R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 2

Brutal murder in Charlotte becomes national flashpoint: Response to release of security video shows deep division between liberals and conservatives

For decades now, leading American conservatives have accused the political left of being soft on crime. This charge against the political left in the United States has been persistent and, in many elections, determinative of the outcome. There is one central reason that the accusation has such traction. The accusation is true. The political left is soft on crime, and it’s not a bug in their system. It’s a feature.

The brutal murder of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte, N.C.’s light rail system raises the issue all over again, and understandably so. The young woman had left Ukraine to come to the United States in order to escape the violence of war. Tragically, she met deadly violence on a commuter train in an American city. The murder took place on Aug. 22, but the story broke into national headlines just in recent days.

The sudden attention can be traced to the release of security footage showing the young woman sit on the train, only to be savagely attacked without any provocation at all by the man sitting behind her. The shock and fear in her eyes are horrible to witness. The brutality of the murder is shocking to our eyes. The images tell a truth we cannot miss. This was an unprovoked murder undertaken and recorded on video.

Charlotte police quickly arrested Decarlos Brown, Jr. and charged him with first-degree murder. Authorities also acknowledged that Brown had a lengthy arrest record, including arrests for robbery with a dangerous weapon, threatening behavior, larceny, and other crimes. He served a prison term for one of the crimes, followed by a year of observation. More recently, he had been arrested, but released with “cashless bail,” a policy pushed by liberal activists. He had a very long list of encounters with police, who knew him to be a deeply troubled offender with a prison record. But he was left on the streets, and now we all know where that led.

Why wasn’t he in some form of custody or supervision? Over and over again we ask government leaders and law enforcement the same question: If you knew he was dangerous, why didn’t you do anything to protect the public?

We need to face the fact that American conservatives and liberals see the same crimes but not the same realities. When conservatives look at violent crime, they see a moral issue. When liberals look at the same crimes and statistics, they see a sociological issue. The natural response of conservatives is to demand that government protect innocent citizens from criminals and punish criminals in accordance with their crimes. The natural reflex of liberals is to demand that systemic problems be addressed, public funding be increased, and personal autonomy be respected. The vast majority of conservatives understand that social dynamics are part of the picture, but they insist that the primary issues are moral. The vast majority of liberals believe that at least some people belong behind bars, but they insist that the big issues are structural and systemic and they downplay personal responsibility.

At an even more basic level, conservatives and liberals see human nature in different terms. Conservatives generally understand human nature in terms of a vision basically compatible with the Bible and its understanding of human sin and human nature. Liberals, virtually from the beginning of modern liberalism, have possessed a more optimistic vision of human nature. Conservatives generally see evil emerging from the sinful human heart and evil intent. The basic problem is internal. Liberals are more prone to see the problem as external, explained by sociological realities and structural inequities in society.

This week, the New York Times ran a news story that declared: “A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right.” The Times seems to believe that the big story is outrage on the right after the release of the security camera video of the crime. Isn’t the bigger story the lack of outrage on the left?

After the crime was reported, Charlotte’s Democratic mayor, Vi Lyles, offered words of sympathy for the victim and condolences to her family. But, more recently, Mayor Lyles called for public understanding for Decarlos Brown—the man arrested for Iryna Zarutska’s murder (and seen murdering her in the security video). She attempted to place blame on the larger society, arguing that the brutal murder and arrest “should force us to look at what we are doing across our community to address root causes.” The mayor also said “we will never arrest our way out [of] issues such as homelessness and mental health” and she exhorted citizens to avoid “villainizing those who struggle with their mental health or those who are unhoused.”

The Trump administration joined the debate and accused Democrats of being soft on crime: “It’s the culmination of North Carolina’s Democrat politicians, prosecutors, and judges prioritizing woke agendas that fail to protect their citizens when they need them most,” according to a statement released by the White House.

Wouldn’t you think that liberals would at least reconsider their position in light of such a brutal and unprovoked murder? Wouldn’t you think they would agree that Decarlos Brown shouldn’t have been free on the streets? Wouldn’t this prompt a more fundamental rethinking of crime and punishment among liberals? Don’t hold your breath. It’s almost like they want to help write Republican ads for the next election.

Meanwhile, some on the right seem tempted to point to the fact that Decarlos Brown is black in order to score political points about race. Wouldn’t you think they would have the sense to see this brutal crime—and the liberal response—as an opportunity to make clear that conservatives will not make this case about race, but about sin and evil, crime and punishment?

