Vice President JD Vance served as host of the late far-right activist Charlie Kirk's podcast this week and was called out after claiming Kirk "never uttered" words about the "brain processing power" of Black women—even though Kirk said as much in 2023.
Vance made the claim after Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah—a Black woman—said she was dismissed from the paper following social media posts on gun control and race after Kirk’s assassination.
Attiah said the Post fired her after 11 years for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns." In a Substack post, she said:
"[The Post] accused “my measured Bluesky posts of being ‘unacceptable,' ‘gross misconduct’ and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues – charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false."
“They rushed to fire me 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.”
One of Kirk's remarks that Attiah highlighted was one he made on a July 2023 episode of The Charlie Kirk Show:
"If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists."
"Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."
But Vance denied Kirk ever said that during an appearance discussing Attiah's dismissal:
"The writer accuses Charlie of saying, and I quote, 'Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously.' But if you go and watch the clip, the very clip she links to, you realize he never said anything like that."
"He never uttered those words."
You can hear what Vance said and hear Kirk's remarks on record in the video below.
Vance was swiftly called out.
Attiah’s position was seen as vulnerable after disputes with Post opinion editor Adam O’Neal, who has reportedly offered buyouts to writers whose work doesn’t align with the paper’s editorial direction under billionaire owner Jeff Bezos.
Bezos’s company, Amazon, donated $1 million to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration fund, and the Post opted not to endorse a candidate in the November election Trump ultimately won, despite its editorial board having earlier voted to back Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
Attiah said she “was the last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist” at the Post, adding that Washington, D.C., "one of the nation’s most diverse regions…no longer has a paper that reflects the people it serves." She said her firing is “part of a broader purge of Black voices from academia, business, government, and media."
The Washington Post guild said that in firing Attiah, the paper "not only flagrantly disregarded standard disciplinary processes, it also undermined its own mandate to be a champion of free speech."
