In the month since Iryna Zarutska was murdered on a Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail train, the Ukrainian refugee has become an icon of the right.

When the gruesome footage of her murder, in which a large Black man attacked an attractive white victim, was released on September 5 and circulated widely on social media, it unleashed a frenzy of racism, panic, and outlandish claims about the criminal legal system. The fevered response wasn’t steeped in reality but rather in far-right mythology.

Elon Musk went into a rage spiral about Black-on-white crime. Chaya Raichik, the right-wing provocateur behind LibsofTikTok, accused the media of covering up the crime so as not to offend racial justice activists. And numerous right-wing accounts mocked the idea that better mental health care mi

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