Yes, this news made my head explode. I will be picking up pieces of skull and bloody lumps of gray matter for the rest of the day.

Sarah Miller Espinosa, an arbitrator, ordered The Washington Post to rehire anti-white, racist, biased and dishonest opinion columnist Karen Attiah, whom the paper properly fired in September because of her social media posts regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The Post has to compensate her with back pay too.

The Post, Espinosa wrote, “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate Attiah and violated its labor agreement. “The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct,” she concluded.

Oh, really?

In its report on this gob-smacking ruling, the NY Times cites Appiah’s BlueSky post that read, “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,” as representative of the offending chain that the columnist issued after Kirk’s assassination. In the EA report on the episode, I focused on this one:

That tweet (“bleet”?) was and is a lie. I wrote,

Oooh, damning! Racist! Except that Kirk never said that, despite the fact than Attiah put the statement in quotes. What he said, according to Attiah’s source, The Guardian, was…

“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.”

The quote was not about black women at all, but referring to four specific and named black women who Kirk believed had demonstrated that they were not qualified for the positions they occupied. (I’d say that three of the four clearly warrant Kirk’s assessment; I’m not sure about Michelle. I would have used Kamala Harris).

Attiah, then, rewrote the quote to make Kirk seem prejudiced against all black women. She used quotation marks, though what she wrote was not what he said. She intentionally lied to readers to make Kirk’s assassination seem deserved. That’s why she was fired by the Post, and the only point of contention is why, as an anti-white, racist hack with no regard for journalism ethics (not that the Post wins any prizes in that area either), she was working for the paper in the first place.

The Washington Post, in defending Attiah’s sacking, maintained that her rant about Kirk injured “the integrity” of the organization and violated standards requiring employees to use social media with civility and respect. “Karen’s social media feed yesterday and today is beyond the pale, completely unacceptable for someone associated with Opinions,” the Post’s opinion editor wrote after her outburst. The arbitrator disagrees! A columnist lying on a public platform, fabricating a quote and using it to support a racist “opinion” isn’t a black mark on the integrity of the newspaper that employs her. Good to know.

To be fair, the Post was irresponsible to hire the woman in the first place. She should never have been hired, and should have been fired—well, except according to the strange standards of Espinosa—in 2023, when Attiah made as ass of herself by opining that a newly unveiled sculpture (in Boston) celebrating the marriage of Martin Luther King and Coretta “perfectly represents how White America loves to butcher MLK.” Oopsie! The sculptor was black and the commission that approved the design was mostly black. I wrote at the time,

“Appiah is a ridiculously careless and dumb racist. How could someone publish a diatribe like she did without checking to see whether the artist was white? She could because she is such a racist that it never occurred to her that something she objected to wasn’t the fault of whites. This is the apex of racism, its most ugly form. To the KKK, everything wrong with their nation was the fault of blacks, Catholics and immigrants. To Hitler, all of Germany’s ills were attributable to Jews. To people like Attiah—and don’t kid yourself, there are a lot of them—whites are the enemy, evil and a human pathogen on society. That’s bad enough that it should disqualify her from a position of authority and influence at the Washington Post. But she also has exposed herself as frighteningly lacking basic reporting skills and journalistic integrity. She is doubly untrustworthy. No apology, no excuse-making can erase this debacle. I am eager to see if the Post has the courage and professionalism, as well as respect for its readers, to do what has to be done. My guess? No.”

But based on this arbitrator’s ruling, there is literally nothing Attiah could write that would disqualify her from having a platform for her hate, ignorance, dishonesty and stupidity on the opinion pages of the Washington Post. The mind boggles: Castrate all men! Put the Jews in camps! Kill Trump! “I am Marie of Romania!” Attiah’s lawyer called the decision “a landmark victory for one of our nation’s crusading journalists.”

Over the past year, I have been professionally involved in several cases involving arbitration. In too many of them (and one is too many), the arbitrator’s decision was incomprehensible and incompetent. Many arbitrators are ancient retired judges; others are incapacitated by unstated biases. Arbitration clauses exist to save the immense costs of litigation, but when the result is a howler like this one, it demonstrates a triumph of finances over logic.

I also want to mention that almost all of the Times readers who commented on this declaration that no columnist’s opinions are so repulsive and biased that they are grounds for firing for cause thought it was wonderful.