Briahna Joy-Gray Defends Karen Attiah After Washington Post Firing Over Charlie Kirk Death Comments
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Briahna Joy-Gray Defends Karen Attiah After Washington Post Firing Over Charlie Kirk Death Comments
Briahna Joy-Gray and her co-host compare how different writers handled Charlie Kirk's death, praising a Jacobin piece by Ben Burgis and Meagan Day for naming his record honestly while criticizing Ezra Klein for saying he disagreed with Kirk without ever specifying what about. They push back on Breaking Points' Saagar Enjeti for suggesting people should hold back criticism of Kirk out of fear of how their own deaths might be received, arguing that's simply not how public disagreement works. The conversation turns to Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, fired after posting on Blue Sky about the racial double standards in how Kirk's death was mourned, with Gray reading through Attiah's actual termination letter and posts to argue the firing had little to do with journalistic ethics and everything to do with silencing criticism.
Briahna Joy-Gray opens by praising a piece co-written by Ben Burgis and Meagan Day that she says handled Charlie Kirk's death the right way: acknowledging the loss of life without celebrating it, while still naming what Kirk actually said and stood for. She contrasts that directly with Ezra Klein's widely discussed piece, which she says stated he disagreed with a lot of what Kirk said without ever specifying what that was.
A New Rule for Public Mourning
Borrowing the format from Bill Maher's segment, Gray proposes her own new rule: if you feel compelled to say you didn't agree with everything a person said, you have to actually say what you did and didn't agree with. She argues that once someone is forced to specify that they didn't agree with, for example, virulent racism, it becomes obvious that whatever they did agree with isn't really relevant to the broader conversation.
The Double Standard on Mahmoud Khalil
Gray's co-host raises the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia activist facing deportation, asking whether Ezra Klein would ever write a piece praising him for doing politics the right way while he's still alive and in legal jeopardy. Both hosts agree that kind of public support is reserved selectively, and that commentators willing to lend their voice to Kirk's memory show no comparable willingness to do the same for people like Khalil.
Why Breaking Points' Sympathy Misses the Point
The hosts turn to a clip from Breaking Points in which Saagar Enjeti reflects on his own similar professional position to Kirk's and says the celebratory reaction to Kirk's death unsettled him, since he wouldn't want people responding to his own death that way. Gray says she doesn't share that instinct at all, arguing that people who dislike you in life are not going to mourn you in death, whether or not they're polite about it in public, and that this is simply how disagreement works. She adds that Kirk built part of his career mocking the deaths of Black men who had been killed, and argues it's inconsistent to expect reverence in death after having shown none toward others.
Karen Attiah's Firing From the Washington Post
The conversation shifts to Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, who was fired after posting on Blue Sky in the days following Kirk's death. Gray explains that conservative commentators circulated a claim that Attiah had misattributed a racist quote to Kirk, treating that as a journalistic ethics violation, but notes that Attiah's actual termination letter never even raised that claim. Gray reads from Attiah's own account, including a post reading that refusing to tear her clothes and smear ashes on her face in performative mourning for a white man who espoused violence is not the same as violence, and another noting that two Democratic state legislators were shot in Minnesota earlier in the year with comparatively little national reaction.
Reading the Termination Letter
Gray reads the Post's termination letter aloud, which cites gross misconduct, accuses Attiah of endangering the physical safety of colleagues, and says her posts violated a company policy against disparaging people based on race or other protected characteristics. The hosts note the irony that a Post columnist known for writing critically about race was fired using a policy framed around protecting people from racial disparagement, and that the letter also references unspecified prior performance concerns, with Gray noting Attiah was reportedly the paper's last Black columnist.
Free Speech Champions, Selectively Applied
The hosts close their critique by pointing out the irony of media figures who present themselves as free speech absolutists and opponents of cancel culture staying silent, or participating, when a Black columnist is fired for a handful of posts about double standards in public mourning.
An Aside on The Hill and a New Rules Audition
Gray briefly recounts her own past experience being let go from a cable news role, saying she believes the real reason wasn't the on-air moment publicly cited, but a segment she did the day before highlighting a double standard in Bill Maher's own rhetoric by swapping the word Muslim for Jewish in a comment he'd made. The episode ends on a lighter note, with her co-host revealing a mock Bill Maher-style new rules segment made for Gray, and Gray joking that HBO should replace Bill Maher with her as host of Real Time.
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