The Hierarchy of Outrage: How Political Narratives Decide Which Victims Matter

Feb. 1st, 2026 by: Richard A. Graves

Writer and independent scholar examining governance, institutional legitimacy, and social outcomes. History, theology, public policy.

"Some deaths are elevated into moral emergencies. Others are quietly normalized. This is the hierarchy of outrage..."

The hierarchy of outrage operates on both the American political left and the American political right. In each camp, violence is not evaluated primarily by harm, innocence, or loss of life, but by narrative utility. A murder becomes worthy of protest, commentary, or sustained national attention only when the victim, and more pointedly the perpetrator, fit a politically serviceable profile. When that profile is absent, moral urgency dissipates, even when the harm is severe and the victim indisputably innocent.

On the activist left, violence that can be framed as an indictment of policing or the state is elevated into a national moral emergency by segments of national media, political commentary, and the broader celebrity culture. Violence that cannot be framed in this way is softened, psychologized, or quietly dismissed, reframed as an unfortunate byproduct of social conditions rather than a failure requiring accountability. On the activist right, violence that can be racialized or folded into civilizational decline narratives is amplified by ideological media ecosystems and elite influencers aligned with nationalist politics, often to mobilize their respective bases. Violence that disrupts these narratives is minimized or ignored. Different aesthetics, the same moral failure.

The contrast between the murders of Sade Carleena Robinson, a 19 year old Black college student killed in 2024, and Iryna Zarutska, a 23 year old Ukrainian refugee fatally stabbed on a Charlotte, North Carolina light rail train in August 2025, illustrates this hierarchy with unsettling clarity.

In Robinson’s case, there was no sustained national outrage from either side of the political spectrum. The accused was not a police officer. The perpetrator was not a Black man. The victim was not a white woman. As a result, the familiar machinery of protest on the left remained dormant, and the outrage economy on the right found no narrative value. Her murder could not be weaponized to advance a broader ideological claim and was therefore absorbed quietly into abstraction.

By contrast, the murder of Zarutska generated immediate national attention from segments of the political right. Although she was an immigrant, she fit a different symbolic profile, young, white, and European, and her death was quickly incorporated into a political narrative blaming Democratic governance and immigration policy. This attention was not merely organic. Murals memorializing Zarutska appeared in multiple cities, including Chicago, as part of a coordinated effort funded by Elon Musk (Chicago Sun-Times, 2026). The act of memorialization itself is not inherently objectionable. What is revealing is the asymmetry. There were no comparable murals, no sustained national attention, and no symbolic elevation for Robinson in Milwaukee. A Black woman murdered by a white man offers no civilizational allegory and no racialized morality play, and therefore receives no spectacle.

Some have argued that the existence of video footage in Zarutska’s case explains the disparity in attention. That explanation fails under scrutiny. The murder of Debrina Kawam, a 57 year old woman who was set on fire on a New York City subway train, was also captured on video, yet it did not generate sustained national outrage (Kilgannon, 2025). Reporting on Kawam’s life revealed that she had experienced homelessness and mental health instability, despite having previously lived a markedly different and stable life trajectory (Newman & Colon, 2025). Although Kawam was white, she did not fit the preferred optics of youth, beauty, or symbolic innocence.

Her death was instead subsumed into narratives of urban disorder and social dysfunction. Compounding this, the accused in Kawam’s case was both an illegal immigrant and reportedly mentally ill, categories that progressive discourse is often reluctant to scrutinize for fear of stereotyping, even when doing so comes at the expense of victims. Thankfully, a memorial service flyer circulated locally emphasized Kawam’s humanity and the ordinariness of her life, a stark contrast to the limited national attention her death received.

This selective moral attention is mirrored in the conduct of Democratic municipal leadership. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson provides a particularly instructive example. In January 2026, Johnson signed an executive order placing “ICE on notice,” directing the Chicago Police Department to document alleged misconduct by federal immigration agents and pursue potential criminal referrals, making Chicago the first city to formalize an investigative infrastructure aimed at federal law enforcement (Reuters, 2026). The order was framed as a moral response to incidents involving ICE agents in Minnesota, matters over which the mayor has neither jurisdiction nor operational authority.

