By Christopher Bedford
Sunday, January 19, 2020
Tuesday night’s CNN debate was a set-up. And that’s not
some internet fever dream, it’s an observation shared by reporters from Rolling
Stone and The
Huffington Post to Fox
News and The
Daily Caller. Even late-night
comedy picked up on the game.
The trap was set the day before, when the hosts of the
debate published a story claiming that in 2018, during a private meeting
between Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Sanders told Warren a woman
can not win the presidency. Reporters have grown even lazier and more
comfortable thinking readers are stupid, so the initial report cited four
anonymous sources for a story about a one-on-one meeting denied by the Sanders
campaign. It also included the hysterical line that Warren’s campaign “declined
to comment,” despite the story coming from the candidate and being filled with
anonymous Warren campaign comments.
CNN moderator Abby Phillip continued the trend of
treating this alleged incident as fact the next night, dismissing Sanders’
denials and opting to ask Warren how the horrible, sexist things Sanders had
said made her feel.
“The 24-hour network,” Matt Taibbi wrote at Rolling
Stone, “combines a naked political hit with a cynical ploy for ratings.”
Four years prior, of course, Sanders lost the Democrat
primary to Hillary Clinton. Before that race, he’d pushed Warren to run for
president instead of him. Over the years prior, he’d been recorded on video
telling an audience there is no reason a woman cannot win the presidency and
telling schoolgirls they could one day win that prize. His supporters have been
quick to point to these confirmed facts to dispute this unproven allegation,
but there’s more to this equation.
Warren has lied about being an American Indian, about
sending her kids to private school, and even being fired from a teacher
position for being pregnant. All three are stories she has used to advance
herself professionally and politically, repeating the latter claim as recently
as Tuesday’s debate.
Many Americans have stories of ancestry they haven’t
fact-checked. Growing up, I heard that my mother’s side of the family had
Apache Indian blood in it. My grandfather had a painting in his living room of
two Apache scouts hiding on a hill, watching a lone wagon amble by. He might
bring up the family lore during a cowboy movie or when “The Last of the
Mohicans” came on. That was the end of it. Warren, on the other hand, became
Harvard University’s first tenured professor of color.
The school’s spokesman told Harvard Crimson Professor
Warren was an American Indian in 1996. In 1998, the school newspaper again
bragged, “Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman,
Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American.’’ For years
after, Harvard’s public diversity documents and other newspapers echoed the
claim. We might all agree a publicly touted fake-diversity hire is a far cry
from sharing family lore we’ve never properly investigated.
But Warren, the Globe reports, claimed she first heard of
all this American Indian nonsense when The Boston Herald reported it during her
first bid for the Senate. That, however, doesn’t check out either. By 1992, the
Globe reports, “she had been listing herself for seven years as a minority in a
legal directory often used by law recruiters to make diversity-friendly hires.
She continued to list herself in the book until 1995, the year she took a
permanent position at Harvard.”
Years before, in 1986, she registered with the Texas Bar
as an “American Indian.” Two years later she contributed “Cherokee” recipes to
the “Pow Wow Chow” cookbook. It’s still available on Ebay. Huh.
She’d dropped the act by the time the news broke, but
President Donald Trump still enjoyed the story a great deal, teasing her at
campaign rallies until she filmed a live reveal of her DNA test results to
prove once and for all that she was indeed Cherokee. Her campaign sent one
camera crew to Professor Carlos Bustamante’s office while another recorded the
candidate on the other end of the line. “The president likes to call my mom a
liar, what do the facts say?” she asks. “The facts,” he replies, “suggest that
you absolutely have Native American ancestry in your pedigree,” as the shot
switches to her satisfied smile.
“How much, 1/1000th?” Trump asked as reporters demanded
his apology. Well, no, but somewhere between .09 percent and 1.5 percent,
according to Bustamante, or, as The Intercept notes, “a bit less than the
average white American.” The Cherokee Nation told her to stop it. She ended up
apologizing and took the video down.
That’s not all. “We are going to have the same choice
that you had for your kids,” a black woman quietly told Warren in Atlanta,
“because I read that your children went to private schools.” Neither she nor
her daughter, she told the senator, could afford to move to the suburbs, so the
children’s best option for a good education and a better future was charter
school.
“No,” Warren gently disagreed, “my children went to
public schools.”
Except for her son, who, The Daily Caller reports,
attended an expensive private school in Austin starting in fifth grade. Today,
that school costs $14,995 a year.
“Elizabeth’s daughter went to public school,” her
campaign told The Washington Free Beacon. “Her son went to public school until
5th grade.”
“I read that your children went to private schools.”
“No.”
Huh.
But there’s more yet. Warren is particularly fond of
telling the one about the school principal who fired Warren for being pregnant.
“When I was 22 and finishing my first year of teaching, I had an experience
millions of women will recognize,” she wrote in a Twitter version of her
favorite stump story. “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.”
But before the Twitter version, she had another one she
shared during an interview at Berkeley College: “I [taught] for a year, and
then that summer I didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an ’emergency
certificate,’ it was called. I went back to graduate school and took a couple
of courses in education and said, ‘I don’t think this is going to work out for
me.'”
And then there are the notes from the school board’s
meeting, which say Warren was offered a contract renewal. Two months later, the
board’s minutes show her resignation was accepted “with regret.” Five days
after the Washington Free Beacon reported on those notes, Warren went to CBS to
defend her campaign-trail version of events, saying the offer was withdrawn
when she was visibly pregnant and her story on leaving education had changed
because she’s now a senator and not just some nationally known law school
professor.
Huh.
Of course, employers discriminating against pregnant
women happened then and despite a law against it, it happens now. Like sending
your children to public school, it’s the kind of story that connects with women
and their families who might have the same experience in real life. Of course,
that’s just what makes the incident with the principal the perfect campaign
rewrite. That, and the villainous school principal passed away in 1999. “Elizabeth
Warren’s Pregnancy Story is Unbelievable—If You’ve Never Known a Pregnant Woman
in America,” The Daily Beast declared.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe Warren does speak for all
women, including her 2011 campaign story about being the first woman to take
the New Jersey Bar while breastfeeding. According to New Jersey records, “women
have been taking the New Jersey bar exam since 1895,” though they’re “not aware
their nursing habits were ever tracked.” Maybe she was joking with the crowd.
Listen, none of this matters. “Based on the fact that
it’s a Tuesday in America, yes, sexism, misogyny, come on,” Democratic
consultant Jehmu Greene said on Fox Business Tuesday evening, explaining how
all men told Warren she could not be president. “I have heard everyone I know
who is an armchair quarterback as it relates to this Democratic primary say
something either exactly the same or similar.”
“And based on Bernie’s record himself,” she continued,
“have you met a Bernie Bro? This is not a new narrative, he called Hillary
Clinton unqualified in 2016!”
Huh.
All candidates lie. Maybe all people lie. Our current
president doesn’t have any aversion to exaggeration, nor did any before him. A
book could be written on Sanders’s love-hate relationship with how much things
cost. Then, a book could also be written on his history of supporting women.
And Elizabeth Warren is a liar.
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