Here’s what Elizabeth Warren is really doing with her dumb DNA test

Elizabeth Warren doesn't need to prove she's Native American, and that's not why she released the results of a DNA test to the Boston Globe. The Globe reports, quoting the DNA report, "Warren’s pure Native American ancestor appears in her family tree 'in the range of 6-10 generations ago.'” This gives a range of 1/64 to 1/1024 Native American (the other 1023/1024 is straight cis white woman privilege). Warren herself claimed it was her great-great-grandmother who was Native American; that would give a fraction of 1/32. The Boston Globe had to correct its story because it initially got the math wrong and misreported the range of her possible ancestry. That's hardly going to silence her critics, least of all President Donald Trump, who takes delight in derisively calling her "Pocahontas" at his rallies.

Questions about Warren's claimed Native American heritage have doggedly followed her since her 2012 campaign for U.S. Senate, when GOP opposition research discovered a Fordham Law Review article touting her as Harvard Law School's "first woman of color" on the faculty. Years earlier, Warren was listed as a minority faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania. Warren is the butt of many jokes in conservative media, often referred to as Fauxcahontas or Chief Spreading Bull, but Warren is not trying to make the jokes go away. She's only added fuel to the fire. No, the point, as she explains in a video that was released in conjunction with the DNA report, is pure identity politics.

"Trump can say whatever he wants about me, but mocking Native Americans or any group in order to try and get at me, that's not what America stands for," Warren narrates in, let's face it, the opening ad of her 2020 presidential campaign about her family's story.

"[My parents] were real people. The love they shared, the struggles they endured, the family they built, the story they lived will always be etched on my heart. And no one — not even the president of the United States — will ever take it away from me," she says.

The facts of the DNA test, which is inconclusive, do not matter. This is all about feelings. This is all about mean old President Trump using racial "slurs" to demean a woman who's fighting for "change" in Washington D.C. If Warren identifies as a Native American, who is Donald Trump or anyone else to tell her she's wrong? A bigot, that's who, and that's all that matters, and that's why minorities can vote for Elizabeth Warren in 2020.

Now notice what's not being discussed. The kind of change Elizabeth Warren's progressivism advocates is the soft tyranny of a ubiquitous federal government that reaches out and nationalizes American businesses, but it's more fun to mock her claimed heritage. Her plan to double down on Obamacare's failures with more subsidies, more price controls, and more regulations as a prelude to a single-payer Medicare for All scheme is ignored. Her open-borders zealotry and demands to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to appease to her far-Left base? Forgotten.

And what alternatives are conservatives offering to these demands from the Left?

It may be great for clicks and views to follow the mainstream media's narrative on Warren's ancestry, but it doesn't do a thing to advance conservatism. Former Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., tried to make Warren's lies about her ancestry a campaign issue, and do you know what happened to him? We call him former senator.

Why don't we stop the clickbait and challenge Warren and the Democrats on the issues that will actually matter when Americans go to vote, before we lose?

Editor's note: An earlier version of this article included the line: "The DNA test found she’s anywhere from 1/32 to 1/1024 Native American, depending on whether it was her great-great-great-grandmother or someone else as far as ten generations back who was Native American." This is inaccurate. The DNA test, as the Globe has further updated its article to state, found that the range was from 1/64 to 1/1024, not including the possibility of 1/32. Warren herself claimed that the native ancestor was her great-great-great-grandmother.

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