Charlie Kirk Purges Show the Need to Stand Up to Government Bullying

Pete Tucker

With the firing of Karen Attiah, the Washington Post no longer has any full-time Black columnists. 

For many years, the nation’s capital was known as Chocolate City, owing to its sizable Black population, which in the 1970s topped 70%. These days that moniker is less used, as DC’s Black population is now a little over 40%.

This dramatic fall is due to runaway gentrification, which has made an already unequal city all the more so. One study from 2016 found that DC’s white families have an astonishing 81 times the wealth of Black families. At what point, I wonder, does a city pass from unequal to apartheid-like?

That’s a question probably best tackled by a Black columnist. But as of September 11, when Karen Attiah was fired from the Washington Post, DC’s paper of record has none who are full-time. They’ve all fallen by the wayside, as the paper is remade in the image of Donald Trump.

This is being done so that Jeff Bezos, the Post's owner since 2013, doesn’t see his companies lose out on multi-billion dollar federal contracts, as happened during Trump’s first term, when the president became enraged at the Post’s coverage of him.

“He’s prioritizing his other businesses over the Post,” former Post executive editor Marty Baron told Zeteo (2/26/25) in February. Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, and his space company Blue Origin in 2000. Baron pointed out:

Amazon has a big cloud computing business. Blue Origin is wholly dependent on the US government. Trump can just decide that they’re not going to get any contracts. Is he going to put that at risk? Obviously, he’s not going to put that at risk.

“The way Bezos is undermining a major institution that he owns is crazy and tragic,” former Post columnist Joe Davidson told FAIR in an email. “His public coziness with President Trump is unworthy of the owner of the Washington Post.”

Devoted to dear leader

Washington Post opinion editor Adam O'Neal, brought in to make the Washington Post more like the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

To carry out the Washington Post’s MAGA makeover, Bezos tapped two men, who make an interesting pair. At the top is Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis, a hopefully sober and definitely scandal-plagued Brit who cut his teeth doing Rupert Murdoch’s dirty work in London, and now wishes that chapter of his life would stop resurfacing. With Lewis apparently in “a state of hiding,” however, we’ll focus on the other guy.

That’d be Adam O’Neal, a 33-year-old former Wall Street Journal editorial writer whom Bezos and Lewis tapped to helm the Post’s vaunted opinion page.

Right out of the gate, O’Neal decreed that the Post will be “unapologetically patriotic,” parroting Bezos and Lewis. In practice, this has resulted in an opinion page devoted less to the country than to its dear leader.

Just three of many examples:

• On the first day of Trump’s military occupation of DC—the Post’s own hometown—the paper welcomed the putsch with an editorial (8/11/25) that began, “President Donald Trump is putting on quite the show to project strength on crime.”
• The next month, when Trump called for corporations to no longer issue quarterly reports—an effort to hide the negative effects of his tariff regime—a Post editorial (9/17/25) called it “a daring suggestion.”
• And when Trump called for once again putting US troops on the ground in Afghanistan, the Post (9/20/25) said it “isn’t a bad idea.”

If Trump turns on a dime tomorrow and says the opposite, expect the Post opinion page to do likewise. If anyone under O’Neal has a problem with that, they can resign—as record numbers have, Black columnists in particular.

“The Post has long struggled with diversity issues, like most of America, but now diversity among columnists is another casualty of Bezos's leadership,” said Davidson, the former Post columnist, who was a founding board member of the National Association of Black Journalists.

“Nearly all of the left-leaning writers, myself included, accepted buyouts, as it became clear that the Post would not want our content,” Perry Bacon, another of the Post’s recently departed Black columnists, wrote in the New Republic (9/15/25). “Attiah opted to stay. I was worried that her time at the Post would not be long, and it was not.”

“Black journalists, like Black activists and politicians, are often the people in their profession most willing to discuss America’s shortcomings forthrightly and urge the country to do better,” Bacon continued. “For example, Attiah and [former MSNBC host Joy] Reid were two of the most prominent voices at their organizations calling for the United States to change its policies toward Israel to prevent the mass deaths of Palestinian civilians.”

