from NewsBusters:
Actual Slate Piece Wonders If Others Will Be ‘Bullied Into Releasing’ Ancestry
Like Warren
Talk about a piece that twisted itself into quite the pretzel. In a piece Monday night for Slate’s Future Tense partnership with New America and Arizona State, James Erwin passed the blame onto the President for the ancestry fiasco concerning Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren (MA), suggesting it could lead to a new McCarthyism with politicians being “bullied” into taking such tests.
Erwin’s headline (“Elizabeth Warren Has Set a Dangerous Precedent”) and subhead (“Will other politicians be bullied into releasing their genetic information, too?”) set the tone for the nutty assertion that merely passed the buck off of Warren and her past claims about being Native American (when she’s likely only between 1/64th and 1/1,024th).
Warren had boasted of her heritage in her past (ex. faculty guides at Harvard and the “pow wow chow” cookbook), but Erwin asserted that it’s Trump who caused this problem:
On May 26, 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump tweeted, “I find it offensive that Goofy Elizabeth Warren, sometimes referred to as Pocahontas, pretended to be Native American to get in Harvard.” It was a classic of the Trump insult-tweet genre: so offensive it demanded refutation but so juvenile it diminished anyone compelled to engage with it. For two years, Trump has returned to the insult again and again, culminating with his July 5 challenge to Warren to take a DNA test….On Monday, however, she released a DNA test which points definitively to Warren having a real (if quite small) percentage of Native American ancestry[.]
