Washington Post Opinion Columnist Fired For Social Media Posts On Charlie Kirk

The Washington Post has fired opinion columnist Karen Attiah due to social media posts she made after the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, according to Attiah's own Substack as well as an email, from Washington Post human resources staff, obtained by the newsletter Status.

Attiah had worked with the Post's Opinions department for 11 years. From 2016 to 2021, she was editor of the Global Opinions section; at the time of her firing, she was a columnist. In the wake of Kirk's death in Utah and a school shooting in Colorado that same day, she wrote a number of posts on Bluesky about gun culture and political violence in America.

"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," Attiah wrote.

Those were the two posts explicitly cited in the letter from the Post HR department to Attiah, informing her of her firing. In another, she mentioned Kirk specifically:

That line attributed to Kirk is a paraphrased version of his original 2023 quote, which instead cites specific black women by name: "If we would've said that Joy Reid, and Michelle Obama, and Sheila Jackson Lee, and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. 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 seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to be taken somewhat seriously." (If the Post objected to Attiah's paraphrasing, they did not cite it in the letter to her.)

"My commentary received thoughtful engagement across platforms, support, and virtually no public backlash," Attiah wrote on Substack. "And yet, the Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being 'unacceptable', 'gross misconduct' and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues—charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false. They rushed to fire me without even a conversation—claiming disparagement on race."

The letter sent to Attiah by the head of human resources at the Post, Wayne Connell, was published in the Status newsletter. In it, Connell claims that Attiah's comments "violate The Post's social media policies, harm the integrity of the organization, and potentially endanger the physical safety of our staff." In particular, Attiah's posts "about white men" (cited above) were found to violate the social media policies that prohibit "postings that disparage people based on their race, gender, or other protected characteristics." Connell also notes that the comments "arise against the backdrop of documented performance concerns, which have been raised with you."

Attiah is one of many workers who have been fired after criticizing Kirk—or even just quoting his own words, or plainly stating what he believed in—on social media. A Suns reporter at PHNX Sports was fired last week for similar reasons. A mass doxing campaign, originally named "Expose Charlie's Murderers" and then rebranded as "Charlie Kirk Data Foundation," was endorsed by Vice President J.D. Vance. (The group previously claimed to have received over 63,000 submissions; its website is down at time of writing.) While guest-hosting Kirk's podcast on Monday, Vance mobilized his listeners: "When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. Hell, call their employer.”