View / The Musk-funded mural backlash elevates the messy politics of martyrdom

The murals went up in Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Fort Lauderdale before Democrats finally took notice.

In September, weeks after the fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light rail train, Elon Musk joined a crowdfunded campaign to paint murals of her in as many cities as possible. Campaign sponsors hoped that anyone unaware of her story — an innocent young woman killed by a man who’d bounced in and out of prison — might see her face, find the security video of her brutal death, and be moved.

“Iryna Zarutska did not ask to be a martyr,” read the text on the funding page launched by Eoghan McCabe, the Irish CEO of the AI customer service company Intercom. He gave $500,000, and Musk gave $1 million, with an expected budget of $10,000 per mural.

There were few complaints, until a Zarutska mural got prepared outside of The Dark Lady, an LGBTQ bar in Providence, R.I. The Dark Lady’s owners defended the art to critics, calling it apolitical: “We are Democrats. We do not support Donald Trump.” Three days later, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley condemned the mural — which was political, after all. The Dark Lady recanted. The mural would come down.

Now conservatives are trying to create a familiar infamy for Smiley and other Democrats who got the mural taken down. Verbal floggings are piling up in Murdoch-owned news outlets and on popular right-leaning X accounts. Conservatives asked: Were Democrats so deranged by an Elon Musk campaign that they’d paint over a tribute to a dead woman? Benny Johnson summed up the point: “Would they had [sic] asked if it was of George Floyd?”

No, they wouldn’t have, and Floyd is the right context. The push to elevate Zarutska as a martyr is part of the long backlash to the summer of 2020, after which one online database catalogued thousands of pieces of street art depicting Floyd.

President Donald Trump himself has incorrectly sought to portray her death as a consequence of progressive immigration policies; in his State of the Union, Trump memorialized her as having “escaped a brutal war only to be slain by a hardened criminal set free to kill in America,” who had come “through open borders.”

That second part wasn’t true. The Black man charged in her murder, DeCarlos Brown, was born in the US.

But in North Carolina, GOP Senate nominee Michael Whatley has made her killing central to his campaign against Democratic former Gov. Roy Cooper, whom Whatley blames for not keeping Brown in prison.

“Her blood is on Roy Cooper’s hands, because he should have never been on the streets,” Whatley said at CPAC last week.

So when the Musk-backed mural campaign talked about ensuring there was “meaning in her brutal death,” hoping that the “important conversations her slaying provokes may perpetuate and drive much needed change,” the implicit policy request was tougher criminal sentencing.

That’s an occasionally overlapping but distinct policy request from the implicit goal of the president’s push to elevate “angel moms” whose children were killed by illegal immigrants. When Trump lionizes those women, the desired change is more aggressive deportation.

But immigration policy, not crime policy, inspired Providence Democrats and bar owners to denounce the mural.

“We want to make sure that every community member who calls Providence home feels safe,” said state Rep. David Morales, a member of Democratic Socialists of America, whose comments were picked up by the 3.9 million-follower X account End Wokeness and denounced by Musk.

It’s fair to see the Zarutska mural campaign as a response to the veneration of Floyd, and the effort — joined by the Democratic Party, progressive infrastructure, and much of corporate America — to change the country in his honor. Political movements have always elevated martyrs, and Trump has spent a decade raising the profiles of victims of violent crime and their family members.

That work has outlived much of the Black Lives Matter movement. Trump and his party have backed away from the bipartisan law he signed during his first term that aimed to decrease prison populations, but his advocacy for tougher treatment of immigrants accused of crimes runs deeper than any support BLM got from Joe Biden.

Biden directed his administration to fight for “racial equity,” but his increased police funding was the opposite of what protesters demanded. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House on the 42nd day of his presidency, but it never passed the Senate and is unlikely to be introduced again, even if Democrats reclaim full control of Washington.

The Laken Riley Act, named for a college student killed by an illegal immigrant in 2024, did become law, complicating the campaigns of some Democrats who voted for it.