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Notes -
Washington Post v. Karen Attiah
An arbitrator has asked and answered:
Mrs. Attiah is the Washington Post writer who rather famously and falsely claimed that Charlie Kirk had said "Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously" in the immediate aftermath of Kirk's murder. I was going to say ex-, but that's not the case anymore. It's now established rule that the Washington Post can not fire someone merely for dancing publicly in the blood of a recently murdered man to disparage people on the basis of race and gender, and making false claims while doing so.
In this case, at least.
There's a legal formalist perspective where this is defensible. The Post may have included all of Attiah's post-shooting posts in the strict text of the termination letter, but they only quoted a couple posts, so maybe the arbitrator felt that the rest weren't sufficiently plead. Though she does spend enough time to repeat, without noting as false, the false attribution of the quote to a dead man. The Post did argue 'security concerns' at length, and the extent that rhymes with a heckler's veto isn't a great policy matter to rest on. The comparisons to Dave "Ratfucker" Weigel and a random contractor not covered by the stated policies might be pretty nakedly different conduct given context, but perhaps if you squint hard enough and there's no other comparisons, you get stuck with the bad approximations. Attiah isn't a government employee, but she is a union one, so as tempting as the obvious Damore comparisons get, they do have limits.
But it's still the floor, now.
As best I can tell from reading the decision the incorrect quote of Kirk didn't come up in the firing context at all. There were two posts cited to, allegedly because they disparaged white men on the basis of gender or race, but the arbitrator ruled that was not supportable by reference to the post themselves (Page 30, Section C The Record Does Not Establish That the Grievant Disparaged White Men). The posts themselves are:
As a white man myself, I don't feel disparaged by either post.
The only other basis given for the firing was the alleged security threat due to other people threatening Attiah for her posts on the topic. I generally think it would be a bad precedent to set that you can get fired because other people communicate threats against you. If people had sent threats to Google over Damore, would they have been more justified in firing him?
More generally, I think this illustrates the advantage of having a union! If there wasn't a CBA I'm skeptical Attiah would have won a more general employment discrimination lawsuit from this set of facts.
Do you think this is a just outcome for this incident?
If you think this is a just outcome, are you comfortable with people generalizing the logic behind this outcome into a set of rules you will then accept living under?
If this is an example of what Unions can achieve, I am even less interested in allowing unions to continue existing than I was previously.
My predictions were logged long ago that I think violence is going to increase. When it does, I intend to quote this post and the context it references back to you, to the letter.
Your predictions have been logged long enough to have been proven wrong. Violence has decreased broadly since the pandemic. I imagine you'll point towards the two attempted Trump assassinations and Charlie Kirk, but I'm unconvinced this is out of the ordinary for a particularly controversial political figure.
Are you willing to make any actual falsifiable predictions on any kind of timeline? You all predicted riots and burning and political violence after the Roe V. Wade repeal, after the 2024 elections, after pretty much every red tribe victory. And just like your predictions about the coming 1,000 year Christian Nationalist Reich in the wake of the 2024 election, you've been categorically wrong. What is it you all like to say? The demand for political violence outstrips supply?
I first read you predicting catastrophic political violence and the disintegration of American society 6 years ago on reddit, and I'm still here in 2026 reading it after none of these things have come to pass.
The left, broadly, killed the most popular young conservative in America that was the head of the movement.
The left, broadly, have come within an inch of killing a sitting President.
Until the day I die, I will read comments like yours and remember not only those two actions but the constant riots over the last several years over police shootings and well whatever, we don’t have to detail the post Covid collapse of civil society.
Yea - the right did Jan 6th … whoopty doo.
I understand society hasn’t collapsed, but if it does, it’ll come from whatever in the hell is happening to the left, here in the US, and abroad, with our European allies.
Maybe Japan and SKorea will be courageous enough to save us this time.
Was Kirk actually that load-bearing? This is one of those bubble things, maybe, but I never thought he was all that influential. Jordan Peterson seemed to have more pull. The big church groups had more sway than anyone. This was in the Midwest.
