Hours after the assassination of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, medical research director and professor Anna Kenney opened Facebook and wrote words that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports made her “a cautionary tale.”
“Should I feel bad that I don’t feel bad about Charlie Kirk? Reading his sayings, he seems like a disgusting individual,” Kenney wrote. “Good riddance.”
MAGA free-speech arsonists immediately went on the attack on social media, with one posting “Meet Anna Kenney. Here she celebrates Charlie Kirk being murdered, and attempts to justify his murder. She is an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at @EmoryMedicine.”
“[Kenney’s] work came to a halt. Her office was cleaned out. Some of its contents were stuffed in a cardboard box,” reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. At 56, Kenney was a distinguished scientist with a Ph.D. from Yale and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who was now out of a job.
“Kenney’s sudden departure from Emory … weakened the collective effort to cure pediatric cancer, the single most deadly disease among American children,” AJC reports. “Kenney was a leader in that fight for decades, a researcher probing the vulnerabilities of brain-cancer cells and looking for better ways to destroy them.”
But Emory uses federal research grants, having recently received nearly $500 million from the National Institutes for Health last year. And the Trump administration had already canceled some grants, and is threatening to cut further funding at many prominent universities over issues including diversity policies and alleged antisemitism.
“People are afraid,” said Noëlle McAfee, president of Emory’s faculty senate.
As a private institution, Emory says it is not subject to the First Amendment but it does have an Open Expression Policy that protects some speech by giving “broad latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.”
McAfee said she believes Kenney’s termination violated this policy, and a preliminary investigation by a senate committee reached the same conclusion. Administrators are not bound by this ruling, however, reports AJC, and Kenney’s case has had a chilling effect on the rest of the faculty.
But Kenney is not making any apologies so far. She insists she was saying “good riddance” to the Kirk’s rancid philosophy, not his life.
“I would hate to say that in this country, you shouldn’t be able to say what you believe. And I am proud to say that although I was fired, it’s not because I was a bad scientist. I didn’t fake data. I didn’t abuse students. I was fired for exercising my right to freedom of speech,” Kenney said.
Read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution report at this link.