WaPo Columnist Says She Was Fired After Sharing Fake Quote From Charlie Kirk

Columnist Karen Attiah complained on Monday that The Washington Post fired her for falsely quoting Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk following his assassination.

The Post fired Attiah for falsely quoting Kirk stating that “black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously” on BlueSky, a left-wing social media website. In a Substack post, Attiah accused the Post of engaging in “hasty overreach” over their swift firing of her and instantly made her termination about race.

“And yet, 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. 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,” Attiah wrote. “Since then, my words on absolution for white male violence have proven prescient. The suspect in Kirk’s killing is indeed a young white man, and already, lawmakers are urging us to pray for him. The media is painting the 22 year-old as a good, all-American suburban kid. The cycle I mentioned has once again come to pass.”

The fired columnist falsely accused Kirk of having “attacked Black women” and of saying that black people were better off living under Jim Crow. Kirk never made any of these claims.

The Post told Attiah that her BlueSky posts were “unacceptable,” “gross misconduct” and endangered the safety of colleagues.

On the day of Kirk’s assassination, Attiah wrote that the U.S. allowed “white children to be massacred by gun violence” because “White America” does not want to make any changes relating to guns. She shamelessly wrote in the Substack post that the reaction to Kirk’s death is another example of society “giving compassion for white men who commit and espouse political violence.”