Karen Attiah, the Washington Post opinion writer, who was fired after 11 years at the newspaper publicly pushed back against her termination and said that she would not be silenced. Her firing came in the wake of the shooting death of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk, but in a Substack post, Attiah, 39, says she did nothing more than use Kirk’s own words in a social media posting.
“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, put academics in danger by putting them on watch lists, claimed falsely that Black people were better off in the era of Jim Crow, said that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, and favorably reviewed a book that called liberals ‘Unhumans,’ “ she wrote. She then pointed out a citation she made on Bluesky of Kirk’s own words when referring to several high-profile and accomplished Black women: “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.”
“The Post accused my measured Bluesky post of being ‘unacceptable,’ ‘gross misconduct’ and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues –– charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false.”
Kirk, 31, known for his controversial far-right stances on race and gender, was shot and killed Sept. 10 while appearing at a Utah college campus. One suspect, Taylor Robinson was taken into custody and charged with murder.
Various places have let go of employees who have commented publicly on Kirk’s death. Including Mathew Dowd, a political analyst for MSNBC, the New York Times reported. Jimmy Kimmel, host of ABCs “Jimmy Kimmel Live” was “indefinitely” suspended from the network’s late-night lineup, after the suggestion by FCC Chair Brendan Carr, but was reinstated Tuesday after a wide backlash, accusing ABC of censorship.
Rumors have also spread that Attiah clashed with the Post’s Opinion Editor, Adam O’Neal, after he reportedly offered buyouts to writers whose work didn’t fit the editorial mix, The Guardian reported.
Attiah was the last full-time Black opinion columnist for the Post. Her departure marks a continued departure of writers and editors over the past year. “Washington D.C. no longer has a paper that reflects the people it serves,” she wrote.
Her post concluded with a link to sign up for her online lectures, Resistance Studies Series.
Here’s what he said, shortly after the Supreme Court rolled back affirmative action: >” 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 comin’ out and they’re saying it for us! They’re comin’ 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.<". Notice how race is never mentioned? Gender, either. The examples he used are POC and women, but he makes NO claim about their race being why he considers them dumb.
So that right there is a falsehood. She got fired for lying, and since this is the era of cancel culture, her words were sent to her employer, an act she undoubtedly supports when she's in favor of the outcome.
Well, THAT right there is a quote that has been cherry picked and stripped of context.