Immediately after Kirk was killed, Karen Attiah decided to blame angry white men for gun violence in America.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the consequences of posting misinformation and hateful rhetoric online in the wake of a tragedy, and cover more media misses.
‘The Washington Post Fired Me’
Left-wing columnist Karen Attiah revealed Monday she had been fired from the Washington Post over social media posts she shared in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week.
In a post on Substack titled, “The Washington Post Fired Me — But My Voice Will Not Be Silenced,” Attiah defended her posts on Kirk and gun violence, which came after both the deadly attack on the conservative activist in Utah, and a school shooting in Colorado that left two students injured and the shooter dead.
“I spoke out against hatred and violence in America — and it cost me my job,” she wrote.
“As a columnist, I used my voice to defend freedom and democracy, challenge power and reflect on culture and politics with honesty and conviction,” she added. “Now, I am the one being silenced — for doing my job.”
“On Bluesky, in the aftermath of the horrific shootings in Utah and Colorado, I condemned America’s acceptance of political violence and criticized its ritualized responses — the hollow, cliched calls for ‘thoughts and prayers’ and ‘this is not who we are’ that normalize gun violence and absolve white perpetrators especially, while nothing is done to curb deaths,” she wrote.
Attiah included several of her Bluesky posts in the Substack.
“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,” she wrote in one post.
She argued her only “direct reference to Kirk was one post— his own words on record.”
Attiah had shared a quote on Bluesky that she attributed to Kirk: “”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.”
However, that “quote” was a misleading rendering of remarks Kirk made on The Charlie Kirk Show in July 2023 about affirmative action, in which he was specifically talking about Joy Reid, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama, and Sheila Jackson Lee — not all black women.
In the full clip, Kirk says:
If we would have said three weeks ago […] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us! They’re coming out and they’re saying, “I’m only here because of affirmative action.”
Yeah, we know. 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.
But Attiah, in her self-aggrandizing Substack rant, claims she was fired for speaking out against political violence, “racial double standards,” and America’s “empathy towards guns.”
“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. They rushed to fire me without even a conversation. 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 wrote.
The Washington Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
She went on to argue that her experience 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.”
Attiah disparaged the Post for firing her because she was the last black full-time opinion columnist on its staff. She argued the paper no longer reflects the people it serves in the diverse city of Washington, D.C.
Despite her strong defense of her controversial posts, her remarks were in clear violation of the Post’s social media policy, which says, “Post journalists should ensure that their activity on social media platforms would not make reasonable people question their editorial independence, nor make reasonable people question The Post’s ability to cover issues fairly.”
Her comments were also at odds with the stated new direction of the Post’s opinion page, which will now prioritize personal liberty and free markets under new leadership.
And the gun violence posts were far from Attiah’s first offense against her employer’s social media policy.
In 2021, Attiah wrote that white women were “lucky” that black people are “just calling them Karens and not calling for revenge.”
Though she ultimately deleted the post, she first doubled down in the comments, saying, “I’m just saying. Be happy we are calling for equality. And not actual revenge.”
Attiah was just one of numerous left-leaning figures who lost their jobs over their controversial comments in the wake of Kirk’s assassination.
MSNBC ousted analyst Matthew Dowd after he reacted to news of Kirk’s shooting by saying, on-air, “We don’t know if [the gunshot] was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration.”
“I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions,” he added.
Dowd also defended himself on Substack:
The Right Wing media mob ginned up, went after me on a plethora of platforms, and MSNBC reacted to that mob. Even though most at MSNBC knew my words were being misconstrued, the timing of my words forgotten (remember I said this before anyone knew Kirk was a target), and that I apologized for any miscommunication on my part, I was terminated by the end of the day.
Headline Fail of the Week
Jezebel was left to publish an insane editor’s note last week on a piece titled, “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk.”
The article was published one day before Kirk’s assassination.
“Editor’s Note: This story was published on September 8. Jezebel condemns the shooting of Charlie Kirk in the strongest possible terms,” Jezebel’s editors wrote. “We do not endorse, encourage, or excuse political violence of any kind.”
Media Misses
• Sam Harris, writing for the Free Press, spreads the idea that Kirk’s alleged killer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, “doesn’t appear to be the far-left golem conjured by the right.”
“He is a Utah native who grew up hunting with his Republican parents. We don’t yet know why he did what he did, but there is a very good chance that he represents no cause beyond his own mental illness,” Harris adds. Yet he fails to mention that Utah Governor Spencer Cox confirmed Robinson was “deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology” and was living with his transgender romantic partner in the lead-up to the assassination.
• On Thursday, during an interview with former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, CBS Mornings co-host Nate Burleson said Kirk’s speech was “offensive to specific communities” and asked if Republicans should be more careful with their rhetoric. “Speaking of this tragedy, is this a moment for your party to reflect on political violence? Is it a moment for us to think about the responsibility of our political leaders and their voices and what it does to the masses as they get lost in misinformation or disinformation that turns into and spills into political violence?”
• CNN confusingly told online readers that federal officials were probing a rifle and ammo “scrawled with cultural phrases” after Kirk’s killing. “A range of phrases related to cultural issues were found scrawled on a rifle and ammunition found in the woods near where conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered on Wednesday, according to sources with knowledge of the investigation,” the report said. And yet reports indicated at the time, and law enforcement sources later confirmed, that those messages included, “Hey fascist! Catch” and “Bella ciao, bella ciao,” a leftist song celebrating the end of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.