Bubble or not, I really disagree that “the left, broadly” did either of those things. A leftist murdered Kirk; a random asshole tried to kill Trump. Blaming “the left” is about as solid as hand-wringing about stochastic terrorism. I believe in individual responsibility.
The broad and horrifyingly ghoulish reaction, including in rationalist spaces, is doing a lot of work in establishing the "broadly."
Sure, one individual did it. Millions of cretins cheered for it and seemed to see nothing wrong with that, and seem to have no fear that anyone's going to do the same to Piker (who is a substantial worse person) or anyone else.
If someone offed Piker, I certainly wouldn't mourn him as a person, and I'm not convinced I could even summon much care for the principle. But I wouldn't blare a cheer across social media celebrating an increase in political violence and know that everyone that matters would have my back, either.
It is so, so easy to just... not say things. And so many people failed, horribly.
If Kirk had been struck by lightning, the left would have celebrated in much the same way. Would you then accuse "the left, broadly" of having electrocuted him? Are all right-wingers whose take on George Floyd was a sneering "whatever he died of, good riddance" to be blamed for his murder? I sympathize with the idea that celebrating an assassination should be taboo in a way that celebrating other kinds of death isn't - the possible second-order effects are obvious - but I think speaking in terms of collective guilt is a bridge and a half too far.
I think that's the point. They wanted him to die, and they celebrated when he did.
Nobody would've cared if George Floyd died by lightning. They didn't really care when he died by cop. The right only cared when it became outrage source #1 in 2020 and nobody could escape it.
George Floyd was a convicted criminal, drug user. Charlie Kirk was a conservative who said things the left didn't like, but by most all accounts was a decent man, even to his political enemies.
The distinction here is that the left widely celebrated the death of a decent person that they politically disagreed with, and that this sort of reaction is not just limited to Charlie Kirk. There are entire subreddits dedicated to rejoicing at the deaths of people they politically disagree with. Members of the left will celebrate the death of their own parents if their parents are too politically dissident for their liking.
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No. But this to me symbolises one of the reasons the Left and the Right seem to talk past each other. The idea that people can see any equivalence between Charlie Kirk the family man & debater, and George Floyd is obscene and incomprehensible to me. George Floyd, the home invader. George Floyd, the man who put a
shotgunpistol to apregnantwoman's belly. George Floyd, the man who spent five years in jail for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, the man who died while being arrested for trying to pass off counterfeit currency, out of his skull on fentanyl.I agree completely that people shouldn't die while being arrested / be murdered by the police, and that investigation and punishment of the police officer was appropriate. I agree that it's unseemly to celebrate people's death no matter who they were and what they'd done. But the fact remains that Charlie Kirk was an innocent man and George Floyd was scum. To me, the fact that the Left considers actively celebrating the death of a man for the crime of being right wing in public to be remotely comparable to not caring that a career criminal is dead demonstrates a vast and hideous chasm of moral divergence.
EDIT:
Oh goodie! Thank you, Politifact. I was worried there for a minute that something bad had happened, you know?
EDIT EDIT: what is known is that the six men with Floyd overpowered a single woman and beat her in the "head and side areas" to make her shut up so they could rob her in peace, Floyd's pistol to her abdomen apparently not having brought the message home: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/meme-spreads-wrong-photo-details-in-floyd-criminal-case/
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Yeah, I originally included a sentence about how a leftist murdered Kirk, and the left was way too fucking enthusiastic about it. I absolutely hate the responses that flooded social media. I will stand by the distinction, but it doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.
My wife is one of the most empathetic people I know. I don’t even think she would shoot someone in self-defense. But she will say, with a worried expression, that she wishes Trump had died at that rally. It’s unbelievable. Ingroup, outgroup, fargroup.
A not-Trump GoP candidate would still have beaten Kamala like a drum and, after instituting a state cultus of Trump, would then proceed to enact a much more effective agenda. Trump himself has largely failed to crown himself with laurels; a not-Trump candidate taking up the torch would probably have not only tried but succeeded in doing so.
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