Phil Bump and Other Resistance Hacks Take Buyouts, But Some Refuse To Leave

Out: Catherine Rampell, columnist who praised Doug Emhoff’s sex appeal. On the clock: Karen Attiah, terrorist sympathizer who wants to ‘crush men’s hopes and dreams.’

Philip Bump is leaving the Washington Post. The annoying resistance columnist announced his decision to take a buyout from the Post last week on Bluesky, the social media app for brain-damaged liberal activists. Few noticed at the time, and even fewer cared. “I am taking some time off before deciding on next steps,” he wrote.

Bump’s final column, published July 17, was a slightly revised version of basically every other column he has ever written about how Donald Trump is a fascist waging war on democracy and how it’s a damn shame no one trusts the media anymore. He is best known for storming out of an interview after being asked to entertain the possibility that Joe Biden was at least somewhat involved in his son Hunter Biden’s shady foreign dealings.

“I feel like you want me to leave, like, just walk out in the middle of this,” Bump huffed during an appearance on Noam Dworman’s podcast in 2023. The host had been trying to get Bump to explain why he had no interest in examining the implications of a text message from Hunter Biden claiming that “half” his income went to his father. Bump is also known for appearing on MSNBC in 2020 for being forced to point out the stupidity of host Katy Tur’s question about how “gerrymandering” could help more Democrats get elected to the U.S. Senate.

It’s not clear why Bump waited so long to take the buyout and leave the Post. The paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, was widely denounced by liberal activists—including the vast majority of Post employees—for refusing to let the editorial board publish a meaningless endorsement of Kamala Harris in October 2024. Several journalists quit in protest, while others vented their disgust on social media.

Bump and his colleagues were further enraged in February, when Bezos expressed his support for “personal liberties” and “free markets,” and said he wasn’t interested in promoting anti-freedom viewpoints. “[W]hat the actual fuck,” Bump wrote in response. Disgruntled Post employees and other Bezos critics have cursed the Amazon founder for daring to make changes at a publication that lost $77 million in 2023. For context, the WNBA loses only $50 million per year. Many of these same people, including Bump himself, are now cursing CBS News for canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which has an annual shortfall of $40 million.

In the days after Bump announced his exit from the Post, several other opinion staffers accepted buyouts, including Catherine Rampell, the columnist who is best known for praising Doug Emhoff as a “modern day sex symbol.” Also leaving the Post is mediocre opinion journalist Jonathan Capehart and editor Krissah Thompson, who had been tapped to lead a “third newsroom” called WP Ventures. Because Capehart and Thompson are black, liberals on Bluesky have been complaining about racism. This includes Karen Attiah, the Post opinion columnist and fitness influencer best known for celebrating the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. “So.. officially, I’m the last Black staff columnist left in the Washington Post’s opinion section,” she wrote. “No words. Literally.”

Given how much she appears to loath her employer, it’s somewhat baffling that Attiah continues to work there and complain all the time. After the editorial board was barred from endorsing Kamala last year, the columnist called it “an absolute stab in the back” and “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.”

It’s also unclear why the Post continues to employ Attiah, given her insistence on writing the same column arguing that everything is racist. In 2020, the columnist was condemned for writing that white women were “lucky that we are just calling them ‘Karen’s’ [sic]” as opposed to “calling for revenge” for all the death and suffering wrought by their “lies and tears.” She doesn’t appear to like men (of any race) either. Attiah claims one of her “fitness goals” is to “build legs strong enough to crush men’s hopes and dreams.”

In any event, Attiah seems to be preparing an alternative career running a “Resistance Summer School”—some kind of online reeducation camp for Jew haters and liberal white women who feel they didn’t do enough apologizing for their racist fragility in 2020. The website describes the school, established after Columbia University canceled Attiah’s course on “Race and Journalism,” as a place for “joyful warriors” eager to put in the “intellectual and emotional labor of building a liberated future.”