A woman named Karen Attiah was recently fired from the Washington Post after she posted a quote from Charlie Kirk that was completely and totally fabricated. According to Attiah, Kirk said that black women do not have the "brain processing power to be taken seriously." He never said that, and lying about something so heinous in order to justify his murder only makes it worse.
Her response was to start a Substack account and, of course, tell everyone that she was fired because she bravely called out racism and how white men are prone to violence:
My journalistic and moral values for balance compelled me to condemn violence and murder without engaging in excessive, false mourning for a man who 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”. In a since-deleted post, a user accused me of supporting violence and fascism. I made clear that not performing over-the-top grief for white men who espouse violence was not the same as endorsing violence against them.
Attiah is well spoken, but so are many villains. Her bigotry and racism are plain as day, and the Washington Post firing her was because she let her hatred consume her to the point where she tried to justify the murder of a father, husband, and son through a quote that never existed.
But racism and bigotry are on display at the Washington Post all the time; it's just the kind usually approved by the left. Attiah's firing was more than that.
Attiah didn't just lie; she endorsed murder.
And while she might be well spoken, she's no different than the neon-haired, infinitely pierced lunatics decked out in clown makeup you see doing dances on TikTok. The nurses, "educators," and others suddenly getting booted out of their jobs after their hideous posts are all the same.
They all celebrated murder.
And that's what’s really being canceled here. We’re not coming down on someone for their politics. We’re not even coming down on them for their racism, bigotry, or sexism. We are a country that values the freedom to say things, no matter how stupid or ignorant they are.
What we’re cancelling is the culture of death. We’re cancelling the celebration of murder of the innocent.
And it’s important work to do. The moment we begin giving tacit approval to murder based on opinion, or the practice of free speech, is the moment we start down the path of dehumanizing one another.
It may start with leftists doing it to conservatives, but it will push the domino to conservatives doing it to leftists, not just out of spite but out of survival. Conservatives will only go underground so much before they start pushing back, and in a deadly manner.
Next thing you know, we’re just killing each other because we’re no longer seeing each other as human; we devolve into radical tribalism, and before you know it, we’ve destroyed ourselves.
These firings are our society drawing a hard line against that future. In that vein, we’re literally depriving that murder culture of influence and resources.
But I’ll go a little bit deeper.
What we’re doing when we expose these lunatics is seeing to it that our country has a basic respect of life. When we celebrate death, especially the murder of the innocent, we all lose.
If the value of life is treated as cheap, then the individual means nothing, and this whole American experiment — including liberty and the pursuit of happiness — fails.
What the left sees is people losing their jobs over an opinion. What’s actually happening is the maintenance of the value of life.
We’re cancelling a dark future, and while we do this daily in various ways, today it just so happens to look like canceling the people celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk.
