A longtime columnist at The Washington Post says the Jeff Bezos-owned paper fired her over posts she made in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Karen Attiah wrote on Substack that her BlueSky posts were deemed “unacceptable” and that her 11-year career at the Post ended last week. She alleged that the paper “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 said.
Attiah, 39, indicated that she disagrees with the decision, claiming she did not celebrate the murder of Kirk but instead “pointed to the familiar pattern of America shrugging off gun deaths, and giving compassion for white men who commit and espouse political violence.”
The Texas-born columnist said the only post that mentioned Kirk by name included “his own words on record.”
She wrote, partially quoting Kirk from a 2023 episode of his show: “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s spot.”
That is not an exact quote. Attiah’s critics pointed out that Kirk had been speaking specifically about liberal Black women such as Michelle Obama and former Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee—who have said that affirmative action gave them an opportunity to prove themselves—but was not addressing all “Black women,” and never said as such.
Attiah said her other posts after Kirk’s murder on Wednesday did not mention the prominent right-wing commentator by name. She said she was expressing her “sadness and fear for America” while also condemning how quickly the country has moved past other recent acts of political violence.
“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 wrote. “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.”
One of her posts 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.”
In another, she wrote that she refused to “tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence.”
Attiah claimed that her posts last week “received thoughtful engagement across platforms, support, and virtually no public backlash.” The posts were made on BlueSky, which is typically described as having a more left-wing user base than other social platforms. Its popularity spiked in retaliation to X owner Elon Musk’s hard turn to the MAGA right last summer.
Attiah posted on her social channels that she will continue writing columns on Substack. Her announcement was met with intense criticism on X, where supporters of Kirk accused her of misquoting the late influencer intentionally. Her announcement was received much more warmly on BlueSky.
The Washington Post declined to comment on the firing when reached by the Daily Beast. Attiah did not specify which post, if any, led to her firing. She said she was “the last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist at the Post, in one of the nation’s most diverse regions.”
Attiah, a staunch critic of President Donald Trump, was hired by the Post as a columnist in 2014. She was the paper’s founding Global Opinions editor and at one point counted Jamal Khashoggi, who Saudi Arabia assassinated in 2018, among her writers.
The legacy paper is owned by Bezos, who Forbes estimates is the fourth-wealthiest person in the world. The Amazon founder has overhauled the paper in the last year and vowed to make its opinion section’s sole focus to defend the free market and “personal liberties.”
The Status newsletter reported last month that Attiah opted not to take a buyout package despite having recently engaged in a “tense standoff” with its newly hired opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, who was hired as part of the Post’s conservative shift.
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