Washington Post fires columnist over social media posts after Charlie Kirk’s assassination
Kirk was killed during a campus event in Utah on Wednesday. On the same day, a shooting at a school in Colorado left two students injured and the attacker dead.
Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah has said she was fired from the newspaper over her posts on social media. (Photo: X/@RpsAgainstTrump)
Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah has said she was fired from the newspaper over her posts on social media following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and a separate school shooting in Colorado, Fox News reported.
Writing on her Substack on Monday, Attiah said: “On Bluesky, in the aftermath of the horrific shootings in Utah and Colorado, I condemned America’s acceptance of political violence and criticised its ritualised responses the hollow, cliched calls for ‘thoughts and prayers’ and ‘this is not who we are’ that normalise gun violence and absolve White perpetrators especially, while nothing is done to curb deaths.”
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Kirk was killed during a campus event in Utah on Wednesday. On the same day, a shooting at a school in Colorado left two students injured and the attacker dead.
Attiah shared screenshots of her Bluesky posts, including one that 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.”
She said her only direct mention of Kirk was a post quoting him: “‘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.”
According to Reuters, Kirk had made remarks on his show in July 2023 about affirmative action, naming Joy Reid, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee.
Attiah said she was accused by the Post of “gross misconduct” and of endangering colleagues, claims she rejected. “They 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 rigour the Post claims to uphold,” she wrote.
She added that she was the last Black full-time opinion columnist at the Post and argued: “What happened to me is part of a broader purge of Black voices from academia, business, government, and media a historical pattern as dangerous as it is shameful and tragic.”
The Washington Post declined to comment, Fox News said. Its guidelines on social media state that staff should not post content that could cause people to question their editorial independence or the paper’s ability to cover issues fairly.
Attiah, who first joined the Post in 2014, said her criticism focused on political violence, racial double standards, and what she described as America’s “empathy towards guns”.
Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah has said she was fired from the newspaper over her posts on social media. (Photo: X/@RpsAgainstTrump) 
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