime. People on X kept posting search results from CNN, the New York Times, AP News, and other outlets showing zero coverage.
It’s obvious to me that if it weren’t for X — and Elon Musk amplifying the story — we probably wouldn’t even know about it at all. Just like many other similar black-on-white crimes in recent years that were quietly buried.
When the New York Times finally broke its silence, the headline it ran with read: “A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right.”
That was the angle. Not the tragedy of a young woman who had finished her shift at a Charlotte pizza parlor, boarded a light-rail train, and was riding home when she was brutally stabbed. Not the systemic failures that allowed her killer — a 14-time offender who had been released on cashless bail — to roam free. No — the story was framed around conservatives “reacting.”
Worse still were the excuses. CNN’s Van Jones, in a bizarre display of misplaced sympathy, chose to focus not on Iryna’s suffering but on how her killer was “hurting.” Naturally, it didn’t take long before multiple GoFundMe campaigns appeared — since taken down — not for her family, but to fund his legal defense.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination coverage was even more grotesque. The media couldn’t ignore it, so they muddied the waters instead — blaming everything from Donald Trump, to January 6th, to a supposed “climate of hate.”
MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd, while Kirk’s body was still warm, declared: “Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” The implication was unmistakable: Kirk brought it on himself. Dowd even speculated he may have been killed by “someone firing off a gun in celebration.”
If you’re shocked by that kind of rhetoric, you haven’t been paying attention.
For years, the legacy media has painted white Americans as inherently racist, conservatives as Nazis, and figures like Trump and Kirk as existential threats to democracy. Here’s a quick video compilation to jog your memory.
Last week’s tragic events are the result of all that brainwashing.
Yes, the thug on the Charlotte train may have driven the blade into Iryna’s neck — but it was the media that sharpened it. And Charlie’s shooter may have pulled the trigger — but it was the media that built the gun and manufactured the ammo.
The Turning Point
Let me circle back to my thoughts on Charlie Kirk in the intro.
Whether you agreed with him or not, Charlie is dead purely because someone didn’t agree with what he had to say.
And let’s be clear: his views weren’t fringe. They were mainstream Christian values, expressed in debates and speeches. That’s all.
So it was really eye-opening to watch leftists celebrate his death in the streets and across social media. I won’t post links or examples — it’s too grotesque — but suffice it to say, the reactions crossed every line of basic decency. Spend five minutes on X or TikTok and you’ll wish you hadn’t, if you value your sanity.
Watching it felt like witnessing the outcome of a massive experiment in mass brainwashing. It’s both chilling and, in a dark way, impressive how much the media has reshaped minds in little more than a decade.
The problem is that these radicalized people aren’t just anonymous trolls or terminally online basement dwellers. Sure, some are. But many are people just like you and me. They’re teachers, nurses, small business owners, yoga instructors — people you’d otherwise think of as ordinary. Ordinary, that is, until you see them openly celebrating a murder.
It’s hard to overstate the level of distrust this breeds in society. I came across a comment on X that captured it perfectly: “These are the same people who pour my coffee at Starbucks. The same people who treat me in the hospital. Can I really trust them not to slip something into my latte or deny me care if they don’t like my politics?”
That fear may not be rational, but millions are thinking it. When ordinary people see a father of two gunned down in broad daylight and his death cheered, they realize they could easily be next in the eyes of his killers and their cheerleaders.
The terrifying part? Many on the Left genuinely believe they’re fighting Nazis. And once you’ve convinced yourself of that, anything goes. Violence doesn’t just feel acceptable — it feels like a moral duty.
And while the media shoulders enormous responsibility for this brainwashing, they’re not the only ones. Leftist professors push it in classrooms, politicians repeat it in speeches, Hollywood packages it into entertainment, and activist groups preach it in communities. The media just makes sure the message echoes the loudest.
I’ll be blunt.
If we keep going down this road, my fear is we’ll end up like Yugoslavia.
A Croatian man I met years ago told me: once you stop seeing neighbors as neighbors and start seeing them as enemies, all it takes is a spark. He knew what he was talking about. In the ’90s, he watched it happen — one day people were sharing schools and soccer games, and before long they were at each other’s throats with knives and rifles. The thin veneer of order gave way to bloodshed and destruction.
Charlie Kirk called his movement Turning Point USA. His murder may prove to be just that — but toward a future none of us want to see.
I hope I’m wrong.
Regards,
Lau Vegys
The “belief” of leftists and their conviction in their fight against perceived “evil” is inexplicable. How can a human brain be so convinced that murder is justifiable based on another’s thoughts!!!
Scary indeed.
RIP Mr Kirk, God bless your family. 🙏
With a great deal of sadness I believe you are totally correct, as an outsider who has visited often, having family my mother now deceased lived in Las Vegas whilst my sister and her family still reside in Utah, thus I have been privileged to take the trip up many, many times having visited most states and your largest urban metropolis’s travelling coast to coast, often for obvious reasons dragging my family with me.
Initially I had found American’s to be polite, engaging, forthright without being rude, willing to exchange ideas, helpful, well mannered, considerate and likely to help, to be giving… over time however there was a perceptible shift and change quite noticeable especially with service, whilst there still existed many who took their roles seriously remaining and coming across with many of the aforementioned traits, I started to note an intolerance creep, a loss of patience, an unwillingness to engage, whereby doing the job they were employed to facilitate was seen not as an opportunity but rather an imposition a hindrance, a lacksadaisacal attitude persisted, in short what I realised over time as such became worse was that it was borne of a lack of ability to think, to process, essentially a mental laziness.
