Washington Post Fires Writer for Attacking Charlie Kirk

A Washington Post writer was fired for social media posts attacking Charlie Kirk and America’s handling of violence, written after Kirk’s assassination.

In a Substack essay, Karen Attiah said the paper deemed her comments “gross misconduct” after she accused Kirk of racism. She a comment of his out of context and bizarrely claimed that the country absolves white criminals, even as Utah seeks the death penalty for Kirk’s killer, far-left toeva community member Tyler Robinson.

She also accused the paper of trying to stifle “black voices.”

“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 [W]hite perpetrators especially, while nothing is done to curb deaths,” Attiah wrote.

Kirk, a leading conservative activist, was assassinated during a Utah campus event on Wednesday.

Attiah shared screenshots of her Bluesky posts, including one saying, “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.”

She said her only direct mention of Kirk was quoting remarks he had made: “‘Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a [W]hite person’s slot’ — Charlie Kirk.”

Reuters clarified that Attiah appeared to be referencing a July 2023 remark Kirk made on The Charlie Kirk Show, in which he named Joy Reid, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee — not a broad comment about all Black women, as a viral X post had suggested.

Attiah said she was dismissed for speaking out about political violence, “racial double standards” and what she called 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.”

She also argued that her firing was 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.”

A spokesperson for the Washington Post declined to discuss personnel matters.

Attiah, who joined the paper in 2014, pointed to the Post’s social media policy, which warns staff not to post material that could make people question their independence or the outlet’s fairness.