At the same time, lethal violence continued unabated within Chicago itself. Kiara Jenkins, a 36 year old Woodlawn mother of five, was shot and killed while heading to church (ABC7 Chicago, 2026a). Andrew Garay, a 30 year old U.S. Army veteran and father, was shot and killed in Humboldt Park weeks later (ABC7 Chicago, 2026b). These deaths did not prompt comparable executive urgency, sustained national media attention, or symbolic mobilization. The contrast is instructive. Moral energy was expended on national political signaling, while the immediate safety of city residents remained secondary.

Across ideological lines, the pattern is consistent. Progressive actors minimize or psychologize violence that indicts their policy preferences unless it can be weaponized against policing or the state. Reactionary actors elevate select victims when their suffering can be converted into racialized or civilizational symbolism. In both cases, victims are valued not according to innocence or harm, but according to usefulness. Some deaths are elevated into moral emergencies. Others are quietly normalized. This is the hierarchy of outrage, a political culture in which spectacle outranks consequence, narrative convenience displaces justice, and the most vulnerable victims are rendered invisible.

There is one final dimension to this hierarchy that deserves explicit acknowledgment: for a large portion of the public, victims like Sade Carleena Robinson were not ignored, they were never encountered at all. That absence cannot be explained purely by organic news cycles, audience interest, or competing headlines. Media institutions function as non neutral gatekeepers of moral visibility. They decide which deaths are amplified into the national consciousness and which remain locally contained. That gatekeeping power shapes what the public believes is rare, what is typical, and what is morally urgent.

In theory, the contemporary media ecosystem is decentralized, but that is not the reality. In practice, agenda setting remains highly concentrated. Editorial priorities, algorithmic promotion, donor aligned advocacy networks, sponsors and political access journalism all exert gravitational pull on what becomes “national news.” When a victim does not serve an ideological purpose, lacks symbolic utility, or complicates preferred narratives, their story is often filtered out before it ever reaches a broad audience. This filtering need not be conspiratorial to be consequential. Structural bias, professional incentives, and political alignment are sufficient to produce silence.

At minimum, this renders media a non neutral arbiter of moral relevance. At worst, it makes media an active partner of the political class, selecting victims and tragedies in ways that reinforce existing power arrangements, ideological loyalties, and policy agendas. The result is a public that believes it is responding to reality, when in fact it is responding to a curated moral script.

The most disturbing feature of this system is not simply that outrage is uneven, but that invisibility is normalized. When entire categories of innocent victims fail to register as at least regional, or national events, the moral imagination itself contracts. Justice becomes episodic. Compassion becomes conditional. And violence against the socially inconvenient is absorbed as background noise. This is not a failure of empathy alone. It is a failure of institutional honesty.

The hierarchy of outrage is therefore sustained not only by activists and politicians, but also by the informational infrastructure that decides whose suffering is worth knowing. Until that structure is confronted, calls for moral consistency will continue to fail, not because the public is incapable of caring, but because it is never fully shown what it is being asked to care about.

References

ABC7 Chicago. (2026a, January). Kiara Jenkins, Woodlawn mother of 5 shot to death while heading to church remembered as loving, welcoming.https://abc7chicago.com/post/kiara-jenkins-killed-woodlawn-chicago-shooting-64th-drexel-heading-mt-bethlehem-missionary-baptist-church/18433801/

ABC7 Chicago. (2026b, January). Andrew Garay, U.S. Army veteran and father, shot and killed in Humboldt Park remembered as selfless and hardworking.https://abc7chicago.com/post/andrew-garay-us-army-veteran-dad-killed-humboldt-park-chicago-shooting-remembered-selfless-hardworking/18480983/

Chicago Sun-Times. (2026, January 27). Mural of slain Ukrainian refugee, linked to effort funded by Elon Musk, appears in Chicago.https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2026/01/27/mural-of-slain-ukrainian-refugee-effort-funded-by-elon-musk-appears-in-chicago-sav45

Kilgannon, C. (2025, January 4). Woman is set on fire and killed on subway platform in Brooklyn. The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/04/nyregion/woman-set-on-fire-debrina-kawam.html

Newman, A., & Colon, S. (2025, January 4). Subway victim’s brutal end stuns friends from her happy past. The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/04/nyregion/woman-set-on-fire-debrina-kawam.html

Reuters. (2026, January 31). Chicago mayor signs executive order directing police to investigate federal immigration agents.https://www.reuters.com/world/us/chicago-mayor-tells-police-probe-allegations-illegal-activity-by-