Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Test Proves She Was Lying

. . . Warren presented a recipe she had published in her cousin’s cookbook as evidence of her background. It was signed “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee.” Later we learned that even the recipe was taken verbatim from an article in The New York Times five years earlier. It’s  easy to see what’s going on. Warren wants to dull Donald Trump’s “Fauxcahontas” jibes because she is about to run for president. "
The Federalist 
Acting as if the results of the senator's DNA test are a vindication of her initial claims is an assault on reason.
"Why did Sen. Elizabeth Warren spend all these years claiming to be a Native American?
"One plausible answer might be that her family had lied to her, or were also misled about their heritage, and that Warren truly believed she was Cherokee. This happens relatively often, I suppose. Then again, few people exhibit as much certitude, and gain as many benefits, over a claim that’s so obscure and unverifiable.
"The second is that Warren herself lied or exaggerated her heritage, knowing full well that her contention to Cherokee ancestry was likely nothing more than lore. She then latched on to this negligible history to gain traction in an academic field that was searching for more diversity in their candidates.
"We now know that the second option is more probable after the prospective presidential candidate decided to make a huge deal out of taking a DNA test, that, in reality, only proves she is as white as I am. A ludicrously unskeptical Boston Globe story about Warren’s dramatic decision to take the test begins by contending that there’s “strong evidence’’ of Warren’s Native American’s ancestry dating back 6 to 10 generations—which creates the impression that she has Native American family littered over the past 100 years.
"In truth, we learn, it’s possible that Warren’s great-great-great grandmother was partially Native American. This would make her around 1/32nd American Indian, a far cry from any reasonable threshold to embrace minority status for a job. That’s exactly what she did starting in the 1990s, before walking back her claims when it became politically expedient.
"Then again, being 1/32 (and really, the math says 1/64th) Native American is the high-end possibility. It is just as possible that Warren 1/1,024th Native American. (The story initially claimed it was 1/512th.) So maybe her great-great-great-great grandmother was part Cherokee.

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