Frankly, the smart conservative play is to let the liberals speak their minds and reveal their toxic ideas—and make sure they are recorded for future use. Closer to home, the smart play is for conservatives to avoid saying stupid stuff, take the high road, and underline the issues of right and wrong, crime and punishment—not race. Remember that our words are going to be recorded, too.

This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on September 10, 2025.

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Yes, Sen. Kaine, our rights come from the Creator: The Democratic senator from Virginia openly denies America’s founding vision

Committee hearings and meetings of the U.S. Senate are often routine and uneventful, but one hearing this week turned into something truly consequential. Sen. Tim Kaine, Democrat from Virginia, spoke only briefly during the hearing, but in those few minutes Sen. Kaine openly repudiated the founding vision of the United States of America. He also made an argument that is both contrary to history and extremely dangerous. The senator denied that rights come from God, rather than government. If you want to see the crisis in American public life and thought, look no further.

The hearing brought five State Department nominees before the Committee on Foreign Relations for confirmation. The session was largely uneventful until Sen. Kaine addressed one of the nominees, complaining about a quotation from Secretary of State Marco Rubio about human rights that was included in the nominee’s opening statement. Secretary Rubio had stated that “all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our creator, not from our laws, not from our governments.” Secretary Rubio’s point has immediate application to American foreign policy, because Rubio’s main point was that the human rights America would defend around the world—the very rights denied by many repressive regimes—are pre-political and universal, precisely because they are given to all men and women by the creator.

Kaine energetically denied such a basis for human rights and called the idea of rights as given by God is “what the Iranian government believes.” Kaine openly asserted that the claim that rights come from God amounts to theocracy. He went on to wander around his own argument for a few moments, and then he went back to say, “the notion that our rights do not come from our laws or our government should make people very, very nervous” and he claimed that an acknowledgement of natural rights given by God demeaned both law and government. Kaine openly claimed that our rights come from laws and governments, not from God.

The senator was reminded that it was none other than Thomas Jefferson, another Virginian, who affirmed in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Endowed by their Creator. That language was not merely poetic, for it incapsulated the very claim the founders of this nation were making. They claimed that the British crown had failed to protect those “unalienable rights” that had been granted by the Creator, and that the colonies were justly declaring their independence as “united States” on the basis of that very claim. Jefferson, primary author of the Declaration, explicitly claimed that these natural rights were given by God, not by government, and were thus a just cause for independence. Government was not the author of such rights, but the legitimacy of government rests on respect for those rights.

Let’s be clear. If government is the author of our rights, then it can also be the destroyer of those rights. If rights are made by law, then both the rights and the laws lack independent existence from the state.

I try to be appropriately respectful of all elected officials, but Sen. Kaine uttered one of the most profoundly wrong, dangerous, and downright stupid comments a member of the Senate might articulate. And, lest there be any misunderstanding, the senator made his assertions over and over again. His comments were not accidental. They were premeditated and delivered with passion. The danger in Kaine’s statement is that all human rights now become artificial and arbitrary. If rights are made by government, and do not even exist until a government declares them, we are doomed. That was the very point the signatories to the Declaration of Independence were making. The pleas they had been making to the British king were not that His Majesty would create their rights, but that he would respect those rights. They did not believe that the monarch actually could make such rights, nor did they believe their new nation could do any such thing.

There is something deeper here. The acknowledgement that natural rights are endowed by our Creator means that these natural rights are real. They exist because the Creator made them to exist. They were not just assertions and claims declared by a bunch of rebels meeting in Philadelphia. No, they existed before human beings knew to articulate them and before human governments were assigned to respect them.

Sen. Tim Kaine’s argument was stunning. I was in the room when he uttered those words. If I had not seen and heard him make this argument, I would scarcely have believed a U.S. senator could say such things. Furthermore, his intentional passion made clear that he meant what he said. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded that he had nearly fallen out of his chair when he heard Sen. Kaine’s comments, because what Kaine had called radical and dangerous “is literally the founding principle upon which the United States of America was created.”

But Sen. Kaine’s claim goes further than Sen. Cruz described. The political left in the United States is all about the process of declaring and demanding new artificial rights. Abortion rights one day, next the right for a man to marry a man, and now the supposed right to deny biological reality. Of course, if rights are just made by governments, then governments should just keep on making new “rights.” That’s the platform of the left, and Sen. Kaine made us see it clearly.

What he called “very, very troubling” is not only the foundational principle of our nation. Natural rights are real, and the statement made in the Declaration of Independence is true. If not, abandon all hope for our republic.

This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on September 5, 2025.

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