On Friday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren spoke before a New Hampshire town hall in an attempt to explain why she claimed to have Native American heritage and that she didn’t benefit from her lie.

“My three older brothers and I learned about our family the same way most people do, from our mom and from our dad. My family’s very important to me and that’s why — many years ago — I sometimes identified as Native American. Boston Globe did a big investigation about this, gosh, about a year and a half ago. Never had anything to do with any job I ever got or any benefit,” she said.  “But even so, I shouldn’t have done it. I am not a person of color, I am not a citizen of a tribe and I have apologized for confusion I have caused on tribal citizenship, tribal sovereignty, and for any harm that I have caused.”

The fact that Warren is not a “person of color” should’ve been obvious to anyone who’s ever seen her.  The fact that she claims that she received no benefit from this blatant misrepresentation is even more brazen than the original lie.

Let’s take a walk down cultural appropriation memory lane, shall we? 

  1. In 1984, Warren submitted recipes for Pow Wow Chow: A Collection of Recipes from Families of the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole in which she was labeled a Cherokee – and the recipes were plagiarized    directly from a famous French chef.
  2. When she applied for the Texas State Bar, she claimed minority status. When she taught at the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University she was classified as a minority instructor. A Harvard Law School spokesman bragged about her being Native American.

My friend David French attended Harvard Law School when Warren was being touted as a professor of color:

I remember it vividly.  I was there. I arrived on campus in the fall of 1991, just… [when] liberal activists were seething with outrage. They were demanding new hires, and the place almost boiled over when the school granted tenure to four white men. My classmate, Hans Bader, notes that the school wasn’t just under political pressure to make a “diversity” hire, it was under legal pressure as well. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination had issued a “probable cause finding” that the school had discriminated against a professor named Clare Dalton when it denied her tenure. In Bader’s words, “Harvard’s faculty badly wanted to racially and sexually diversify their ranks to show their commitment to diversity, so that MCAD would not view future denials of tenure to unqualified minorities and women as being motivated by a discriminatory animus.”No one can know whether Warren would have landed at Harvard without faking her ethnicity (Harvard of course denies her alleged minority status was a factor), but we do know that she spent years holding herself out as a Native American. We do know those claims were extremely dubious. We also know that she made those claims exactly at the time when they could most help a young career.

Exactly.  It strains credulity that her “accidental” Native American claims occurred exactly at the same time that such heritage would benefit her career.

What would the media do to a Republican that falsely claimed membership in a minority group?  Hint: they’d “go nuclear” forever. The fact that the other Democrat candidates aren’t calling her out on this shows that they aren’t really all that sincere about cultural appropriation.  

It’s great that she is finally admitting she’s not a Native American, but that’s certainly a low bar for honesty.  Especially since she just switched that preposterous claim for another, self-serving lie.

Hat Tip: PJ Media and National Review

About The Author

Mark was a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and served as the national coordinator. He left the organization to work more broadly on expanding the self-governance movement beyond the partisan divide. Mark appears regularly on television in outlets as diverse as MSNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, Bloomberg, Fox Business and the BBC. He’s highly sought after for the tea party perspective from print and electronic media outlets, from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Examiner, Politico and the The Hill. Mark blogs at MarkMeckler.com, and his opinion editorials regularly run in many of the leading political newspapers both on and offline. Mark has a BA in English from San Diego State University and graduated with honors from University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in 1988. He practiced real estate and business law for almost a decade. For the last eleven years of his legal career he specialized in Internet advertising law. When not fighting for the future of our nation, Mark is an avid horseman, and lives in rural northern California with his wife Patty and two children.

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