WaPo Termination Letter to Attiah: We Fired You For Being a Raging Racist

Well, my my my. It turns out that I underestimated the Washington Post yesterday in their clash with former editor Karen Attiah. And Attiah turned out to be even more mendacious than previously thought. 

Yesterday, Attiah launched her new Substack after being fired by the Post, and claimed that the newspaper simply couldn’t handle the truth. “I am the one being silenced,” Attiah declared, “for doing my job. … I believed in using the pen to remember the forgotten, question power, shine light in darkness, and defend democracy.” She claimed that the Post fired her “without evidence” and “without even a conversation,” claiming that they had excised her as “part of a broader purge of Black voices from academia, business, government, and media.”

In other words, Attiah called the Post raaaaaaaaacist.

And rather than roll over for that, someone leaked her termination letter to Oliver Darcy. At least according to the Post, Attiah suffers from a colossal case of projection on the issue of racism. Moreover, they inform her that she had been warned about her performance as well as her race obsession in the past, and that her fulminating over whites in the Charlie Kirk assassination was the final straw:

Write out of letter for those who struggle with small print 👇

The Washington Post
September 11, 2025

Karen,

I am writing to inform you that The Post is terminating your employment effective immediately for gross misconduct. Your public comments on social media regarding the…

— Apple Lamps (@lamps_apple) September 16, 2025

Translation: You want to play? We’ll play, too. 

Here’s the meat of the letter:

Among other requirements, the Company-wide social media policy mandates that all employee social media postings be respectful and prohibits postings that disparage people based on their race, gender or other protected characteristics. The policy also reminds employees that everything they post is a reflection on the Company and should not affect the integrity of The Post’s journalism. Your postings on Bluesky (which clearly identifies you as a Post Columnist) about white men in response to the killing of Charlie Kirk do not comply with our policy. For example, you posted: “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” and “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.”

In addition, just last year, Opinions leadership asked everyone in the Opinions Department to review the newsroom social media guidelines, attached those guidelines to an email to the Department for review, and reiterated in that email the “bedrock principle that our use of social media must never harm the journalistic integrity or reputation of The Post”.

What about the lack of “conversation”? The Post made it clear to Attiah that they’ve already had “conversations” about these issues, and that Attiah refused to take it seriously:

The poor judgment exhibited by your public comments regarding Charlie Kirk arise against the backdrop of documented performance concerns, which have been raised with you. Given these concerns, and in light of your recent unacceptable Bluesky posts, we cannot tolerate the risk your performance poses to The Post.

Yesterday, Attiah made it appear that the Post fired her for using Charlie Kirk’s “own words on record,” which turned out to be not quite his actual words. Attiah had changed Kirk’s words to strip the context and specificity of his argument and then wrapped them in quotation marks after her rewriting, all in service in painting him as a bigot. That was enough of a journalistic fraud to justify her termination, as I argued yesterday. The Post would have been justified in taking action just on that basis, and frankly, would have been safer to stick to that narrower-yet-still-terminal violation. 

Give the Post credit, however, for setting standards, enforcing them, and standing by them when Attiah kept violating them. Even more, one has to tip the hat to the person who saw Attiah’s dishonest jeremiad yesterday and decided to leak the actual reasons for termination to another media outlet. I’d bet that the management of the Post is officially none too happy about that leak, but … come on, man. This is Score Settling 101, and Attiah made the mistake of playing the game with a losing hand. 

This sends an interesting message, coming as it does on the heels of the massive housecleaning by the Post. The days of woke and roses are definitely over, even if the era of Protection Racket Media progressivism may not be. At the very least, Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis are making it excruciatingly clear that the inmates will not run the asylum at the Post any longer. For the first time, I am now genuinely curious about whether this means a genuine change in direction for the editorial voice of the Post and the nature of its reporting. And I’m upping my popcorn orders.

Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy [Insert Site’s] conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.

Join Hot Air VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership!