A left-wing columnist said Monday she was fired by The Washington Post over social media posts she made in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and a Colorado school shooting.
“On Bluesky, in the aftermath of the horrific shootings in Utah and Colorado, I condemned America’s acceptance of political violence and criticized its ritualized responses — the hollow, cliched calls for ‘thoughts and prayers’ and ‘this is not who we are’ that normalize gun violence and absolve white perpetrators especially, while nothing is done to curb deaths,” Karen Attiah wrote in a Substack post.
Kirk was assassinated during a campus event in Utah on Wednesday. That same day, a separate shooting at a Colorado school left two students injured and the assailant 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 [W]hite men who espouse hatred and violence.”
“My only direct reference to Kirk was one post — his own words on record,” Attiah wrote. In that post, she quoted Kirk as saying: “‘Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a [W]hite person’s slot.’”
She appeared to be referencing remarks Kirk made in July 2023 on The Charlie Kirk Show about affirmative action in which he named Joy Reid, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, according to Reuters. A viral X post at the time had suggested he was speaking broadly about all Black women.
Attiah said the Post dismissed her for speaking out against political violence, “racial double standards,” and America’s “empathy towards guns.”
“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,” she wrote. “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 rigor the Post claims to uphold.”
More over at The Hill:
Washington Post columnist says she was fired over Charlie Kirk posts https://t.co/PfrG3NsERP
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