The Washington Post has terminated columnist Karen Attiah after she posted controversial comments on social media in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination and a Colorado school shooting.
Attiah revealed the firing in a Substack post on Monday.
She said she was dismissed for her posts on the liberal social media platform Bluesky.
In the posts, Attiah said she was criticizing what she called America’s “acceptance of political violence” and “racial double standards.”
“On Bluesky, in the aftermath of the horrific shootings in Utah and Colorado, I condemned America’s acceptance of political violence and criticized its ritualized responses — the hollow, cliched calls for ‘thoughts and prayers’ and ‘this is not who we are’ that normalize gun violence and absolve white perpetrators especially, while nothing is done to curb deaths,” Attiah wrote.
Kirk, the 31-year-old Turning Point USA founder and father of two, was gunned down while speaking at Utah Valley University last Wednesday.
That same day, a shooter opened fire at a Colorado school, leaving two students injured before being killed.
Controversial Posts
Attiah shared screenshots of her Bluesky posts, including one that read:
“Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness, and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.”
She said her “only direct reference to Kirk” was another post quoting his past remarks out of context.
“‘Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot’- Charlie Kirk,” Attiah wrote.
The remark appeared to stem from Kirk’s July 2023 comments on affirmative action during “The Charlie Kirk Show.”
During the show, he criticized race-based admissions.
Kirk singled out specific public figures, including Joy Reid, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), all of whom benefited from race-based affirmative action.
Attiah claimed she was targeted for speaking out.
“The Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being ‘unacceptable’, ‘gross misconduct’ and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false,” she wrote.
“They rushed to fire me without even a conversation.
“This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”
She further argued that her firing reflected a purge of minority voices.
“What happened to me is part of a broader purge of black voices from academia, business, government, and media — a historical pattern as dangerous as it is shameful — and tragic,” she added.
Attiah also noted she was the Post’s last black full-time opinion columnist.
The Post’s Response
The Washington Post declined to comment on personnel matters but pointed to its social media standards, which state:
“Post journalists should ensure that their activity on social media platforms would not make reasonable people question their editorial independence, nor make reasonable people question The Post’s ability to cover issues fairly.”
Attiah, who first joined the Post in 2014, included a 2019 photo of herself with Post owner Jeff Bezos in her Substack post announcing the firing.
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