Washington Post Fires Karen Attiah For Truthful Posts About Charlie Kirk

One thing we should have all known was going to happen in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing is that white people, conservatives, and other contrarians across the internet were all going to prove immediately that they were straight-up lying about how much they hate “cancel culture.”

It didn’t take long for Kirk fans and other political theater aficionados to launch a campaign to ostracize and go after the employment of people who either made light of Kirk’s death online or called him out for being the loud and proud bigot he was when he was alive. Possibly, the first prominent victim of this campaign is now-former Washington Post opinion columnist Karen Attiah, who announced via Substack that she has been fired from the Post for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.”

“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, adding, “I expressed sadness and fear for America.”

“My most widely shared thread was not even about activist Charlie Kirk, who was horribly murdered, but about the political assassinations of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman, her husband, and her dog,” she continued. “I pointed to the familiar pattern of America shrugging off gun deaths, and giving compassion for white men who commit and espouse political violence. This cycle has been documented for years. Nothing I said was new or false or disparaging— it is descriptive, and supported by data.”

Attiah also noted that she did her “journalistic duty, reminding people that despite President Trump’s partisan rushes to judgement, no suspect or motive had been identified in the killing of Charlie Kirk — exercising restraint even as I condemned hatred and violence.”

From Substack:

My journalistic and moral values for balance compelled me to condemn violence and murder without engaging in excessive, false mourning for a man who routinely attacked Black women as a group, put academics in danger by putting them on watch lists, claimed falsely that Black people were better off in the era of Jim Crow, said that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, and favorably reviewed a book that called liberals “Unhumans”. In a since-deleted post, a user accused me of supporting violence and fascism. I made clear that not performing over-the-top grief for white men who espouse violence was not the same as endorsing violence against them.

My only direct reference to Kirk was one post— his own words on record.

In the post Attiah deleted, she paraphrased Kirk in writing, “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.

Now, fragile and obtuse white conservatives are going to quibble over Attiah not using the exact words spewed out of Kirk’s white nationalist pie hole. Kirk didn’t actually mention “Black women” in general; he was speaking specifically about  Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all of whom he referred to as “affirmative action picks” before accusing them of not having “the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.” But here’s the thing: Charlie Kirk was a community college dropout who fancied himself a political expert, and he said these things about an accomplished journalist with decades of reporting under her belt (Reid), a Princeton University and Harvard Law School graduate who was a practicing attorney before she became our First Lady (Obama), a U.S. congresswoman whose political career spanned three and a half decades before she died last year (Jackson Lee), and the Black woman currently serving on the U.S. Supreme Court who has a deeper resume than virtually all of her co-justices (Brown Jackson.)

Kirk was attacking Black women. If one can’t see that clearly and unmistakably, they are just not living in truth.

Anyway, Attiah said 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.”

“They rushed to fire me without even a conversation,” she wrote. “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 also noted that she was “the last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist at the Post, in one of the nation’s most diverse regions,” and that her firing is “part of a broader purge of Black voices from academia, business, government, and media.”

What a perfect way to describe white supremacist cancel culture.

On Fox News, hosts are out here suggesting that homeless people should be exterminated and still keeping their jobs, because that network’s audience would never call for one’s termination over that offense. They’d call us all “snowflakes” for even calling for it. But calling an obnoxious, racist, misogynistic, queerphobic bigot exactly what he was — and offering up his own words to substantiate calling him that — well, that’s worth forcing people out of their jobs.

Imagine that.

SEE ALSO:

Conservatives Blame Everyone Else For Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Killer

Fox News Host Apologizes For Suggesting We ‘Just Kill’ Homeless People