The reckoning on the Left has been something to behold. Troves of people, not all public officials, have been getting exposed for their ghoulish celebrations over the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Some have been put on administrative leave, and others have been fired from their jobs. Kids, it’s free speech, yes. No one had a black bag placed over their heads and dragged out by the secret police overnight, but most, if not all, were at-will employees. And no employer wants workers who are pro-domestic terrorism. And when you lie about something in the media, you are for sure going to get your ass handed to you in a handbag.
WaPo fired Karen Attiah for posting a fake quote from Charlie Kirk. She claims her post received “virtually no public backlash.” (Perhaps she believes this because she posted it in an echo chamber.) Now she’s crying that she’s the victim of a race-related cancelation. pic.twitter.com/VTexLGQP5l
— Laura Powell (@LauraPowellEsq) September 15, 2025
Karen Attiah, who was just fired from the WaPo for making up a Charlie Kirk quote, lobbied to get an editor fired for publishing an op-ed from Tom Cotton.
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) September 15, 2025
So no, I'm not interested in hearing free speech absolutist arguments from these people now that it's convenient.
Fired Washington Post columnist @KarenAttiah: "My only direct reference to Kirk was his own words on record."
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 15, 2025
Except, what she claims to be a direct quote is not even remotely close to being true. https://t.co/oKgINoAMsG pic.twitter.com/MEAmDkSTfJ
The firing of Karen Attiah is a good example of something I do NOT count as cancel culture.
— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) September 15, 2025
She egregiously misquoted Charlie Kirk, which is journalistic malpractice. WaPo fired her, as was their right. Fine by me.
It's not her opinions, it's bad journalism. https://t.co/0b9xdVxTCR
I’d like the FAFO doctrine applied to the Charlie Kirk assassination. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) September 15, 2025
Karen Attiah is no longer a Washington Post opinion writer. The unabashed liberal was given a pink slip after lying about quotes she thought Charlie Kirk said but didn’t. She also said her firing was part of the overall purge of black voices from academia, media, and elsewhere. Wait, is she really defending former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s plagiarism (via Fox News):
In a post to her Bluesky account, Attiah wrote, "'Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a [W]hite person’s slot'- Charlie Kirk."
Attiah appeared to reference a July 2023 remark made by Kirk during "The Charlie Kirk Show" about affirmative action in which he named Joy Reid, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee, according to Reuters, rather than speaking broadly about all Black women, as one viral X post suggested.
Attiah said 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 in the post, where she included a 2019 photo of herself and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.
[…]
"What happened to me 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," she continued.
Oh, stop, lady. And some tried to say her firing was an example of conservative cancel culture, which doesn’t exist. We get upset over legitimately offensive things, and in this case, a fireable offense by manufacturing quotes about someone. Liberals get upset over the innocuous, like someone who says ‘we must hire the right person for the job’ or two white people making Asian fusion food, or something.
We’re not the same, and this person deserved it.
Incredible, these "libertarians" are so brain-dead, they think WaPo firing an employee for fabricating a quotation in an attempt to tarnish the reputation of a recently assassinated man is "right-wing cancel culture." https://t.co/Zkk3thxI4y
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) September 15, 2025
