Columnist Karen Attiah Claims Washington Post Axed Her Over Charlie Kirk Posts
(Screengrab via YouTube)
Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah announced she was fired last week after editors deemed her social media commentary, including a post made following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, as “unacceptable.”
In a statement posted to Substack on Monday, Attiah said she was accused of “gross misconduct” and of “endangering the physical safety of colleagues.” She called the allegations “charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false.”
Attiah argued her posts were measured and focused, not on Kirk but on America’s growing tolerance for 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.
“Nothing I said was new or false or disparaging – it is descriptive, and supported by data,” she added.
In her statement, Attiah said her only direct reference to Kirk was to cite his “own words” sharing a past post from the day after the activist was killed.
(Screengrab via @karenattiah.bsky.social/BlueSky)
Attiah’s quote, however, was not in Kirk’s “own words.” The misquote appears to reference remarks in a show from July 2023 where Kirk was speaking specifically about former MSNBC host Joy Reid, former first lady Michelle Obama, then-congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a tirade about affirmative action.
While Kirk’s views on the subject remain deeply contentious among liberals such as Attiah, his precise wording was:
If we would have said three weeks ago […] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us! They’re coming out and they’re saying, “I’m only here because of affirmative action.” Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.
Reacting to news of Attiah’s firing, journalist Brad Polumbo argued that pushing the “fake quote” to “smear” Kirk was “100% a fireable offense.”
The columnist’s dismissal comes amid a wave of firings and suspensions in the media for comments made about Kirk after his killing.
MSNBC parted ways with analyst Matthew Dowd, who described the Turning Point USA founder as a “divisive” figure who pushed “hate speech” on-air in coverage just after the killing.
Mediaite has reached out to the Washington Post for comment.
