The Washington Post has fired opinion columnist Karen Attiah after a series of controversial social media posts she made in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Attiah confirmed the dismissal in a Substack essay Monday. The paper called her remards “unacceptable social media posts.” The posts came in the wake of the killing of Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA.
One of Attiah’s posts on Bluesky 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.”
Another read: “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is… not the same as violence.”
The Washington Post accused her Bluesky posts of being “unacceptable,” “gross misconduct,” and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues.
In her Substack piece, Attiah forcefully rejected the charges.
“They rushed to fire me without even a conversation,” she wrote. “This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”
She said the reason for her firing was “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.”