JUST IN: The Washington Post has fired race hustler Karen Attiah. pic.twitter.com/lPKOfHFR8M
— Bad Hombre (@Badhombre) September 15, 2025
"The Washington Post fired me" over Charlie Kirk posts, writes @KarenAttiah.
"I have been canceled by Columbia. I have now been canceled by the Washington Post." https://t.co/3kLfcwq99h
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) September 15, 2025
She didn’t have to mourn or like Charlie Kirk. That is what so many liberals don’t understand. The issue is their promotion and endorsement of violence and murder against those with whom they disagree.
— KJ (@SnayburtJames) September 15, 2025
This is a fake quote. Charlie never said it. It was in a tweet that featured a video, but in the video he never says it. Compete slander of a dead man, the likes of which probably got him killed. pic.twitter.com/Wb8INsw2rG
— Sud (@Sudsiii) September 15, 2025
It’s a sad day for journalism when you can’t even libel a dead white guy w/ fake quotes
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 15, 2025
I like where she sort of acknowledges she made the quote up , but is still confused because she felt like the post got good engagement. Journalism is of course about engagement and not truth.
— Matt Wright (@mattwr) September 15, 2025
WAPO EDITOR: I Got Fired Over Charlie Kirk.
[Karen] Attiah sources this from an article rushed out by The Guardian less than 24 hours after Kirk’s death that attempted to argue sotto voce that Kirk had it coming. Even if one grants the Guardian the presumption that they took his words in context, Attiah changed the quote the Guardian provided at the link she used as a reference. This is the quote that the Guardian allegedly pulled from Kirk’s show in July 2023:
If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.
Note that the quote doesn’t include the phrase “black women” at all. Kirk referenced four specific black women in this criticism, arguing that their own words made them look like affirmative-action charity cases. The “you” in this case refers to the four women he named. Attiah rewrote this quote to make it sound as though Kirk was talking about all black women.
That is journalistic fraud. And that is likely why the Post just handed Attiah her walking papers. She lied to readers, and did so to imply that Charlie Kirk had it coming. She used quotation marks to sell her fraud, knowing damned well that quotation marks mean something to readers, and that falsely representing a quote in that manner is corrupt.
h/t jlee2027