Another front in the culture war ignited in Bushwick this past week when a Reddit user posted about a new mural in the neighborhood as being part of a so-called “Elon Musk and Andrew Tate back[ed] Fascist Astroturf campaign.”
The mural, three stories-high, appeared last month on the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Evergreen, right on the corner of the local outpost of the Taiwanese dining spot Formosa, as a tribute to Iryna Zarutska, the twenty-three year old Ukrainian refugee who was stabbed to death in a South End light rail station in Charlotte, North Carolina last August.
Zarutska’s death had been quickly politicized in right wing media. Zarutska was a young, blond woman murdered by a Black man; Decarlos Brown Jr., a homeless paranoid schizophrenic who told his sister he committed the murder because people could read his thoughts. In the subconscious of suburban conservatives, the details of her death; on public transportation, working a regular blue collar job in a city like Charlotte, North Carolina, were as nightmarish as the murder itself. The New York Post, covered her death by interspersing security footage of Zarutska’s terrified final moments with selfies and a picture of her in a bikini, as did the The Daily Mail in the UK.
Soon after, Irish tech CEO Eoghan McCabe pledged $500,000 to put up murals of Zarutska in American cities, offering interested artists a cool $10k per gig. Elon Musk and Andrew Tate then both claimed on Twitter that they would chip in a million dollars each to the campaign.
McCabe—whose company Intercom, qua the Washington Examiner, is a “heavyweight in the artificial intelligence customer service space”—used the occasion to call for public executions, saying, “I do think rapid public executions for crimes like this are a spiritual goal that we should point ourselves to” and “I worry about Western society if we can’t react in proportion to how evil this is.”
McCabe, who donated $200,000 to Trump’s presidential campaign, further expanded on his ideas about “Western society” on Twitter last year, saying that 2025 would be “a year of great violence on the streets of Ireland… A lot of blood will be spilled… this blood will be on the hands of those who have gleefully imported people who do not share our values.”
Asked for comment on the Bushwick mural by the Post, McCabe said the point of the project was “to highlight how crime in liberal areas can lead to tragedies like Zarutska’s death.”
On Twitter, McCabe currently documents various Zarutska murals going up across the country, including the location in Bushwick, which largely went unnoticed until redditor “Leading_Noise9858” posted it to the r/bushwick subreddit this week, under the title, “Elon Musk and Andrew Tate Backed Fascist Astroturfing Campaign on Jefferson and Evergreen,” writing: “Her senseless murder in Charlotte public transit was undoubtedly a tragedy. However her cause has been championed by Great Replacement touting anti immigrant fascists as proof that beautiful birthing aged white women (the right kind of immigrants they would tell you, a war refugee from Ukraine) are being hunted by black and brown bodies that belong behind bars.”
The thread currently has over 900 responses, with many posters agreeing with the gist of the post and fantasizing about defacing the mural.
Leading_Noise9858 told Grime Square they first noticed the mural going up a month ago: “I pass it regularly. I watched the guy painting it and wondered why a newly refurbished building in Bushwick was getting a 3 story mural to a white woman. I looked into the artist and saw he had painted billionaires and recently another Zarutska mural. Knowing what I know about the politicization of her tragic murder I looked into it and clear as day there is Elon Musk saying he would give $1M towards painting these murals.”
It seems to be the second mural made of Zarutska by Ben Keller, a Connecticut muralist for hire who created the Bushwick mural along with local graffiti artist hoacs, and whose work usually consists of pop culture characters like Scarface, Madonna, Martin Luther King and Jesus. Keller has rendered his own portraits of Musk and Jeff Bezos, alongside images of Walter White, also Scarface, and others as part of a commissioned series of paintings for a local IT company in March of last year.
In conversation with Grime Square, Keller denied there was any political aspect to his mural, which he worked on after being recruited by the project putting the murals up around the country, and said he wasn’t aware of McCabe’s reputation or comments, labeling McCabe’s call for executions “pretty crazy.”
He dismissed the Reddit thread as “a bunch of leftists” and added that “Reddit is a waste of time.” He said his thoughts on Musk were “not something I want to share publicly” and his work on the mural was “business.”
Similarly, hoacs told Grime Square they were “simply artists being hired to paint a mural of an innocent woman who was murdered for no reason. We don’t do politics nor care about politics. The Reddit post is way over politicized for liking.”
(For their part, Leading_Noise said: “I did this to raise awareness at a moment of rampant unfettered fascism.”)
A second mural of Zarutska, done by Montreal collective Txyna, is already up in the East Village too, as documented in EVGrieve. Txyna declined a request for comment about this project.
Though the mural may have set r/bushwick on fire, a tour of neighboring bars on a recent Friday found that pretty much no one had noticed it and very few had even heard of Zarutska. In fact, unlike other murals the project has sponsored, the Bushwick mural doesn’t even depict Zarutska’s name, which Keller noted was at the direction of his funders and the landlord of the property, as was hoacs’s abstract graffiti composition at the bottom of the piece. For most passersby, it’s simply a colorful image of a woman’s face.
But the juxtaposition of her tragic death and her use as right wing fodder still make it insidious culture war bait. As Reddit user york100 put it: “I can just see the Fox News headline now: “murder victims memorial taken down in woke neighborhood because she was white.” (Coincidentally, the Zarutska mural is across the street from a warehouse owned by art storage company UOVO, who sponsor a well publicized grant to decorate their building with a mural, all the better to change the company’s Google results when they are being accused of union busting.)
Brian Jones Kraft is a writer who has been living in Bushwick for over a decade and a half. He has previously written extensively about the legacy of Andrew Cuomo and, more recently, David Dinkins.
Leave a Reply