Should the Washington Post have fired opinion writer Karen Attiah for her awful posts after Charlie Kirk's assassination?

This is an edge case, but I think the answer is yes. Here's why.

Yesterday, the Washington Post opinion writer Karen Attiah said she’d been fired for posts she’d made in response to the killing of Charlie Kirk.

My first thought was: Firing Attiah sounds wrong. It sounds like cancel culture. Like when the New York Times forced out editor James Bennet in 2020 because he published an opinion piece by Republican senator Tom Cotton after George Floyd’s death.

Then I read what Attiah had written. And I changed my mind.

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(Questioning my own priors. Every time. With your help.)

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Let’s get two crucial points out of the way.

As an American citizen, Attiah has an (almost) total right to say what she thinks about Kirk or anything else without governmental sanction.¹

Second, the Washington Post is neither part of the government nor a “common carrier” obligated to carry all speech.² As a private company, the Post has a presumptive right to fire Attiah for speech of hers it finds beyond the pale,³ especially since her termination letter refers to other “performance concerns.”

So the question here isn’t about Attiah’s First Amendment rights. And it isn’t whether the Post can fire Attiah, but if it should have — or if it compromised its own commitment to free speech in doing so, as the Times did when it let Bennet go in five years ago.

But the differences between the situations are crucial.

Bennet got in trouble for doing his job. He ran an opinion piece from Cotton suggesting the United States might need the military to stop looting after George Floyd’s murder.⁴ Cotton’s call for “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers” proved misguided and ultimately unnecessary. And his view was deeply unpopular among Times readers.

Still, Bennet was right to run it. Times readers benefit from knowing what powerful people — like United States senators — are thinking. So does the world.

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(A fireable offense)

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Bennet’s real crime was upsetting N. Hannah Jones.

Jones, a black Times writer, became famous for the “1619 Project,” a set of Times articles that more or less suggested George Washington fought for American independence so he could wear a Ku Klux Klan hood on weekends.⁵

In 2020, Jones was at the peak of her power. A month before Bennet okayed Cotton’s piece, she had won a Pulitzer Prize for a 1619 Project essay. She led a revolt by the Times’s increasingly woke staff against Bennet’s decision to run the piece. She was “deeply ashamed” of the Times, she said.

In response, Bennet explained running Cotton’s words didn’t mean he or the paper endorsed them:

We understand that many readers find Senator Cotton’s argument painful, even dangerous. We believe that is one reason it requires public scrutiny and debate.

No matter. The paper forced Bennet out days later, a cowardly act that showed it was too afraid of its readers and writers to open even its opinion pages to dissenting views.

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Attiah’s case is different.

After Kirk’s assassination, her posts on Bluesky, the social media network that has become the left’s preferred alternative to X, showed — at best — a distinct lack of concern for his death.

Instead, Attiah, who is black, preferred to focus on what she called “white violence” in one post.

In another, she wrote she was “refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence.”

In still another, in response to a poster who asked her, “How about just saying that murder is wrong?” she wrote, “Murder is wrong… Have I performed enough goodness for you?”

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(Interesting take)

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Attiah made clear that she found any grief for Kirk’s assassination “perfomative.”

And although she did not explicitly justify his killing, in still another post she wrote that anyone who has ever called the police or supported increased funding for them “believe(s) in the threat of lethal violence to deal with others.”

Further, she (apparently as a joke) called for sending the National Guard to Utah.

But Attiah’s most troubling post of all consisted of a single word: “Wow.”

She made the post at 4:53 p.m. on Sept. 10, only minutes after President Trump announced Kirk’s death.

She didn’t elaborate, but her audience responded with vile comments, none of which Attiah condemned.

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(A dead white man. Wow.)

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In other words, hours after Kirk died, Attiah posted about him and his death in inflammatory and callous ways. She wasn’t doing her job, as Bennet had been. She was amusing herself.

In fact, as the Post pointed out in its termination letter to her, her posts violated the company’s explicit policy on the use of social media by Post employees. The policy “prohibits postings that disparage people based on their race… [and includes the] bedrock principle that our use of social media must never harm the journalistic integrity or reputation of the Post.”

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Nor has anyone suggested that the Post was responding to government pressure in firing Attiah — thus potentially implicating the First Amendment.

The paper appears simply to have grown sick of Attiah’s antics, which included reposting tweets that justified the massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. In its termination letter, it lambasted her for “poor judgment… against the backdrop of documented performance concerns, which have been raised with you.”

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(If you support my performance on Substack, you know what to do!)

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Of course, Attiah remains as free to speak as ever.

In firing her, the Post did not block her access to X, Bluesky, Substack, or other social media. And the legacy media has heavily covered her firing (in sharp contrast to its near-total blackout of Twitter’s decision to censor me in 2021, when I had a far larger audience than Attiah). Her Substack post on her firing has received over 6,000 likes and 1,000 comments, far more than her other posts.

So shed no tears for Attiah. She can keep telling her audience that “white violence” is the main crime problem in the United States as long as she likes.

She just can’t do so on the Washington Post’s dime anymore.

That seems fair.

And far from a cancellation.

1. Subject to very narrow exceptions, such as conspiring to commit a crime (there is no First Amendment right to plot a murder), true threats, fraud, or child pornography.

2. Common carriers include telephone networks — and perhaps social media companies, an argument that James Lawrence and I unsuccessfully made in Berenson v Twitter.

3. This issue gets more complicated. Attiah may have specific contract protections. Or she might be able to sue the Post if she can prove it discriminated against her based - for example - on the fact she is black and had not acted similarly when a white person made similar comments.

But in general, your employer has the right to set standards for your behavior at work and can also take note of your behavior outside it.

4. Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murder, so murder is the correct term, even if you believe that Floyd died of an overdose.

5. I exaggerate only slightly: the Times itself wrote in its introduction to the 1619 Project that “no aspect [of the United States] has been untouched” by slavery and that “it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.” Yes, finally. Because slavery and the treatment of African-Americans had never come up before.