Karen Attiah, a former Washington Post opinion columnist, was fired on September 11, 2025, for social media posts disparaging white men after the assassination of conservative leader Charlie Kirk — and now she's headed to arbitration against the paper, claiming wrongful termination.

When you've lost the Washington Post on wokeness, you've lost the plot entirely.

Here's what happened. Charlie Kirk was assassinated on September 10, 2025. While normal people processed the murder of a public figure, Attiah took to Bluesky to share her thoughts. And boy, were they something. She wrote: "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 followed that up with: "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."

A man was just murdered. And her response was to lecture America about how we shouldn't feel too bad because he was a white man who had the wrong opinions.

The Washington Post's Chief Human Resources Officer Wayne Connell fired Attiah the very next day, September 11, 2025, citing "gross misconduct." The termination letter stated that her posts violated the paper's company policy — specifically, the prohibition against disparaging people based on their ethnicity or race. The Post's own social media standard says "journalists should ensure that their activity would not make reasonable people question their editorial independence." Turns out, celebrating a man's murder because of his skin color raises a few questions.

Now here's where it gets rich. Attiah isn't going away quietly. She's lawyered up with Katie Phang, a former MSNBC host — because of course — and the Democracy Defenders Fund, a group that describes itself as a "nonpartisan" team fighting an assault on democracy. Nonpartisan. Sure. Her arbitration hearing is scheduled for June 4, 2026, as reported by Blaze News.

Attiah's defense? She claims she was commenting on "America's racial double standards in public discourse when it comes to political violence." She also says she was "the last remaining Black full-time staff columnist in the Washington Post's Opinions section" and that her presence was important "for diversity's sake." So the argument is: you can't fire me because I'm your diversity hire. That's quite the legal theory.

The Washington Post Guild and the Washington-Baltimore News Guild filed a grievance challenging her termination, alleging it violated their collective bargaining agreement. Because apparently, union rules should protect your right to mock a dead man based on his race.

Here's what nobody on Attiah's side wants to admit. Imagine — just imagine — a white columnist at the Washington Post writing those exact same sentences about a Black public figure who'd just been killed. Swap the races. "Refusing to perform care and absolution for Black men who espouse hatred." That person wouldn't just be fired. They'd be erased from the internet, banned from journalism for life, and probably investigated by the FBI. We all know it.

Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. He let this one go. That tells you everything about how indefensible even the left found Attiah's posts.

She said the quiet part out loud, and even her own team couldn't cover for her. Good luck in arbitration, Karen.