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Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah claimed she was fired by the newspaper last week over her social media posts following the assassination of Charlie Kirk — including one in which she condemned “excessive, false mourning” of the conservative activist.
Attiah, who spent 11 years at the paper and was the last remaining black person on its opinion page, wrote on her Substack that she was accused by the newspaper of “gross misconduct” which endangered colleagues’ safety — allegations she rejected as false.
Attiah had taken aim at Kirk — as well as the outpouring of grief and sympathy for the conservative activist who was gunned down last week during a college campus appearance in Utah.
“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,” Attiah wrote.
Attiah wrote that she referenced Kirk on just one Bluesky post in which she quoted him as saying: “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.”
“My commentary received thoughtful engagement across platforms, support, and virtually no public backlash,” Attiah wrote.
She bemoaned the fact that her exit from the newspaper leaves the opinion section without any African-Americans.
“I was the last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist at the Post… Washington D.C. no longer has a paper that reflects the people it serves,” she wrote.
Last month, Status newsletter reported that Attiah’s future at the Washington Post was murky after she held a tense meeting with her new boss, the freshly installed opinion editor Adam O’Neal.
O’Neal, formerly of The Economist, was hired by the Jeff Bezos-owned publication as part of his overhaul of the opinion section, which he wanted to reorient around the ideas of “free markets and personal liberties.”
The Washington Post has seen a mass exodus of talent since last fall, when Bezos prevented the editorial board from publishing its planned endorsement of then-Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency.
A Washington Post spokesperson said the paper would not comment on personnel matters.
Attiah characterized her dismissal as “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 claimed that a series of social media posts touting gun control that she wrote on the Bluesky platform, which has emerged as the preferred left-leaning alternative to X, was used as justification for her firing, even though the views she voiced were long-held and not new.
The other Bluesky posts were innocuous pleadings for more gun control, she wrote.
In her Bluesky posts from last week, Attiah referenced Kirk’s assassination in Utah last Wednesday as well as a a shooting on the campus of a high school near Denver on the same day.
A student, 16-year-old Desmond Holly, opened fire at Evergreen High School, wounding two classmates before turning the gun on himself.
“I wish I had hope for gun control and that I could believe ‘political violence has no place in this country.’ But we live in a country that accepts white children being massacred by gun violence. Not just accepts, but worships violence,” Attiah wrote on Bluesky on the day of both shootings.
In a subsequent post, she wrote: “Political violence has no place in this country… But we will also do nothing to curb the availability of the guns used to carry out said violence. The denial and empty rhetoric is learned helplessness— because the truth is.. America is sick and there is no cure in sight.”
Attiah wrote another post in which she said: “Because America, especially white America is not going to do what it needs to do to get rid of the guns in their country. It will be thoughts and prayers, ‘violence has no place’ out of a performance of goodness, not out of the resolve to convince their communities to disarm.”
Attiah also referenced the shooting of two Democratic state legislators in Minnesota earlier this year, lamenting that “America shrugged and moved on.”
On her Substack page, Attiah posted a photo outside the Washington Post’s offices holding a flaming newspaper and a rose in her mouth
She stressed that she did not celebrate Kirk’s death and noted her only direct mention of him was citing his past statements.
“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 wrote.
“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 on Substack.
Writing on Substack, Attiah insisted that her Bluesky commentary condemned political violence and pointed to what she claimed were racial double standards in America’s response to shootings.
Attiah defended her posts on Bluesky, writing on Substack: “Nothing I said was new or false or disparaging — it is descriptive, and supported by data.”
“I did my 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,” she wrote.
Nonetheless, her bosses at the Washington Post said they were “unacceptable” and amounted to “gross misconduct.”
“They rushed to fire me without even a conversation,” according to Attiah.
“This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”
English (US)