In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing in September 2025, MAGA influencers like Laura Loomer famously worked to ruin the professional aspirations of anyone who exhibited anything less than somber reverence. Now, nearly one year later, reality has delivered a series of rebukes to the right’s cancel culture campaign. From quiet multi-million-dollar settlements to high-profile reinstatements of fired employees, the conservative crusade to police speech has run hard into the unyielding wall of labor solidarity and constitutional protections.
Former Washington Post opinion columnist Karen Attiah is the latest example of this shift. On Thursday, an independent arbitrator ordered the newspaper to reinstate Attiah and restore her wages and benefits after she was fired in September for a social media post following the Turning Point USA co-founder’s death. Arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa did not mince words. The Post, she wrote, “did not have good and sufficient cause” to fire Attiah and had “failed to establish [that she had] engaged in gross misconduct.”
