'The Right to Suck': Ex-Rolling Stone Editor Obliterates Karen Attiah's Fake Free Speech Antics

She’s back.

 As Amy covered last week, Karen Attiah, a Washington Post columnist, was fired for her atrocious social media posts about the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September 2025. Through arbitration, she was ordered to be reinstated to the payroll with back pay. She has claimed her termination was an affront to free speech and spoke to the “disposability” of black writers. Yet, as former Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi 

 

noted, this isn’t a First Amendment issue. She filed a grievance; it was put through arbitration; both parties agreed to this method of mediation; and her firing or rehiring wasn’t due to government pressure. 

Attiah is a classic race-obsessed columnist, whom Taibbi ran over with a tank, calling her and the rest of her ilk, the ones who signed 'More Specific Letter on Open Justice and Debate' in The Objective, a cadre of some of the most useless and talentless hacks wallowing among major publications. Attiah shouldn’t be silenced; she “has the right to suck” 

 

Attiah suffered consequence for what she posted, but the Post’s own speech decisions with regard to Attiah were also curtailed. The Post doesn’t have a particularly impressive recent record on speech lately, but Attiah loved canceling, until it happened to her.

She’s been consistently unsympathetic toward writers who lost jobs over speech issues. The classic example was New York Times writer Donald McNeil, whose firing over “use of the N-word” turned out to be different in reality. He was asked by a student if it was right to suspend another student for using the term and replied by asking if it was used as a slur, or repeated in a lyric or a book title, as Times writers like Paul Krugman had in print, with the consent of Times editors. McNeil’s life was wiped out for a conversation that was not intended for publication and was absurdly misrepresented. Attiah didn’t care and scoffed at the “fuss.” In the wake of the forced or semi-forced resignations of Times editorial page editor James Bennet and junior editor Adam Rubenstein, Attiah upheld the ludicrous notion that publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton put “black people and black journalists in danger.”

[…]

In a Substack column bemoaning her dismissal, she said, “I used my voice to defend freedom and democracy, challenge power and reflect on culture and politics with honesty and conviction. Now, I am the one being silenced — for doing my job.” Her explanations for her dismissal have evolved over time. Initially, she said she was fired for “refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence,” but lately she’s said she was fired for “talking about race,” which is ironic because she was clearly hired to do that almost to the exclusion of anything else.

[…]

That Attiah is a hypocrite on speech issues is undeniable, but that isn’t the first thing that jumps out reading her copy. The bigger issue is that she sucks. She’s on a short list of the most defiantly unoriginal, skilless columnists ever employed at a major American newspaper. Her columns read like first drafts, and her social media posts are full of gems like, “White women are lucky that we are just calling them ‘Karen’s’ [sic]. And not calling for revenge.” Her columns are just a micro-step removed from Titania McGrath-type parody of the “Shakespeare was a black woman. Deal with it" variety, only she’s not in on the joke.

Recommended

Taibbi noted how the winds have changed for the worse, where, at one time, black reporters were none too pleased to be assigned one beat: race. Now, it’s all they want to talk about, and it’s made the nation dumber as a result. Attiah penned some piece about how choosing wall color was a chore in a white world, or something. Even her etymology pieces, yes, she wrote some, are laughably off-base, obtuse, and not grounded in reality for a simple reason: no one uses these damn words:

In a piece called “Uxoricide: The Word You Don’t Know Because You’re Not Supposed To,” Attiah explained that she took Latin in school, leaving her with a “lifelong interest” in etymology. “I have seen a number of accounts and writers explicitly use the term femicide, and specifically Black femicide.” She complained that while most people know the term “homicide” and “suicide,” and may even know patricide, matricide, filicide, and fratricide, most people have never heard uxoricide, or the killing of a wife — suspicious!

“I wonder why?” she wrote. “What does it mean that we don’t use this— or any— specific term that immediately signifies the specific act of killing one’s wife?”

This would only make sense if it were true that most English speakers didn’t know uxoricide but did know matiricide, the term for killing one’s husband. We don’t use either word, making the premise ridiculous (especially since we do use femicide and countless other terms, as she mentioned) but so what, apparently?

Oh, and here's her take on James Arday, the late Cambridge academic who got busted for plagiarism, was as expected:

The plagiarism case against Arday was ironclad; he lifted so much with so little effort to conceal what he was doing that he made a mockery of academia. Attiah’s main argument is that Arday’s “scholarship” was so “impactful” that the thing she doesn’t mention, his fabulism, didn’t matter. But Arday’s scholarship was essentially a verbose version of Attiah’s journalism; he repeatedly bemoaned the “centrality of Whiteness as an instrument of power,” then engaged in things like racial audits of citations, and didn’t really say anything else. Still, she says, pointing out that he lied about everything and stole work from other people amounted to “anti-black terror.” In her calculus, nothing about Arday mattered except that he was black and criticized.

She’s a core member for any media bubble, and that apparatus has placed a stranglehold on liberal America, to the point where they’re now embracing full-blown communism, illiberal speech principles, and authoritarian measures to enforce all the above.