Elizabeth Warren's recent visit to the Breakfast Club podcast, anchored by 'Charlamagne Tha God' did not go well for her. When pressed on her 'Native American' fable, Warren uncorked a dizzying parade of excuses and explanations, clearly baffling her hosts. She claimed simultaneously that she still believes she's a Native American, while averring that she's not a person of color and regretting her false identification as a Cherokee. I'm not sure how those statements can be reconciled, and the podcast crew seemed similarly perplexed. CTG went so far as to disparagingly refer to Warren -- to her face! -- as the "original Rachel Dolezal," a cutting reference the former NAACP official who fraudulently 'identified' as black, but is a white person. In case you missed it, here's the cringeworthy exchange:
Watch @cthagod grill @ewarren on her heritage. "When did you find out that you weren't [Native American]?" "Were there any benefits to that?" "You sound like the original Rachel Dolezal a little bit" @breakfastclubam pic.twitter.com/GFzH8JqSqN
— Sarah Dolan (@sarahedolan) May 31, 2019
Over the weekend, the Trump campaign highlighted CTG's appearance on CNN in which he was asked whether he bought Warren's version of events. He says, quite understandably, that he simply does not believe Warren's contention that there was no connection between her abrupt decision to start listing herself as a minority woman in a professional directory that was known to be widely used by hiring deans, and her coincidental promotion into the Ivy League that very same year:
"I definitely don't buy her answer. ... She had to have benefited in some way, shape or form." pic.twitter.com/9xyWNsqilE
— Official Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 15, 2019
Warren cites denials from some people involved in the hiring process -- most of whom are liberal Democrats, of course -- but other circumstantial evidence is powerful. Both Penn and Harvard were experiencing diversity controversies at the time of her hiring, and both schools formally touted her as a woman of color. She was hired at Penn shortly after inaugurating her Native American self-identification, then suddenly retired it immediately after attaining tenure at Harvard. Her feeble explanation for this suspicious timeline is directly refuted by people who overlapped with her at Harvard, and just strains credulity generally. CTG thinks her story smells funky because her story obviously smells funky, and that was true even before she tried her disastrous DNA stunt.
Nevertheless, Warren has been gaining in the polls, even overtaking fellow left-wing zealot Bernie Sanders in a number of surveys. She's been positioning herself as a hard-charging leftist who has a "plan for that" when it comes to a wide array of policy challenges. Alas, nearly all of said plans call for an ever more powerful government intervening deeper into Americans' lives, confiscating more private wealth and redistributing it via the levers of centralized bureaucratic power, to the tune of an estimated $129 trillion, and counting. Running through some of the substance of her proposals, Ramesh Ponnuru is not impressed:
The more big ideas someone has, the more likely it is that some of them are very bad ones. It is a potential that Senator Warren has realized. And some of her ideas are downright demagogic...From Bill Clinton’s administration onward, voters have been much more likely to punish than to reward presidents for pushing ahead with bold ideas. In practice, they seem to understand something about the limited ability of government officials to change the world for the better, and the risks of their trying -- something that Senator Warren and her fans don’t.
I'll leave you with Warren reacting to her placement in what is generally seen as the less prestigious Democratic debate grouping later this month -- which could turn out to benefit her:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren responds to Democratic debate line-up: "I'm glad for everybody to have a chance to talk about what they want to do, their revision for, how they see this country going forward. Never in a million years that I think I was going to be running for president." pic.twitter.com/zp43w5KTQI
— The Hill (@thehill) June 16, 2019
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