The Washington Post was ordered to hire a fired columnist who seized upon Charlie Kirk’s death to launch a baseless diatribe about the late TPUSA founder’s alleged racism.
But the arbitrators forcing the legacy media publication to give a platform to the former Global Opinions Editor is a classic case of “Woke privilege.”
It goes to show, once again, there are no consequences for bad behavior so long as you are on the political left.
A private arbitrator has ordered The Washington Post to reinstate opinion columnist Karen Attiah and to provide back pay.
She was fired in September 2025 after she demonstrated the extremely poor judgment of viciously attacking the character of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Nonetheless, the arbitrator’s decision found the newspaper lacked “good and sufficient cause” for termination and violated its labor agreement; it also failed to prove gross misconduct.
You certainly have to believe this is a case of “liberal privilege” once again haunting our “prestige” institutions.
This is exactly what Charlie Kirk had the audacity to speak out about until he was silenced by an assassin: the complete abandonment of standards in America due to the misplaced priorities of “DEI.”
Far from the left-wing fairy tale that white people are born with some kind of “get out of adversity free” card because of the color of their skin, nearly every institution in America is rigged against conservatives and middle-class white people.
That is what the Woke ideologues, who blatantly discriminate against white people based on the color of their skin, call “equity.” People like Karen Attiah.
Attiah could not restrain herself at the sight of the American people celebrating the memory of a conservative activist who had become a nemesis to Woke indoctrination cults on college campuses.
His grave crime? Inviting radicals to debate him in public.
That is what Charlie Kirk was doing when he was shot in the throat in front of the world: expressing his opinion.
Attiah saw the outpouring of grief for Kirk and did what so many of her leftist colleagues did: took to social media to condemn Kirk and those who were honoring him.
Attiah was dismissed over Bluesky posts made shortly after the killing of Kirk.
“Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is…. not the same as violence,” she remarked.
Attiah also acted like Kirk’s murder was an escalation of a political war that conservatives had foisted on leftists, seizing on the highly flawed example of two Democrat legislators being shot in Minnesota.
“For everyone saying political violence has no place in this country… Remember two Democratic legislators were shot in Minnesota just this year,” she said. “And America shrugged and moved on.”
Beyond this, she clearly insinuates that Charlie Kirk pushed “hatred and violence.”
“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 said.
It is unclear why anyone wouldn’t believe that this is a window into the writer’s thought process: smearing a slain person’s reputation when he is no longer even alive to defend himself.
Because a leftist killed him.
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We don’t need to rehash the vile celebrations of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to recognize that posts like Attiah’s were feeding a culture where celebrating a political adversary’s death was somehow morally acceptable.
Now, unsurprisingly, we have misguided women openly empathizing with a child murderer, because they believe her case is emblematic of their struggle against the “system.”
Attiah was defiant after her firing. In a series of strangely popular Substack posts where she unleashed her performative outrage, the former Global Opinions Editor adopted the pose that she did no wrong.
On September 11, 2025, after 11 years at the Washington Post as an editor and columnist, I was fired via email. In the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk killing, I did what I have always done— and was expected to do — as a public voice and columnist on race, gender, and culture: I commented on America’s racial double standards in public discourse when it comes to political violence. You can read my posts below.
The very next day, I was fired from my job at the Washington Post without so much as a conversation.
According to the termination letter from the Post, the company cited these two Bluesky posts, claimed that I disparaged white men, accused me of ‘gross misconduct’, and that my Bluesky posts “potentially endanger[ed] the physical safety of our staff”.
You can read the letter for yourself here.
The Washington Post’s letter cited “poor judgment exhibited by your public comments against Charlie Kirk arise against the backdrop of documented performance concerns, which have been raised with you. Given these concerns, and in light of your unacceptable Bluesky posts, we cannot tolerate the risk your performance poses to the Post.”
Attiah and her union contested the firing, arguing the posts fell within her role as an opinion writer and were protected under the labor agreement and social media policy.
Yet again, we find that there are no consequences for certain liberal women who smear the dead and stoke an environment that excuses political violence. That’s quite the example of “structural racism.”
