Pavlich: Elizabeth Warren’s fake victimhood

Throughout her entire career, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren told stories about her Cherokee heritage. She’s repeatedly used the title to get ahead and documents show she listed herself as “American Indian” on a Texas Bar registration card in 1986. In 1997, she was named Harvard’s first woman of color by the Fordham Law Review. In 2010, Warren told a story of racism and discrimination within her own family.

“My mom and dad were very much in love with each other and they wanted to get married and my father’s parents said absolutely not. You can’t marry her because she’s part Cherokee and part Delaware. After fighting as long as they could, my parents went off, they eloped. It was an issue in our family the whole time I grew up about these two families. It was an issue still raised at my mother’s funeral,” Warren said during an interview with a local Massachusetts television station.

Many people, including President Trump, questioned Warren’s claims of tribal heritage. During her Senate campaign against Republican Sen. Scott Brown, the number of questions from Boston Globe reporters started to increase.

Two months ahead of her announcement she would be running for president, Warren decided she was going to prove once and for all she was telling the truth and that the Cherokee tribe was truly part of her story.

On Oct. 15, 2018, a media campaign centered around the issue was launched. Team Warren published a new section on her website dedicated to the results of a DNA test. On Twitter, a lengthy video was heavily promoted as “proof” her claims were backed up by “strong evidence” and science.

“My family (including Fox News-watchers) sat together and talked about what they think of @realDonaldTrump’s attacks on our heritage. And yes, a famous geneticist analyzed my DNA and concluded that it contains Native American ancestry,” Warren tweeted.

The DNA test results showed Warren might be 1/1,024th American Indian. Pushing even more doubt into the results, her DNA wasn’t compared to lineage of the Cherokee tribe. In fact, it immediately sparked backlash from the tribal nation and brought back horrific memories of a time when people’s worth was judged through their bloodline.

“A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship. Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America. Sovereign tribal nations set their own legal requirements for citizenship, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation,” Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. released in a statement at the time. “Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is prove. Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”

Warren’s family story, especially of discrimination, victimhood and elopement because of her mother’s alleged Cherokee heritage, completely fell apart. She’s apologized privately to the tribe, but has never admitted she isn’t Native American.

Now, Warren is facing another controversy.

On the 2020 campaign trail, Warren isn’t talking about her high-cheek bones, but instead about how she was fired from a job for being pregnant.

“When I was 22 and finishing my first year of teaching, I had an experience millions of women will recognize. By June I was visibly pregnant — and the principal told me the job I’d already been promised for the next year would go to someone else,” Warren tweeted. “This was 1971, years before Congress outlawed pregnancy discrimination — but we know it still happens in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. We can fight back by telling our stories. I tell mine on the campaign trail, and I hope to hear yours.”

This is the same narrative she’s been pushing on the campaign trail during her stump speeches with voters. But it isn’t true. Warren wasn’t fired from the job. In fact, she was asked to come back to the position and instead offered her resignation to pursue graduate school.

“The Riverdale Board of Education approved a second-year teaching contract for a young Elizabeth Warren, documents show, contradicting the Democratic presidential candidate’s repeated claims that she was asked not to return to teaching after a single year because she was ‘visibly pregnant,’ ” the Washington Free Beacon recently reported. “Minutes of an April 21, 1971, Riverdale Board of Education meeting obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show that the board voted unanimously on a motion to extend Warren a ‘2nd year’ contract for a two-days-per-week teaching job. That job is similar to the one she held the previous year, her first year of teaching. Minutes from a board meeting held two months later, on June 16, 1971, indicate that Warren’s resignation was ‘accepted with regret.’ ” [Editor’s note: Warren stands by her original statement.]

In an attempt to court voters and score political points, Warren has repeatedly painted herself as a victim. The stories she’s told aren’t true, yet she keeps telling them. In the age of authentic populism, it’s a wonder why she continues to do so.

Pavlich is the editor for Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor.