Washington DC - The Washington Post has fired one of its top opinion columnists after she shared an offensive quote from Charlie Kirk following his assassination.

In a Substack post shared on Monday, writer Karen Attiah explained how she used her role as an opinion columnist for over a decade to "defend freedom and democracy, challenge power, and reflect on culture and politics with honesty and conviction."

But after sharing her opinions on social media in the wake of the fatal shooting of Kirk on September 10, she said she is now "the one being silenced – for doing my job."

On the day of the shooting, Attiah shared a series of posts on the platform BueSky in which she disavowed political violence, pointed out a "familiar pattern of America shrugging off gun death," and admonished those who had been aggressively insisting the shooter was driven by leftist ideologies before the suspect's identity was even revealed.

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Attiah pointed out that she did not reference Kirk directly in her posts, except for one, in which she used "his own words on record."

She included a screenshot of that post, which quoted Kirk as having said, "Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person's slot."

She claimed The Washington Post accused her commentary of "being 'unacceptable', 'gross misconduct', and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues," and quickly fired her "without even a conversation."

"This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold," Attiah argued.

Kirk was a far-right political commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump group that was crucial in helping the president win both of his elections.

He was most well known for his very contentious and arguably hateful rhetoric, which often saw him share disparaging comments towards Black people, Hispanic people, the LGBTQ+ community, women, Muslims, and many other minority groups.

The quote about Black women that Attiah shared was made in 2023, when Kirk argued in an interview that progressive political commentator Joy Reid, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, and former First Lady Michelle Obama were only able to get their jobs because of affirmative action.

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Kirk's death has sparked a firestorm in US politics, as many on the right seek to immortalize his name in American history as a compassionate Christian and free speech warrior, while many critics on the left argue his rhetoric and ideologies should not be uplifted, and his image should not be sanitized.

Trump and members of his administration are expected to attend Kirk's funeral, and members of Congress recently filed a petition to have a statue of Kirk erected in Washington DC.