Elizabeth Warren: The movie

Elizabeth Warren has proved that she is approximately as Native American as the average cigar store Indian. I won’t be persuaded until Ward Churchill has endorsed her claim. Warren released a video (below) in connection with her alleged vindication. She must think we’re really, really stupid, and she has more evidence to support that proposition than she does her claim to official Indianship of some kind. Committing the only kind of humor of which Warren is capable, the video is unintentionally hilarious (more here).

It seems to me that Warren’s target audience for this production is the Democratic Party’s media adjunct. There her confidence in the stupidity of her audience is fully warrented (misspelling intended).

James Freeman provides useful context to Warren’s test results. His column is worthwhile in its entirety. Freeman turns to “our shared heritage” as suggested by Carl Zimmer’s account of the biggest genetic profile of the United States to date. Freeman quotes Zimmer:

The researchers found that European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.

These broad estimates masked wide variation among individuals. Based on their sample, the researchers estimated that over six million European-Americans have some African ancestry. As many as five million have genomes that are at least 1 percent Native American in origin.

Freeman comments: “At least according to the report from Professor Bustamante, it’s possible that Sen. Warren has far less than one percent Native American ancestry, and that her genetic makeup is perhaps similar to that of the average white person in the U.S.”

Elizabeth Warren obviously fancies herself presidential material. It would be difficult to find a candidate less appealing to a general national audience than Hillary Clinton, but Elizabeth Warren may be she. Her natural appeal extends to the narrow band of Americans those who love being lectured and hectored and condescended to.

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