Longtime Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah said on Monday that she had been fired by the newspaper last week over “unacceptable” social media posts she made in the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination, adding that she was the last remaining full-time Black opinion writer on staff.
{snip}
Attiah’s termination from the Post comes days after MSNBC fired political analyst Matthew Dowd for describing Kirk – the founder of conservative youth organization Turning Point USA and a prominent MAGA pundit – as a “divisive” figure who pushed “hate speech” shortly after he was shot.
{snip}
Attiah, the paper’s founding Global Opinions editor who rose to prominence following the horrific murder of her columnist Jamal Khashoggi, noted that in the wake of Kirk’s death she had taken to social media to express “sadness and fear for America” while condemning the country’s acceptance of political violence.
“My most widely shared thread was not even about activist Charlie Kirk, who was horribly murdered, but about the political assassinations of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman, her husband and her dog,” she stated. “I pointed to the familiar pattern of America shrugging off gun deaths, and giving compassion for white men who commit and espouse political violence. This cycle has been documented for years. Nothing I said was new or false or disparaging— it is descriptive, and supported by data.”
Adding that she did her “journalistic duty” to remind people that, at the time, no suspect or motive had been identified in Kirk’s killing, she noted that she had only made one direct reference to the slain conservative influencer in her social media posts. In that instance, she quoted Kirk saying that prominent Black women such as Michelle Obama and Shelia Jackson Lee did not have “the brain processing power to be taken seriously” and needed to “steal a white person’s slot.”
{snip}
Pointing out that 22-year-old Tyler Robinson has since been accused of carrying out that assassination of Kirk, Attiah said that her “words on absolution for white male violence have proven prescient” as the suspect is “indeed a young white man, and already, lawmakers are urging us to pray for him.” She asserted that the media is now painting Robinson as a “good, all-American suburban kid,” and that the “cycle I mentioned has once again come to pass.”
{snip}
“Washington D.C. no longer has a paper that reflects the people it serves,” she wrote in her Substack on Monday. “What happened to me is 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.”
{snip}
[Editor’s Note: Here are the posts.]
The post Washington Post Columnist Says She Was Fired Over Her ‘Unacceptable’ Charlie Kirk Social Media Posts appeared first on American Renaissance.
American Renaissance
