Society of Professional Journalists will honor scandal-plagued ex-WaPo writer at ‘hall of fame’ ceremony in June
Karen Attiah, the radical beefcake columnist who lost her job at the Washington Post after “endangering” colleagues with her inflammatory posts about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, has repeatedly denounced mainstream journalism as a racist industry in which black voices are “silenced” and progressive black women are “hunted.”
This summer, Attiah will receive the Distinguished Service Award from the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), a mainstream association dedicated to the promotion of “high standards” and “ethical behavior.” The award was designed to honor journalists whose “work and or actions have made a positive difference on our craft and on society.” The SPJ Dateline Awards dinner will take place in June at the National Press Club, where the SPJ will also induct several journalists into its hall of fame.
The Post fired Attiah in September for “gross misconduct” after the beefcake columnist wrote a series of racially charged posts about Kirk’s assassination and blamed gun violence on “white America.” Attiah responded by hiring a professional photographer to take photos of her posing in front of the Post headquarters wearing a socialist ball gag and holding a flaming newspaper like a torch. She promptly retained a Soros-funded legal advocacy group and sued for unlawful termination.
Taylor Lorenz, the left-wing psychopath and former Post journalist who “quit” her job after accusing Joe Biden of “genocide,” was outraged. “Karen was one of the most brilliant voices still left at the Post and what she posted was completely correct,” wrote Lorenz, who has praised accused murderer Luigi Mangione as a moral icon. “The way these news organizations are culling any journalists who speak truth to power is appalling.”
Others weren’t so sad to see the beefcake columnist go. “Karen Attiah wrote two columns in the last three months, and one was about her body-building regimen. I think the Post will be OK,” one Post staffer, granted anonymity due to personal-safety concerns, told the Washington Free Beacon at the time.
Attiah’s firing for undermining the physical safety of her colleagues with racially charged posts was somewhat poetic given her insistence in 2020 that the New York Times had “put black people and black journalists in danger” by publishing an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) arguing that riots were bad.
Post journalists and others were arguably justified in fearing for their safety given Attiah’s history of violent rhetoric. She expressed support for “Palestinian liberation” in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist massacre by Hamas. In 2020, she argued that white women were collectively deserving of violent “revenge” for enabling racial injustice. Attiah’s social media posts about her obsession with bodybuilding and (more recently) swordplay frequently promote violence. For example, she said her fitness goals involve becoming “more lethal” and building “legs strong enough to crush men’s hopes and dreams.”
Attiah invoked violent imagery in 2024 after Post owner Jeff Bezos blocked the paper from publishing a pointless endorsement of Kamala Harris. “Today has been an absolute stab in the back,” she wrote. “What 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.”
Since leaving the Post, Attiah has posted sporadically on Substack and prolifically on Bluesky, the social media app for deranged liberals who will never be happy. She has also launched an online school for “resistance” liberals that aims to guide students through the “intellectual and emotional labor of building a liberated future.” She recently announced a new course on politics and soccer—the most anti-American sport ever devised—that purports to explain how the World Cup is a “framework for how we move through the world.”
In recent days, Attiah has been defending herself from accusations of being a closet fascist after she suggested on Bluesky that Elon Musk’s X was a better social media platform for following African soccer news.
Congrats to all!
