While many even in the liberal media have derided Elizabeth Warren’s botched attempt to justify and explain her claim of having Native American history, Time magazine is digging in and defending the liberal Senator. In a Tweet on Tuesday, the news weekly insisted, “Elizabeth Warren's DNA test shows how she's weaponizing transparency.”
How’s that? The woman who represented herself as Native American at Harvard, who contributed to a cookbook where she falsely called herself Cherokee, is now transparent? In the Time article, writer Ryan Teague Beckwith tried to turn a negative into a positive:
In revealing the results of a DNA test of her ancestry this week, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren showed just how far she would go to rebut Trump’s repeated and baseless claim that she lied about having Native American ancestry to get ahead in academia.
Beckwith never mentioned the book Pow Wow Chow, the 1994 cookbook where Warren allowed herself to be listed as Cherokee.
Instead, the Time writer made the narrow argument that it can’t be proven Warren specifically benefitted from telling people at Harvard she was Native American:
In recent weeks, Warren also sat for a lengthy interview with the Boston Globe, which pored over hundreds of documents and interviewed 31 professors and released a dozen personnel forms relating to her academic career at Harvard University and other schools. The Globe found that she was not given preferential treatment in hiring because of any claims about American Indian heritage.
Back in 2012, Warren told the Boston Globe that she portrayed herself as Native American to connect with people:
US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren said on Wednesday that she listed herself as a minority in directories of law professors in the hopes of networking with other “people like me” — meaning those with Native American roots.
After acknowledging that Warren’s DNA test has “backfired in the short run,” Beckwith touted it as a plus for 2020: “But being transparent could bolster one of Warren’s likely campaign themes — if she chooses to run — of strengthening anti-corruption laws.”