Subsequent trips saw a hardening of this attitude especially amongst a specific cohort of the population whereby a latent sense of entitlement commensurate a distinct intolerance coupled with an arrogance began to permeate … resulting in what can be described as an hostility…. this has become noticeably worse to the point whereby I determined that to save the grief the practitioners of such whom from previous experience with their overt hostility would be avoided, I mean it mattered not the sector, food, retail, government administration, I even incurred such on flights with hostesses be they male and or female, but I will add it was predominantly female who had this really bad attitude, as noted it was most noticeable with a specific group of the American populace.
Add to this the decline in your media coverage with a noticeable shift to what has become unbalanced, biased, prejudiced and at times of late an almost hysterical reporting on your T.V media channels, such that it has reached the point of being both, unbearable and unwatchable… As a result it was during a trip 2017/18 or thereabouts but during Trumps 1st dig, that we had had enough and decided that watching American T.V reporting was a waste of time and a risk to our mental well being… to this day and given we now get most U.S channels packaged into what would be the equal to a U.S cable subscription the policy adopted and agreed in this household is that no U.S, including now many U.K and E.U channels are ever viewed.. such is the vitriolic nature of the broadcasts and programming received, I mean the hate and rage broadcast is virtually palpable.. it is as ugly as it is unwanted, the only viewing now being news clips we are fed our news items and as viewed travelling, hence, it is hardly surprising that Americans have become conditioned, well conditioned or rather propagandised many would say brain washed as they have become inculcated by their media and those to whom they defer to bring them their news, becoming themselves much alike those whom they are listening and viewing their heads filled with the same talking points they oft repeat, though it can be said whilst oft repeated I came to find that when you engaged more directly the level of understanding or the context by which a response would be given underscored a complete lack of true understanding of the most basic facts, the responses given being shortened sound bites of that which they’d heard stated by MSM.. which as we have come to know, those of us who like to be well informed, that by the time a response in discussion descends to only being able to repeat a headline, then name calling, together a raised voice, that you are dealing with someone who is not only ill informed but equally is ignorant of depth of subject, in short brain lazy, not prepared to do what’s required to enable themselves to be sufficiently informed in order they can engage from a balanced perspective, yet dangerously they cling to such short circuited views as a gospel truth with missionary like zeal.
It would seem on the face of it that the as known CIA orchestrated Operation Mockingbird, that was ostensibly dropped in 1973 on order of the then Church Congressional Committee’s findings that had investigated the actions of the CIA and their agenda as was then known to usurp U.S Mainstream Media with the objective of both controlling the space and its content with the overarching objective of influencing and controlling completely public discourse and the narrative together the added focus of forming and shaping public and individual opinion, in essence the CIA wanted to achieve population group think, to capture thought.
The level of vitriol and hatred observed on visits, much of it now so overt, certainly bears testament to the fact that despite the Church Cttee ordering the cessation of Op Mocking Bird that despite confirmation it would end, that in reality the operation it could be opined simply went underground, that it became more subtly managed whilst still continuing with the result that it seems given the clearly visual decline, at least it is noticeable to those of us who have travelled up to the U.S reasonably frequently doing so with sufficient gap between visits to experience and observe very real population behavioural change that Op Mockingbird has truly succeeded.
We know for example that many of today’s media executives and hosts are engaged by Intelligence Agencies to promote a required narrative and talking points, indeed it can be said that the once need for subtlety no longer applies, such has been the success of the entire program that as with for example the WEF Globalist agenda, that no longer is kept secret, indeed similar to the WEF Globalist Agenda it seems todays Mainstream media are quite happy to openly champion and promote their agenda, with many broadcasters brazenly doing so ..
The descent into this abyss has been noticeable and when looking more closely at the events unfolding it is clear that between the financial, political and media involved that are responsible for driving the divisive agenda pervading the nation, doing so it seems gleefully, the bigger question must be why? Why is their so much animus unto a nation and its peoples from which for many involved in destabilising it, they have received and been given so much? How does that work? Is it emblematic of the fact such people have lost all empathy with their fellow man? Are they merely greedy, intolerant, jealous, suffering mental health issues, if so then whatever they suffer from… it must be serious, or are they just loathsome, vile, evil people? Has it gotten to the point that not only the nations moral compass has been lost but that of many individuals as well? Certainly that is a point that on the face of it can be reasonably argued. This descent into the abyss the result of intolerance, an intolerance I find consists of much that most sane, clear thinking people simply cannot under any circumstance agree with such as the ridiculous debates as to what constitutes a woman? The transgender LGBTQ+++ arguments with commensurate activism such as exposing toddlers to the gambit of what really ought be confined to consenting adults, of marching near naked in public, demanding use of terms that are not agreed to in other words forcing a culture onto those who do not buy into that which a small minority of the populace demand be accepted… the entire agenda one of forcing acceptance being emblematic of a gross intolerance, something peculiar to this group who demand acceptance and tolerance yet by their own actions and deeds they are the most intolerant… I seem to think we are living in an era of the revenge of those who believe they have been marginalised and prejudiced, that have been put down and had to endure… irrespective of flavour and oh how they seem to relish this new found ability to punish.
A sad indictment indeed given most I know who share similar perspectives have always subscribed to the live and let live mantra, just do not force your views and morals upon me and mine and we likewise won’t upon you… it is thus sad that this has been lost in the U.S resulting in much of the decline as has been experienced and witnessed… can the decline in quality of education be the catalyst, I certainly do not discount such, indeed in my mind much of the present can be laid at the door of education decline and compromised academics allowing personal agendas to dominate classroom content … to those of you residing there notwithstanding what seems dark times ahead, stay and be safe, don’t and never allow you or yours to be second…. just saying
Kia Kaha (stay strong) from New Zealand