The Washington Post has been ordered to rehire fired opinion columnist Karen Attiah and compensate her with back pay nearly a year after she was dismissed over social media posts related to the assasination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Attiah was axed as global opinions editor by the Post over comments on September 10, the day Kirk was fatally shot at a college campus in Utah, and a separate shooting in Colorado which injured two and left the teenage shooter dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Private arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa said in a Thursday decision that the Post "failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct." Attiah's termination letter, dated September 11 and shared by the writer on September 16, said she was fired for "gross misconduct" following social media comments regarding the death of Charlie Kirk which "violate The Post's social media policies, harm the integrity of our organization, and potentially endanger the physical safety of our staff." The letter highlighted two Bluesky posts on September 10.
They were: "Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence," which Attiah posted on September 10, the day Kirk was killed. "Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is…. not the same as violence," which she posted later that evening. The posts were among several the columnist made shortly after Kirk's death.
In another, Attiah attributed the quote, “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person's slot” to Kirk. A week later she wrote: "Hey everyone, in the heat of things, I originally saw this quote in a piece in the Nation, and their quote has since been updated to specify that it was specific to Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, etc.
But Kirk’s clearly anti-black statements speak for themselves," adding a link to a Guardian article headlined "Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’." In a seperate post on September 10, Attiah also wrote: "I wish I had hope for gun control and that I could believe “political violence has no place in this country”. But we live in a country that accepts white children being massacred by gun violence. Not just accepts, but worships violence." About 30 minutes later, she wrote: "Political violence has no place in this country...
But we will also do nothing to curb the availability of the guns used to carry out said violence. The denial and empty rhetoric is learned helplessness— because the truth is.. America is sick and there is no cure in sight." About 35 minutes after that post, she wrote: "Because America, especially white America is not going to do what it needs to do to get rid of the guns in their country.
It will be thoughts and prayers, “violence has no place” out of a performance of goodness, not out of the resolve to convince their communities to disarm." This is a breaking story.
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