Columnist Karen Attiah says she was fired by the Washington Post last week over a series of social media posts about gun control and race in the wake of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
“As a columnist, I used my voice to defend freedom and democracy, challenge power and reflect on culture and politics with honesty and conviction,” Attiah wrote in a post on Substack published on Monday. “Now, I am the one being silenced — for doing my job.”
In writings on the left-leaning social media app Bluesky, Attiah bemoaned that America, in her view, “accepts and worships” gun violence.
University begins to reopen after Charlie Kirk assassination
“I pointed to the familiar pattern of America shrugging off gun deaths, and giving compassion for white men who commit and espouse political violence,” she wrote in the subsequent Substack post.
“My only direct reference to Kirk was one post— his own words on record,” she said, including a screenshot of a quote in which he said several prominent Black women “do not have brain processing power to be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot.”
The Post, the columnist said, “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.”
“They rushed to fire me without even a conversation,” Attiah said. “This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”
A Post spokesperson decline to comment and pointed The Hill to the news outlet’s publicly-available social media policy and standards for its journalists.
Attiah had been a columnist with the Post for more than a decade.
