Washington Submit columnist Karen Attiah, who’s Black, mentioned in a weblog put up on Monday that she was fired after she criticized slain pundit and political activist Charlie Kirk’s racist remark about Black ladies.
After Kirk was killed final Wednesday, Attiah posted to the Bluesky social community, “‘Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.’ -Charlie Kirk.”
Her quote of Kirk is barely inaccurate, in line with fact-checking web site Snopes, which tracked down the video through which Kirk made his disgusting comment. In July 2023, he mentioned:
If we’d have mentioned three weeks in the past […] that [then-host at MSNBC] Pleasure Reid and [former first lady] Michelle Obama and [then-Rep.] Sheila Jackson Lee and [Supreme Court Justice] Ketanji Brown Jackson have been affirmative-action picks, we’d have been referred to as racist. However now they’re popping out and so they’re saying it for us! They’re popping out and so they’re saying, “I’m only here because of affirmative action.”
Yeah, we all know. You should not have the mind processing energy to in any other case be taken actually significantly. You needed to go steal a white particular person’s slot to go be taken considerably significantly.
Although Kirk was smearing 4 particularly completed Black ladies—and never explicitly all Black ladies—his racist comment was part of his lengthy historical past of bigotry and hatred, which included routinely attacking Black professionals and falsely assuming that they had no expertise.
In her Monday weblog put up, Attiah mentioned she was fired from the Submit after making her Bluesky posts about Kirk.
In a sequence of posts on the day Kirk was killed, she mentioned she wished she “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.” She additionally talked about that america has a historical past of violence “[b]ecause America, especially white America[,] is not going to do what it needs to do to get rid of the guns in their country.”
Attiah wrote in her weblog put up that the paper mentioned her posts constituted “gross misconduct” and have been “unacceptable.”
Washington Submit proprietor Jeff Bezos, left, attends Donald Trump’s inauguration within the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20.
“They rushed to fire me without even a conversation,” she added. “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 additionally claimed that she was “last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist at the Post” and that the paper and different establishments have seen a purge of Black voices since Donald Trump gained the 2024 presidential election.
Below proprietor Jeff Bezos, the Submit’s editorial web page has moved to the appropriate, which Trump himself has praised. The removing of Attiah is simply the newest obvious knowledge level within the paper’s shift.
The Submit’s response is a part of a pattern through which Kirk’s lengthy historical past of statements expressing bigotry towards ladies, LGBTQ+ individuals, and varied ethnic teams—alongside together with his promotion of baseless conspiracy theories and his protection of routine gun deaths—is being whitewashed.
A number of college professors and college have misplaced their jobs after conservatives have pressured faculties to punish individuals who made unflattering feedback about Kirk.
Equally, MSNBC fired political analyst Matthew Dowd after he famous that Kirk was a promoter of divisive speech, including, “I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
Kirk’s loss of life was a tragedy for his family and friends, however dialogue of his open bigotry is getting used to silence dissent in America.
