Before a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer decided to ruin his life, Dr. Mark Tykocinski wasn’t exactly controversial.
Tykocinski, 70, has spent his life in academic medicine as a pathologist and cancer researcher. Last year, Philadelphia’s 8,400-student Thomas Jefferson University named him its president, capping his career - which included a short stint with Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health in the 1980s.
Then Susan Snyder arrived, looking for blood.
Snyder covers higher education for the Philadelphia Inquirer, once a highly regarded newspaper. In 2012, she led a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, journalism’s highest honor, for covering violence in Philadelphia schools.
These days, Snyder uses her talents differently.
Tykocinski has a personal Twitter account. It’s not exactly Elon Musk’s. Thomas Jefferson University is hardly a household name outside Pennsylvania, and Tykocinski’s account had about 100 followers as of last week. (It’s now up to almost 400.)
He also followed 130 people. I was one.
For whatever reason - I hope it was a tip, I hope she wasn’t doing this on her own - Snyder sifted through Tykocinski’s tweets. She found a bunch she found objectionable.
Actually, these weren’t Tykocinski’s tweets, or even retweets. They were “likes.”
For people who don’t use Twitter, a “like” is weakest form of endorsement. A “retweet” means a user sends someone else’s tweet to his followers. A like does not. It’s effectively the equivalent of saying, huh, that’s interesting, maybe check it out for yourself.
To anger a veteran reporter like Snyder, the statements Tykocinski liked must have been horrible, right? Racist, anti-Semitic, maybe pornographic? Inciting criminal behavior?
Or not.
Turns out Tykocinski had liked a bunch of tweets I’d written about the failure of the mRNA jabs. Including this one, from December:
(See if you can find the inaccuracy! Oh, wait, there isn’t one.)
...
Much more:
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/on-targeting-a-university-president
