Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, who is Black, said in a blog post on Monday that she was fired after she criticized slain pundit and political activist Charlie Kirk’s racist comment about Black women.
After Kirk was killed last Wednesday, Attiah posted to the Bluesky social network, “‘Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.’ -Charlie Kirk.”
Her quote of Kirk is slightly inaccurate, according to fact-checking website Snopes, which tracked down the video in which Kirk made his disgusting remark. In July 2023, he said:
If we would have said three weeks ago […] that [then-host at MSNBC] Joy Reid and [former first lady] Michelle Obama and [then-Rep.] Sheila Jackson Lee and [Supreme Court Justice] 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.
Though Kirk was smearing four especially accomplished Black women—and not explicitly all Black women—his racist remark was a part of his long history of bigotry and hatred, which included routinely attacking Black professionals and falsely assuming they had no experience.
In her Monday blog post, Attiah said she was fired from the Post after making her Bluesky posts about Kirk.
In a series of posts on the day Kirk was killed, she said she wished she “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.” She also mentioned that the United States has a history of violence “[b]ecause America, especially white America[,] is not going to do what it needs to do to get rid of the guns in their country.”
Attiah wrote in her blog post that the paper said her posts constituted “gross misconduct” and were “unacceptable.”
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, left, attends Donald Trump’s inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20.
“They rushed to fire me without even a conversation,” she added. “This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”
Attiah also claimed that she was “last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist at the Post” and that the paper and other institutions have seen a purge of Black voices since Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election.
Under owner Jeff Bezos, the Post’s editorial page has moved to the right, which Trump himself has praised. The removal of Attiah is just the latest apparent data point in the paper’s shift.
The Post’s reaction is part of a trend in which Kirk’s long history of statements expressing bigotry against women, LGBTQ+ people, and various ethnic groups—along with his promotion of baseless conspiracy theories and his defense of routine gun deaths—is being whitewashed.
Following his death, conservatives have used the murder as a cudgel to silence their critics.
Multiple university professors and faculty have lost their jobs after conservatives have pressured schools to punish people who made unflattering comments about Kirk.
Similarly, MSNBC fired political analyst Matthew Dowd after he noted that Kirk was a promoter of divisive speech, adding, “I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
Kirk’s death was a tragedy for his friends and family, but discussion of his open bigotry is being used to silence dissent in America.
