Why are liberals erasing the memory of Iryna Zarutska?

One of the most offensive things you can do to a person in the grips of a false belief or an ideological obsession is to hold a mirror up to those beliefs. Confronted with the consequences of their views, many people become enraged – not at their mistake, but at whoever is pointing it out.

For some time, American progressives have argued it is good for society to be soft on crime. Not only is the criminal justice system inherently racist and patriarchal, they claim – those who commit crimes are really the victims, too. According to this view, it is better to have a society where there is lots of murder and crime – and sympathy for perpetrators – than to live in a world where a supposedly ‘racist’ police force could do something about it.

The latest example of this woke moral inversion arrived earlier this month, in the small New England city of Providence in Rhode Island. Here, a mural to the slain Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska has been taken down. Some have accused it of being right-wing propaganda.

Zarutska was just 23 years old when she was murdered in August 2025 while riding the train home from work at a pizzeria in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her killer was repeat offender Decarlos Brown Jr, a black man. Brown, who had been arrested 14 times before he killed Zarutska, was this week found ‘mentally incapable’ of standing trial by medical experts.

Zarutska arrived in the US in 2022 after she and her family fled the war with Russia. She then had the double misfortune of not only losing her life in a terrifying, unprovoked attack, but also of being the ‘wrong’ kind of victim, with the ‘wrong’ kind of attacker. For woke zealots, the optics of this were all wrong: Iryna was a beautiful, young, blonde European woman trying to live the American Dream, and her attacker was an African American whose rap sheet, many argued, was a product of progressive policies on crime and mental illness.

Providence artist Ian Gaudreau was commissioned to paint a tribute to the Ukrainian on the wall of a local gay bar, The Dark Lady. Initially, the bar owners were supportive of the project, saying: ‘The mural on our building was created for one reason: remembrance. It honours Iryna – a life taken too soon, as so many others have.’

But progressives didn’t like this one bit. A Reddit user described the memorial as ‘wildly fascist, racist propaganda’. A state politician linked it to a ‘right-wing movement’ that is ‘exploiting’ Zarustka’s death for its own benefit. Eventually, the bar changed its tune, saying the mural was actually ‘created for our community to honour Iryna’s memory, mental wellness, LGBTQIA+ rights, immigration, the war, unity and anti-Trump policies’. It was taken down, and has since found a home in a different part of the city.

Memorialising a young woman, a refugee from a war-ravaged country, who was murdered in cold blood by a violent stranger, for no reason at all, is fascist and racist now? Okay, then.

The real problem was the project’s connection to Elon Musk. Gaudreau told NBC 10 that the mural was funded by a non-profit organisation that, in turn, had received funding from Musk. This connection has pushed the city’s libtards and blue-haired loons into conniptions. Even the city’s mayor, Democrat Brett Smiley, issued a statement condemning the mural. He is currently running for re-election and facing a primary challenge from the left, which I’m sure has nothing at all to do with his response.

‘The murder of the individual depicted in this mural was a devastating tragedy, but the misguided, isolating intent of those funding murals like this across the country is divisive and does not represent Providence’, Smiley said. I tend to think that what’s divisive is going around stabbing young women in the neck. Oh dear, maybe that means I’m a fascist!

Also notice how mayor Smiley – such an apt name for a snivelling cretin – does not even speak the words ‘Iryna Zarutska’. As if even just the sounds alone, emanating from his thin-lipped mouth, could conjure up Musk’s far-right pong from an imaginary far-right swamp.

Look, I get it. Elon Musk, he who committed the gravest sin one can commit in liberal circles – backing Donald Trump – gave money to the project. Therefore, the woke-lib-progressive thinking goes, it must be destroyed.

Makes me wonder. If Musk saved a farm’s worth of puppies from a burning building, would liberals demand he put them back? If Musk cured paediatric cancer, would deranged mothers of cancer-stricken kids refuse to allow their child the cure? If Musk literally saved the human race from planetary extinction, would liberals refuse a ride on the last shuttle bound for a pleasantly habitable Mars, because ‘hE’s A fASciSt?!?!?’ This is Stalin-level mania, folks.

‘All this political vitriol being kicked up has removed Iryna’s humanity from her story. And I think we’d all do better to remember that’, said Ian Gaudreau on the row. Amen, brother.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.