But in a tense meeting this summer, O’Neal encouraged Attiah to do like many of her colleagues and take a buyout, according to Status (8/13/25). Attiah should do this, O’Neal explained, since her work no longer aligned with the Post’s new direction.

Attiah, however, decided to stay.

'Right out of Goodfellas'

Sen. Ted Cruz: FCC chair Brendan Carr's threat to ABC was "dangerous as hell" (New York Times, 9/19/25).

In the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s shooting on September 10, getting rid of troublesome voices has become easier. The most prominent example has been at ABC.

Trump had called without success for late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to be taken off air in July, but after Kirk’s death, Trump’s FCC commissioner Brendan Carr made it happen for his boss. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr publicly threatened ABC and its affiliates over carrying Kimmel’s show. Within hours, the Disney-owned ABC caved.

“I’ve got to say, that’s right out of Goodfellas,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, an ally of Carr, said in response. “That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

“Who is hiring these goons?” asked David Letterman, the former late-night host. “We all see where this is going, correct? It's managed media. And it’s no good.”

Kimmel was purportedly yanked over his benign comments about Kirk’s death. But his real offense may have been showing how Trump couldn’t be bothered to mourn his friend’s death, even as he insisted the rest of the country do so.

When asked how he was holding up in the wake of Kirk’s death, Trump breezily offered four words—“I think very good”—before turning unprompted to more important matters, namely the White House ballroom he’s building. “It’s going to be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure,” Trump rambled on. “It’ll get done very nicely, and it’ll one of the best anywhere in the world, actually.”

It’s an extraordinary clip of Trump, one Kimmel played to great effect just before his suspension (clip via the New York Post):

Trump was quick to gloat over Kimmel’s sacking, and then he pivoted to his next targets —late-night hosts Seth Myers and Jimmy Fallon, who have also mocked Trump, as has Stephen Colbert, who in July had his show cancelled for next year, much to Trump’s delight.

Trump’s wheels were now turning. If he can cancel critical late-night hosts, what’s to stop him from doing the same to journalists on those same networks?

“The newscasts are against me,” Trump said Friday in the Oval Office. “They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal, personally.” The networks, Trump continued, are “getting free airwaves from the United States government” and should therefore show more deference to him.

Decrying corporate cowardice

John Oliver (Last Week Tonight, 9/22/25), noted that Jimmy Kimmel pointed out "that many on the right seem desperate to weaponize Kirk’s death, an argument that’s aged pretty well, given, you know, everything that’s happened to Kimmel since."

As Trump ratcheted up his censorship, civil society roared back.

“In the days since ABC’s decision, at least five Hollywood unions, collectively representing more than 400,000 workers, publicly condemned the company,” the New York Times reported (9/22/25):

The screenwriters’ union decried what they called “corporate cowardice,” and organized a protest last week outside the main gate at Disney headquarters in Burbank, California. Damon Lindelof, a creator of ABC’s Lost, said that if Mr. Kimmel’s program did not return from suspension, he couldn’t “in good conscience work for the company that imposed it.” Michael Eisner, a former chief executive of Disney, issued a rare rebuke on social media on Friday, as well. Some conservatives expressed misgivings, too.

Elsewhere, over 400 entertainers joined Tom Hanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Meryl Streep in signing an open letter organized by the ACLU. The Trump administration’s moves against Kimmel mark “a dark moment for freedom of speech in our nation,” the letter read.

Many canceled their Disney+ subscriptions in protest, including talk radio host Howard Stern, who said on his show Monday, “Someone’s gotta step up and be fucking saying, ‘Hey, enough, we’re not gonna bow.” And Tatiana Maslany, who starred in a series that aired on Disney+, called on her Instagram followers to hit the company where it hurts, writing, “cancel your @disneyplus @hulu @espn subscriptions!”

Comedians also used their platforms to stand with Kimmel and lampoon Trump. “The Epstein list won’t be released but Jimmy Kimmel will be?” Sam Morril asked on Instagram.

