Senator Elizabeth Warren told CNN: “I am not running for president in 2020.” In perhaps related news, Warren has declined to take a DNA test to establish once and for all how much — if any — Native American blood she has in her.
Acosta also asked if she gets upset when President Donald Trump refers to her as “Pocahontas.”
“It’s about my family’s story. Because my family’s story is deeply a part of me and a part of my brothers,” Warren said. “It’s what we learned from our parents. It’s what we learned from our grandparents. It’s what we learned from our aunts and uncles.
“I went to speak to Native American tribal leaders and I made a promise to them that every time President Trump wants to try to throw out some kind of racial slur, he wants to attack me, I’m going to use it as a chance to lift up their stories,” she added.
The left loves science — as long as it serves their political purposes. Otherwise, not so much.
Warren doesn’t want to find out how much Native American ancestry she has because no matter what the percentage is, it won’t be enough for most people. Besides, for the left, the issue isn’t DNA. In an age when you can claim you’re any sex you want, you can also call yourself black even if you’re white and Native American even if it’s based on family legends.
Her explanation for not taking the DNA test is dishonest.
“I know who I am. And never used it for anything. Never got any benefit from it anywhere,” Warren said of her ancestry on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The Massachusetts Democrat has been under increased pressure to provide evidence of her Native American roots, with President Trump repeatedly mocking her as “Pocahontas” as recently as Saturday.
An editorial this month in Massachusetts’s Berkshire Eagle urged Warren to buy a DNA test for $99 to resolve the issue once and for all.
“All the senator needs to do is spit into a tube, wait a few weeks and get her answer,” the paper said.
Asked whether she’d take an ancestry test, Warren said she wants to hold onto the folklore of her parents’ love story.
“My mother and daddy were born and raised in Oklahoma,” Warren said. “My daddy first saw my mother when they were both teenagers. He fell in love with this tall, quiet girl who played the piano. Head over heels. But his family was bitterly opposed to their relationship because she was part Native American. They eventually eloped.”
How nice. But the claim she makes about never using it for anything and not getting any benefits is belied by the fact that at both Pennsylvania University and Harvard, she told administrators she had Native American ancestors.
Warren’s central offense dates back to the mid 1980s, when she first formally notified law school administrators that her family tree includes Native Americans. Warren said she grew up with family stories about both grandparents on her mother’s side having some Cherokee or Delaware blood.
That genealogical claim has zero documentary evidence to back it up, according to a PolitiFact review of news and newsletter databases back to 1986.
Before this controversy arose in 2012, there is no account that Warren spoke publicly of having Native American roots, although she called herself Cherokee in a local Oklahoma cookbook in 1984.
There is no dispute that Warren formally notified officials at the University of Pennsylvania and then Harvard claiming Native American heritage after she was hired.
The article claims that there is “no proof Warren gained any special advantage in her career.” Except, there is:
“Elizabeth Warren’s avowed Native American heritage — which the candidate rarely if ever discusses on the campaign trail — was once touted by embattled Harvard Law School officials who cited her claim as proof of their faculty’s diversity,” the article began. What the article revealed dated back more than a decade to diversity records kept by Harvard.
At a time when law schools faced public pressure to show greater ethnic diversity within their faculty, the university’s Crimson newspaper quoted a law school spokesman in 1996 saying Warren was Native American.
The Boston Globe followed the Herald with a report that the Association of American Law Schools listed Warren as a minority law teacher each year from 1986 to 1994. In that time, Warren went from being a law professor at the University of Texas, to the University of Pennsylvania, and finally in 1995 to Harvard University.
Anyone who doesn’t believe that Warren gained an advantage by claiming minority status is living in a delusional world — especially when it comes to an Ivy League school.
Warren didn’t say if she would accept the second slot if Bernie Sanders is nominated, but it hardly matters. In any national race she runs in, she will be an easy target given many of her outrageous views on issues.
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