Karen Attiah, an opinion columnist for The Washington Post, has been fired after posting a number of controversial things on social media after Charlie Kirk was killed.
In a Substack essay on Monday, Attiah confirmed that she had been fired. The paper called her comments “unacceptable posts on social media.” The posts came after the death of Kirk, who was 31 years old and the founder of Turning Point USA.
“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,” one of Attiah’s posts on Bluesky said.
Another said, “Not tearing my clothes and putting ashes on my face to show how sad I am about a white man who supported violence is not the same as violence.”
The Washington Post said that her Bluesky posts were “unacceptable,” “gross misconduct,” and put her coworkers’ physical safety at risk.
Attiah’s Answer
Attiah strongly denied the charges in her Substack post.
“They quickly fired me without even talking to me,” she wrote. “This was not only a hasty overreach, but it also broke the very standards of fairness and rigor that the Post says it upholds.”
She said she was fired for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s lack of concern for guns.”
The background of Kirk’s murder
Kirk, a well-known conservative commentator, was shot and killed last week. Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old from Utah, has been arrested and is set to appear in court on Tuesday.
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Attiah wrote in her essay that she felt “sadness and fear for America” after the shooting. She also said that the country often ignores political violence. One of her most popular posts said, “For everyone who says there is no place for political violence in this country… Two Democratic lawmakers were shot in Minnesota this year, so keep that in mind. “And America didn’t care and went on.”
She went on to say that her comments were “descriptive, backed up by data, and not new or false.”
A Bigger Debate
Attiah has been in the news a lot lately, and this firing is the latest. In 2021, she got a lot of hate for tweeting that Black people were “lucky” that white women were “just calling them Karens and not calling for revenge.”
Attiah said she only directly mentioned Kirk once when she quoted one of his past controversial comments about Black women.
She said that her firing was part of a bigger problem: “What happened to me is part of a larger effort to silence Black voices in academia, business, government, and the media—something that has happened before and is just as dangerous as it is shameful.”