Senator Elizabeth Warren made big headlines this week by releasing the results of a DNA test which proved that her ancestral heritage is roughly one-tenth of one percent Mexican/Peruvian/Colombian — and that any Native American blood in her lineage is entirely impossible to discern. In the process, she managed to offend Cherokee Nation Secretary of State, Chuck Hoskin Jr., who explained that Warren’s effort to exploit this “useless” DNA test was not merely “inappropriate and wrong,” but actually “makes a mockery out of DNA tests and [their] legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven.”
But because Elizabeth Warren is a creature of the Left and its slavish devotion to tribal identity politics, she has a long history of trying to cast herself as a member of an aggrieved minority whose victim status supposedly confers upon her a large measure of moral authority.
She also has a long history of disparaging the free-market economic system because of the inequalities it generates. In 2003, for instance, Warren and her daughter co-authored a book portraying capitalism as a “game” that is “stacked against” ordinary Americans who seek “to provide a decent life for their children.”
In September 2008, as the U.S. faced its worst financial crisis in three-quarters of a century, Warren penned an article calling for the federal government to bail out the many bankrupt Americans who purportedly had been tricked into taking out risky mortgages by unscrupulous bankers. “They are casualties,” wrote Warren, “of a financial system that saw them not as customers, but as prey … a financial system that has been devastated by mindless deregulation and unchecked greed.” Conspicuously absent from Warren’s analysis was any mention of the fact that leftist Democrats in government — and not the private sector — had created the entire crisis by instituting a disastrous set of mandates requiring banks to lend money to underqualified borrowers.
In 2009 Warren appeared in Michael Moore‘s anti-capitalist film titled Capitalism: A Love Story. In a recorded interview regarding “how Wall Street got away with murder,” the filmmaker told Warren that “capitalism in and of itself, at least the capitalism we know now, is immoral, it’s not democratic, and worst of all, it doesn’t work…” Warren did not disagree, replying: “But we made up these rules, and the rules are of men, of people. We pick what the rules are. The rules have not been written for ordinary families, for the people who actually do the work. We have to rewrite those rules.” When Moore then blamed the greed of “corporate America” for allegedly having tricked people “into these adjustable rate mortgages [which] they may not be able to pay … back,” Warren said: “It’s a big part of what happened, and then just layer in on top of that: ‘Can we sell them more credit cards that are loaded with tricks and traps?’”
In July 2010, Warren spoke at an East Hampton, New York event on the topic of “Restoring the Integrity of the U.S. Financial Markets.” Fellow panelists included the billionaire financier George Soros and the self-proclaimed revolutionary communist Van Jones.
In October 2011, Warren — while enjoying a $429,000 Harvard salary and residing in a $5 million mansion — voiced enthusiastic support for the anti-capitalism rallies which were staged in cities across the United States by Occupy Wall Street and other activist groups. “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” she said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “I support what they do.”
While campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat in September 2012, Warren stated that the government and the public sector play a vital role in wealth creation: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own—nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces [sic] that the rest of us paid for…. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless—keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
In March 2013, Warren suggested raising the national minimum wage from $7.25 to $22 per hour: “If we started in 1960, and we said [that] as productivity goes up … then the minimum wage was going to go up the same … if that were the case, the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour.” “What happened to the other $14.75?” she continued. “It sure didn’t go to the worker.”
By no means limited to the realm of economic class, Warren’s devotion to identity politics extends also to gender and race. For example, the senator has long claimed — falsely and deceptively — that female workers in the United States are paid considerably less than equally qualified men who do the same work, and that the American workplace is thus “rigged against women.” But Warren’s lamentations rang particularly hollow when it was reported in April 2017 that the women working in her own Senate office “earned just 71 percent of what was earned by men” in that same office.
A number of years ago in Lexington, Virginia, Warren spoke at a symposium entitled “Critical Race Theory: The Next Frontier,” alongside academics who, according to the Washington Free Beacon, “have advocated for corporate and government reparations for African-Americans, criticized the concept of U.S. citizenship, and accused the United States of operating under a system of ‘apartheid.‘” Founded by the late Derrick Bell, Critical Race Theory is an academic discipline that seeks to divide society along racial lines into (white) oppressors and (black) victims, similar to the way Marxism frames the oppressor/victim dichotomy along class lines.
This same mindset served as the foundation for Warren’s much more recent assertion — during a question-and-answer session hosted by Congressional Black Caucus chairman Cedric Richmond at the historically black Dillard University two months ago — that the American criminal justice system is “racist [from] front to back.”
Elizabeth Warren is considered a likely contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. If she gets it, she will seek to bring her passionate devotion to socialism, class warfare, and identity politics to every sector of American life. In short, she aims to pick up right where former president Obama left off.
Leave a Reply