Kimmel’s fellow late-night hosts went hard in the paint. On Last Week Tonight (9/22/25), his HBO show, John Oliver took the opportunity to speak directly to Disney CEO Bob Iger.

“Giving the bully your lunch money doesn’t make him go away. It just makes him come back hungrier each time,” Oliver said, before referencing the $15 million Disney paid Trump back in December to make his weak defamation lawsuit go away:

Instead of rolling over, why not stand up and use four key words they don’t tend to teach you in business school?... The only phrase that can genuinely make a weak bully go away, and that is “Fuck you. Make me.”

The collective pressure worked, and ABC agreed to put Kimmel back on air beginning Tuesday night.

Still, many cities, including DC, won’t be able to watch the show on TV, because Nextstar and Sinclair, the two largest owners of ABC affiliates, still refuse to air the program.

'Refusing to tear my clothes'

The kind of opinion you're not likely to see in the Washington Post (10/13/23) anymore.

Also joining in the defense of Kimmel was a former president mostly known for staying out of the fray. “After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level,” former President Barack Obama wrote (Bluesky, 9/18/25). Obama tied the silencing of Kimmel to that of Attiah, writing of her firing:

This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent—and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating to it.

Like Kimmel, Attiah had also commented on Kirk’s killing, questioning how America can decry gun violence but not guns, or the white men who frequently wield them to such deadly effect.

“Political violence has no place in this country,” Attiah wrote on Bluesky (9/10/25) in the hours after Kirk’s murder. “But we will also do nothing to curb the availability of the guns used to carry out said violence…. America is sick and there is no cure in sight.”

Attiah also quoted Kirk’s racist comments about Black women, and wrote, “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.”

The scourge of political violence is not new to Attiah. As the Washington Post’s founding global opinions editor, she recruited and edited Jamal Khashoggi, who wrote critically about his home country of Saudi Arabia in the pages of the Post until October 2018. That’s when Khashoggi was dismembered in Saudi Arabia’s Turkish consulate by operatives working at the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to a US intelligence report.

As a Post columnist herself, Attiah carried Khashoggi’s torch forward. In the days after Hamas’ October 7 attack, she presciently warned of Israel’s coming genocide on Gaza.

“The United States cannot stand by and allow Israel to carry out the collective punishment it has declared it will exact,” Attiah (10/13/23) wrote six days after October 7. “It cannot stand by as Israeli officials engage in genocidal language and describe genocidal intent against Palestinians for the actions of Hamas.”

Attiah also called out the coordinated effort to silence anti-war voices in the US. In a column (6/11/24) headlined “No one should be surprised a Black politician is the canary in AIPAC’s coal mine,” Attiah wrote:

“Shut up or else” is the message a pro-Israel lobby is sending to Black lawmakers in America who are critical of what’s happening in Gaza. The front line is New York’s 16th Congressional District, where Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D) is facing one of the most expensive primary challenges in history.

'The integrity of our organization'

Karen Attiah (Golden Hour, 9/15/25): "Democracy Dies in Darkness, but some of us will still carry on the light."

Despite 11 years at the Washington Post, and multiple journalism awards, Attiah was fired the day after Kirk’s killing “without even a conversation,” she wrote on Substack (9/15/25). The letter from Post HR chief Wayne Connell accused her of "gross misconduct" and "poor judgment" by making comments that "disparage people based on their race, gender or other protected characteristics." He charged that Attiah's posts "harm the integrity of our organization, and potentially endanger the physical safety of our staff."

Attiah’s termination letter is “ironic,” said Joe Davidson, because “it is Karen who is endangered by the death threats she received in the wake of her firing.” He added:

It is the actions of Jeff Bezos that have harmed the integrity and credibility of his own company, as evidenced by the thousands of cancelled subscriptions and the many resignations of fine journalists.

In firing Attiah, the Post “flagrantly disregarded standard disciplinary processes,” according to the Washington Post Guild, which said the paper has “also undermined its own mandate to be a champion of free speech.”

This summer, when Adam O’Neal told Attiah that her work didn’t align with the paper’s new direction, he was right. It was a damning indictment— not of Attiah, but of the Washington Post.