Liberal Washington Post Columnist Fired Over Charlie Kirk Comments

Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah — who was with the outlet for just over a decade — was terminated over a Bluesky post in which she misquoted the recently-assassinated conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.

Attiah claimed in a Substack article that the outlet had fired her for doing her job as a journalist, saying that she’d only been “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.”

In a series of Bluesky posts, Attiah claimed that Americans would never take action on gun control because they were fine with sacrificing the lives of children in order to keep access to firearms — and “especially white America is not going to do what it needs to do to get rid of the guns in their country.”

The only post that mentioned Kirk by name was a quote she attributed to him:

“Black women do not have the brain-processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.”

“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,” Attiah added.

But as journalist Jerry Dunleavy noted, Attiah’s quote was inaccurate. She suggested, as a number of others had, that Kirk was referring to all black women when he said that they lacked “the brain-processing power to be taken seriously.” In reality, Kirk had directed that comment at a few specific black women: Michelle Obama, the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, former MSNBC host Joy Reid, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Karen Attiah says she has been fired by WaPo. In her Substack, she shares her post which had mentioned Charlie Kirk & doubles down — & it’s a fake quote! Charlie did not say this about “Black women” writ-large, he said it about Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, & KBJ. pic.twitter.com/mN326WXKcS

— Jerry Dunleavy IV ???????? (@JerryDunleavy) September 15, 2025

WATCH:

Charlie Kirk’s thoughts on Michelle Obama, Joy Reid, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. pic.twitter.com/A3hwo1NYOq

— VIBE Magazine (@VibeMagazine) September 12, 2025