The Washington Post has finally fired Karen Attiah, the radical left-wing journalist best known for her jacked physique, passionate support for anti-Semitic terrorism, and searing columns about why Republicans are racist.
Attiah announced her termination in dramatic fashion on Monday with a self-righteous screed on her Substack page. The post was accompanied by a professional photograph of the buff columnist posing in front of the Washington Post headquarters with a rose in her mouth and a newspaper torch in her hand. “Democracy Dies in Darkness, but some of us will carry on the light,” the caption read.
The unemployed journalist claimed the Post had “silenced” her for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.” The paper’s leadership, she alleged, had cited her “unacceptable” posts on Bluesky, the social media app for deranged liberals, about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Attiah’s posts included an egregiously false, out of context quote accusing Kirk of saying all black women “do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously.” (He was talking about Sheila Jackson Lee.) She described the United States as a “sick” country that “worships violence,” and denounced the “performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence.”
Somewhat amusingly, Attiah claimed the Post had accused her of endangering the physical safety of her colleagues. This may or may not have been a deliberate reference to the language Attiah (and many others) used in 2020 to denounce the New York Times for publishing an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) arguing that riots were bad.
Taylor Lorenz, the disgraced former Post reporter best known for praising alleged murderer Luigi Mangione as a “morally good man,” slammed her former employer for firing a like-minded radical. “Karen was one of the most brilliant voices still left at the Post and what she posted was completely correct,” Lorenz ranted on social media. “The way these news organizations are culling any journalists who speak truth to power is appalling.”
One of Attiah’s former colleagues at the Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity over concerns for their personal safety, expressed a different view. “I see people like Taylor Lorenz suggesting ‘Karen was one of the most brilliant voices still left at the Post,'” the Post staffer told the Washington Free Beacon. “Karen Attiah wrote two columns in the last three months, and one was about her body-building regimen. I think the Post will be OK.”
No one will be surprised to learn that Attiah and her left-wing defenders are insisting that her firing was racially motivated. Attiah argued her dismissal was “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 will almost certainly sue the Post for unlawful termination. In the meantime, Attiah has started to explore new career opportunities. “Would any of yall be interested in lefty martial arts training?” Attiah wrote on Bluesky earlier this week. “I mean political lefties!”
The disgraced journalist has also started teaching online classes that might be best described as #Resistance reeducation training for anxious liberal white women. Prospective students can enroll now for fall courses that will “examine the intersection between race, national identity, and the mass media in today’s global world order.” The only requirement (beyond a working credit card) is a willingness to do the “intellectual and emotional labor of building a liberated future.” There will also be informal lectures on how to look fierce while smashing the patriarchy.
“We’re teaching the resistance and we’re gonna look cute!” Attiah said in a recent Instagram video. “The world is falling apart but mwah, mwah, mwah, look at our lip gloss.”
Attiah’s firing did not come as a surprise. Last month, she rejected a buyout offer from the Post after a “tense” meeting with her new boss, opinion editor Adam O’Neal. Oliver Darcy, who left his job at CNN because the network wasn’t anti-Trump enough for his liking, reported that Attiah had expected O’Neal to “affirm her value and express a desire to keep her,” which did not transpire. Attiah was one of the final holdouts after many of the paper’s liberal staffers, including the fact-checking icon Glenn Kessler, opted to leave on their own terms.
Days after the contentious meeting, Attiah signaled that a “heroic transformation” was on the horizon. “I have long said that this moment calls for many of us to pivot, to transform, to move differently,” the former journalist mused on Substack like a wide-eyed college freshman overcome with the profundity of her thoughts. “Heroes have become monsters. Institutions are collapsing. Cowardice is reigning, greed is supreme, and the darkness is here.”
It’s unclear why Attiah declined the buyout given her apparent disdain for the Post. She accused the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, of subverting democracy by refusing to let the editorial board publish a meaningless endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024. “Today has been an absolute stab in the back,” she wrote at the time. “What an insult to those of us who have literally put our careers and lives on the line, to call out threats to human rights and democracy.” Attiah complained again months later when Bezos expressed support for “personal liberties” and “free markets.”
Attiah’s radical leftist ideology and her chronic inability to produce original thoughts in her poorly written columns were incompatible with the leadership’s desire to revamp the Post into a semi-respectable publication that normal people would actually want to read. Her unapologetic expression of solidarity with the Hamas terrorists who murdered Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 did not help her cause, nor did her threats to inflict “vengeance” on white women for enabling racist violence. Perhaps Post readers will miss her insightful commentary in columns such as “All praise the drag queens of Texas,” “Beyoncé was robbed at the Grammys. We need to hear from her now,” and “Arm the gays? Unfortunately, the culture war is more than a metaphor.” Perhaps not.
In her final column for the Post, Attiah explained why her recent obsession with buffing up at the gym was a “deeply feminine act of self-consciousness.” Her stated fitness goals include becoming “hotter and more lethal,” and acquiring “legs strong enough to crush men’s hopes and dreams.” Attiah recently traveled to Los Angeles for an intensive training program with “progressive martial artists” who taught her to “move with elegance and beauty through sword, wushu and tai chi.” She plans to harness these new skills to advance the values of “liberation, beauty, and community defense.” She recently claimed that her reading list includes titles such as Women in the Martial Arts and The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee.
