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What Happened to This WaPo Op-Ed Writer Was Not Cancel Culture

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  Sep 16, 2025
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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.

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 there are some who tried to say her firing was an example of conservative cancel culture, which doesn’t exist. We get upset over legitimacy 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.