ROBERT SPENCER: Elizabeth Warren Demands Conflict-of-Interest Rules for Musk, and Trump Camp’s Response Is FIRE.
Heap big trouble for Trump and Musk, eh? No. Not only is Warren’s demand patently one-sided and politically motivated, but Trump’s team is not disposed to take it lying down. Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on Monday sent Warren a teepee-shaking response: “President Trump,” Leavitt wrote, “has assembled the most impressive and qualified team of innovators, entrepreneurs, and geniuses to advise and staff our government. Pocahontas can play political games and send toothless letters, but the Trump-Vance transition will continue to be held to the highest ethical and legal standards possible—a standard unfamiliar to a career politician whose societal impact is 1/1024th of Elon Musk’s.”
This statement should be preserved as an example of how patriots should fight back against the left. “Pocahontas,” of course, was Trump’s unforgettable nickname for Warren after she was unmasked as a fake, having claimed for decades to be a Native American while not having any actual native ancestry. Leavitt’s statement that Warren’s “societal impact is 1/1024th of Elon Musk’s” was a riotous reference to Warren’s disastrous decision in 2018 to prove Trump wrong with a DNA test, only for it to show that she was no more than 1/1024th Native American, at best.
And note that the Democratic Party operatives with bylines at the Washington Post are far angrier at Trump’s spokeswoman referring to Warren as “Pocahontas” rather than Warren having used a fake ethnic identity to advance her career:
As Kevin Williamson wrote in 2018 in “The Blackface Party:”
Senator Warren is the main offender of the moment, a significantly-whiter-than-the-average-white-woman white woman who has for years been masquerading as a Native American, telling transparent bumfodder stories about how her parents had to elope because her mother was part Cherokee and part Delaware, an obvious attempt to claim some of that victimhood juice secondhand. She allowed herself to be advertised as a woman of color by Harvard, happy in the coincidence that “her major professional advances — to the University of Pennsylvania and then to Harvard — came after she began formally identifying as Native American, a distant descendant of Cherokee and Delaware tribes,” as the Boston Globe put it.
(She is a woman of color: Pantone 11-0602.)
Warren, previously a mostly obscure academic and an author of dopey self-help books — The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan — needed a little extra kick to stand out from the crowd of sanctimonious white ladies who rest like a dollop of low-fat sour cream atop the nation’s educational institutions. And so she went all in on her fictitious Indian ancestry: You’ll remember the recipe for “Pow-Wow Chow” and other “Indian” dishes plagiarized from the New York Times.
The Cherokee Nation is not buying it, denouncing Senator Warren’s extraordinarily tenuous claim to native ancestry as “a mockery,” “dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens,” “inappropriate and wrong,” etc. “Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage,” Cherokee Nation secretary of state Chuck Hoskin Jr. wrote.
Identity politics is generally goofy and often trivial, but this is no trivial thing: The Cherokee Nation is a separate sovereign nation, with the rights and dignity that implies. It deserves to be treated with respect, not used as a prop by an ambitious low-rent hustler from Oklahoma.
White people did some pretty rotten things to the Indians over the years. But making them take Elizabeth Warren on top of it? That’s just mean.
Incidentally, some of us on the right are also extremely angry with Trump’s spokeswoman referring to Warren as “Pocahontas.” It’s Fauxcahontas, dammit — Fauxcahontas!
