In a post on X on Sept. 15, 2025, longtime Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah announced that she had been dismissed from the newspaper’s Opinion section after 11 years. Attiah linked to a detailed essay on her Substack outlining her account of the events, which has since ignited sharp debate across social media.
In her Substack post, Attiah contends that the Post dismissed her for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.” She writes that the paper cited a series of posts she published on Bluesky following recent shootings in Utah and Colorado as the principal reason for her firing:
“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—claiming disparagement on race.”
Supporters have framed Attiah’s dismissal as a blow to representation and free expression, while critics argue that her remarks crossed professional boundaries.
Attiah’s Bluesky comments
In the Substack post, Attiah attached several of her Bluesky threads, which she posted following the recent shootings in Utah and Colorado. In her words, those posts “condemned America’s acceptance of political violence.”
Her commentary ranged across themes of political polarization, rising extremism, and the persistence of racial double standards in how violence is framed. According to Attiah, the Washington Post seized on these posts as grounds for dismissal, pointing specifically to her references to race and to an alleged misquotation of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was killed in the Utah Valley University campus shooting.
Attiah’s posts about Charlie Kirk were not taken well by social media
Beyond her broader remarks about “White America,” Attiah’s response to the killing of conservative activist Kirk drew some of the strongest criticism. Her comments were described by detractors as insensitive and racially charged. In her Substack, Attiah defended her stance, writing that “not performing over-the-top grief for white men who espouse violence was not the same as endorsing violence against them.”
She argued that her journalistic and moral obligation was to condemn violence and murder while resisting what she saw as false mourning for a figure who, in her view, had “routinely attacked Black women as a group, put academics in danger by putting them on watch lists, claimed falsely that Black people were better off in the era of Jim Crow, said that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, and favorably reviewed a book that called liberals ‘Unhumans.'”
The remarks drew a divided response online. Critics accused her of misquoting Kirk’s past statements and of introducing racist overtones into her commentary. Supporters, however, argued that her dismissal was disproportionate and reflected a double standard, calling the Washington Post’s decision “unfair and unbalanced.“