It goes further: As if she has learned nothing, she recently fueled the unhinged discourse surrounding Jason Arday, who sadly took his life after being exposed in a plagiarism scandal at Cambridge University.
Attiah, demonstrating why the Washington Post said she had “poor judgment,” turns Arday into a victim of white persecution, instead of acknowledging that plagiarism is a serious academic offense and his reaction to turn to suicide is a tragedy.
In a section called “when journalism scrutiny becomes digital terrorism,” she dispenses a jeremiad against alleged "white supremacist" structures that demand intellectual honesty.
Throughout history, American and British media especially —have repeatedly shown the world their lust for the blood of Black people, especially ones they have deemed to be too powerful or influential for their liking. Black people who transgress the racial hierarchy are targets to be “put back in their place”.
In my online Race, Media and International Affairs class, my students and I examine the history of white media’s role in whipping up or justifying murderous frenzies against newly freed Black people, or African colonial subjects, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the United States, that often meant lynching, pogroms, and racial massacres; in the British context, it often operated through imperial war and colonial repression.
In the United States in the late 1800s, white newspapers made a habit of justifying lynching, even going so far as to inciting mobs to go after Black people and white abolitionists. Edward Carmack, a Tennessee newspaper editor and later senator, used his newspaper to incite a white mob to attack and destroy the offices of pioneering Black journalist Ida B. Wells. Her “crime”? She had dared call out the white media’s complicity in the wave of lynchings of Black people, including her friend.
Her argument is that Cambridge was stoking a racial mob by recognizing the plagiarism offense.
Today, these campaigns are not just limited to Black people, but to the white allies or institutions that dare hire or support Black people. In the 1800s, white newspapers incited mobs against white abolitionists.
Today, the British media didn’t just attack Arday; they sustained an attack on Cambridge. In the end, after standing by Arday at first, the institution agreed to do an investigation of Arday’s work.
In the digital era, British and American media’s epigenetic habit of anti-Black hysteria has not waned, even if actual vigilante mob violence against black people has receded, at the moment, at least.
The lack of introspection is breathtaking. This is boilerplate critical race theory pablum dressed up as the genuine observations of a “silenced voice.”
She goes on to rail against DEI, which explains why Charlie Kirk became an object of vitriol in the wake of his murder.
In this global anti-DEI age, removing Black people from public life has become an explicit political project, orchestrated at the highest levels of government, academia, and media, and embedded into policy. We then started seeing high-profile news of Black college presidents being pressured to resign (Claudine Gay of Harvard), prominent Black journalists being forced out of their positions (Don Lemon, Joy Reid, and myself), and corporations stepping back from funding or supporting anything that looks like diversity initiatives.
This practically begs for there to be no standards or accountability for “persons of color.”
But far from this doing a favor to racial and ethnic minorities, DEI creates a cloud of uncertainty regarding the competence of those it benefits. It seeks to install a legally enforced racial caste system to replace an imaginary system of “structural racism.”
The chief accusers of this alleged "structural racism" live in urban areas run for decades by elected Democrats. A recent example of a man in Gary, Indiana, claiming that a blackout was caused by "environmental racism" was complicated by the reported fact that a shooting delayed utility workers. A cursory look at who runs Gary, Indiana is illustrative of the problem with this narrative.
DEI also perpetrates a culture of victimhood and stokes social conflict by reinforcing an "oppressed versus oppressor" narrative that is detached from lived reality.
It is neo-segregation and leads to the dehumanization of the white “other”; it is a mirror image reversal of the alternative universe that has been fabricated in the minds of the masses through the false narrative that America has not changed since the Jim Crow Era.
The world has changed. America has become a less racist place. But there are many who want to keep cashing in on the racism of bygone eras, perpetrated by white people who are dead or who are no longer relevant.
At the same time, we have prestigious institutions giving “Woke privilege” to minorities who abuse it to engage in a similar form of racial bigotry against white people.
When you abandon standards to push “equity,” everybody loses. If America is ever going to move beyond the racial grievances of generations past, it needs to stop creating new ones.
