Washington Post ordered to rehire left-wing columnist who claims she was victimized by ‘anti-Black terror’ campaign
Karen Attiah finally prevailed after demanding to speak to the manager. The Washington Post must rehire the radical left-wing columnist with full back pay and benefits because the paper lacked “good and sufficient cause” to fire her last year, a private arbitrator ruled last week.
The Post terminated Attiah’s contract on Sept. 11—a date that will live in infamy—after she publicly disparaged the recently murdered activist Charlie Kirk as a “white man that espoused violence” and ridiculed the “performative mourning” of his supporters. Attiah subsequently filed a grievance against the Post. She claimed she was being “silenced” for exposing “racial double standards,” and was the victim of a “broader purge of Black voices” from American institutions. She also posed for a professional photoshoot in front of the Post headquarters holding a flaming newspaper and wearing a socialist ball gag.
The private arbitrator, Sarah Miller Espinosa, rejected the Post‘s contention that Attiah had engaged in “gross misconduct” by sounding off on Bluesky, the social network for deranged #Resistance diehards. Attiah praised the outcome as a “victory for journalists” everywhere, and told the New York Times she would be “willing to go back” to the Post despite repeatedly trashing the paper and its leaders in the months surrounding her dismissal.
A spokesperson for the Post said the paper respects the arbitration process, which is generally binding under the terms of its labor agreement. It’s anyone’s guess what happens now, but we would love to see Attiah back in the Post opinion pages, where her singular insights have been sorely missed.
We particularly enjoyed Attiah’s final column, an eloquent meditation on her bodybuilding routine, which supposedly helped her gain “20 pounds of muscle.” Her stated fitness goals, outlined in social media posts accompanied by mirror selfies at the gym, are deliciously subversive. She wants to become “more lethal” by beefing up her legs until they are “strong enough to crush men’s hopes and dreams.” She has stressed the importance of bulking up in order to “beat up racists and evade the cops if necessary.” She dabbles in swordplay.
Attiah’s other interests include: 1) accusing her enemies of promoting violence, and 2) promoting violence against her enemies. For example, she refused to apologize for expressing solidarity with Hamas after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. She denounced white women for enabling racist terrorism and suggested they would be “lucky” to escape violent “revenge.” Most recently, she argued that disgraced former Cambridge professor Jason Arday was driven to suicide—effectively murdered—by an “anti-Black terror” campaign orchestrated by “white media” and others who felt threatened by Arday’s scholarly success.
“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,” Attiah wrote on Substack. “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.”
In Attiah’s view, Arday’s death was a “warning to successful Black people in white institutions around the world: Don’t aim too high. What happened to Arday can happen to you. Behave accordingly.” Some context: Arday was credibly accused of extensively plagiarizing his academic work and blatantly fabricating key biographical details. Attiah appears to agree with the suggestion that Arday, a serial fabulist, did nothing wrong and simply crumbled under “the impossible standards placed on Black people.”
In any event, the Post is lucky to have her back, and so are its readers. Attiah’s comeback columns, if they ever get published, could very well restore this country’s faith in journalism.
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