A star Washington Post columnist fired by Jeff Bezos’s newspaper has warned that the billionaire is enabling America’s descent into authoritarianism under Donald Trump.
She says the state-sanctioned murder of journalists is no longer unthinkable. Trump has repeatedly spoken about using the military to stifle an “enemy within”—including Democrats, leftists, and protestors—saying troops are using their deployment in U.S. cities as “training grounds.”
Karen Attiah, 39, told the Daily Beast that America under Trump is on an “authoritarian” slide, enabled by tech billionaires like her former boss Bezos, who are consolidating power over platforms and newsrooms.
“We’re regressing—back to a wealthy class shaping reality to fit what they want,” she said. “Instead, a handful of people [and] companies control what we see. That’s fundamentally anti-democratic.
“It’s hard to separate Bezos from Musk, from CBS/TikTok. Globally, look at Jared Kushner’s firm with the Saudis buying into Electronic Arts. It’s using money and power to shape how people see the world—and they’re more naked about it.”
Noting that U.S. press-freedom rankings have fallen, and that journalists have been targeted and shot at during protests, she warned Americans to ignore the signs of a move towards fascism at their peril.
“We’re already living in an authoritarian culture. There’s shock, paralysis, fear,” said Attiah, whose firing from the Post last month over social posts about the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk has left the paper without any Black full-time opinion writers.
She said it wasn’t just journalists’ jobs that were now on the line—she fears they could be killed. “Journalists, particularly journalists of color, are facing increased death threats and physical harassment, moving from online to the actual physical realm. People’s lives are at stake—not just our jobs. It’s feeling existential…
“I keep telling people: keep your imagination open for how bad it can get. People used to say, ‘They’re not going after citizens.’ Now they are. The ‘leftist threat’ framing [and] rhetoric keeps escalating. The natural conclusion of dealing with your ‘enemies’ is to eliminate them.”
Attiah had hired American-based Saudi journalist and critic Jamal Khashoggi to write for the Post in 2017 before he was murdered in Turkey by his country’s leadership a year later.
“Sadly, I saw this firsthand, which is why I warned so much about domestic and international accountability,” she said.
”Jamal was a U.S. resident in Virginia. This administration covered up for [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed bin Salman—actively dismissed the killing. They’re now in power and more empowered, bold, racist—talking about locking people up, retribution, revenge. It’s scary.
“I always said it would boomerang back to us if we allowed such things—and now it feels that way. It’s not a stretch.
“I used to write, ‘How would we cover it if it happened somewhere else?’ Now the ‘somewhere else’ is here.”
Addressing Bezos directly, during an hour-long interview with the Beast last Friday, Attiah said: “Don’t you remember Jamal Khashoggi? A man lost his life, and now you’re cozying up to the people who killed him—and helped cover it up.”
She added: “Bezos himself was front and center when my colleague Jason Rezaian was imprisoned in Iran. When Jamal went missing and was murdered, he flew to Istanbul for the makeshift funeral. He was part of that story. And now there’s been a 180.”
Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Turkey in October 2018, after entering to collect paperwork. He was reported to have been dismembered with a bone saw. U.S. officials concluded he was killed by Saudi agents.
The following month, President Trump publicly rejected the CIA’s assessment that bin Salman ordered Khashoggi’s killing, saying the country’s leader “maybe did and maybe didn’t” know, and that the U.S. relationship was with Saudi Arabia as a whole. Two days later, Trump denied the CIA had even reached a firm conclusion.
Lawmakers from both parties blasted his stance and vowed investigations, with House Intel Democrat Adam Schiff—briefed on the CIA’s findings—accusing Trump of lying about what the agency concluded.
Bezos, who owns the Post and built the behemoth online shopping platform Amazon, at first publicly aligned himself with Khashoggi’s memory, attending a vigil on the first anniversary of the killing.
But Attiah says symbolic moments like that have given way to a broader capitulation by Bezos and his tech bro peers—in what she described as a “media capture,” where money and platforms shape reality, including who gets heard, and who gets silenced.
Pointing to a wave of corporate and institutional decisions that, in her view, reward power and punish dissent, she says tech titans like Bezos, who once postured as defenders of free expression, are now chilling critical speech.
“It’s about raw power and money—and there hasn’t been enough pushback,” Attiah said. “Universities capitulated. Media orgs are paying Trump to settle lawsuits. Law firms are capitulating. A lot of institutions are letting it happen.”
That is why Attiah believes her own dismissal, which she said left her “shocked and deeply confused,“ was about politics, not policy.
The Post labeled her social media commentary on Kirk as “gross misconduct,” an accusation Attiah rejects as an excuse to purge a critic. She says it was about racialized political violence and her refusal to “overly performatively mourn.”
Her firing, she says, fits a pattern inside the Bezos-era Post, where she says journalists of color have been “nakedly” pushed out of a paper, which is based in a city with a large Black population.
Attiah’s departure came after the exit of several Black Post opinion staffers—four in the past six months alone, including Attiah—with several publicly stating their distaste for the paper’s MAGA-friendly political stance, particularly since the start of Trump’s second term under Bezos.
Last October, Bezos announced the paper was moving away from endorsing in presidential races for the first time in 36 years—an abrupt reversal a month before Trump’s re-election.
The diktat, Attiah says, caused “shockwaves” among Post journalists.
Then, in February this year, just after Trump’s inauguration, Bezos directed the Post’s opinion writers to shift their focus from politics and instead concentrate solely on topics tied to “personal liberties and free markets.” That triggered a petition signed by over 400 staff members who voiced “deep alarm” over the change.
Bezos’ Post henchman, publisher and CEO Will Lewis, then told staff this summer that those who didn’t feel “aligned” with the paper’s “reinvention” should consider leaving.
Several did, including Pulitzer Prize winners Jonathan Capehart and Eugene Robinson, and another veteran black journalist, Joe Davidson, who attacked Bezos’ new direction in a scathing Facebook post.
“The space for dissent shrank fast,” Attiah explained. “So many people who shared my values—who cared about human rights and diversity—have gone, been bought out, pushed out, or left.
“I don’t know if we’ve ever seen a major media organization do such an about-face this fast. This is the paper of Watergate, multiple Pulitzers, the Access Hollywood tape—the thorn in Trump’s side—now completely flipped.”
Attiah has filed a Washington Post Guild grievance and retained legal counsel—moves she hopes will force disclosure about who ordered her termination and why.
She “legitimately” does not yet know whether Bezos and the Trump administration will be drawn into discovery, but says she intends to find out and will share updates along with her work on Substack.
“I’d love to find out the details of the decisions made in my case. A lot of people said I could’ve stayed silent—just taken the letter and gone. But I can’t capitulate. This was unjust. How can I write about institutions if I won’t stand up for myself?”
If the case proceeds, Attiah believes it will test whether America’s marquee newsrooms retain the independence to challenge power—corporate and political—or whether, as she fears, media capture has already done its work.
“I haven’t changed,” she said. “If the Post has changed and has things to hide, we have processes for that.”
Attiah is now running her own class—Race, Media, and International Affairs—after Columbia pulled funding, teaching it independently over Zoom with sliding-scale pricing, and the same speakers and materials she used at the university.
She feels it’s even more vital now than ever. “Talking about race is scary in Trump’s America, but I’m doing it anyway,” she said, adding that what happened at the Post “only lights the fire for why we need independent ways to resist capitulation and censorship.”
“People’s lives are at stake—not just our jobs.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Bezos and the Washington Post for comment.
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