Fox News cleverly used the “controversy” over Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage claims both to avoid talking about her policy ideas and to suggest she’s already out of the presidential contest.
“We’ve had this Native American dust up,” host Neil Cavuto said at the beginning of the discussion. How many places did she use that or venues did she use that either in the Texas bar, to get into an elite school? It’s the issue that won’t go away from her. … This is a constant with her.”
It was certainly a constant with Fox News. The show spent 6:28 on the issue and called on a three-person panel for commentary.
Of course, two out of the three were conservatives. Conservative Kat Timpf said “it should be” an issue that doesn’t go away because "it’s super messed up, and it’s super weird.”
“I don’t pretend to be anything but white,” Timpf sneered. “I can’t imagine being Elizabeth Warren, having pulled, essentially, a Rachel Dolezal, and then saying, ‘You know what? I can still run for president.’”
Scott Levenson, the lone Democrat on the set, called Timpf’s attack “not accurate.” He responded to Timpf’s claim that Warren had “lied” by saying that Warren “had an oral history that was brought down from her family, she had an understanding of what her lineage is. She tested, she found out that was not the case. Millions of Americans are testing for their lineage every day and getting revelations.”
“My issue is that she’s apparently misrepresented it in a number of public [arenas]” Cavuto began.
“She was under a belief that she had a certain lineage. She wasn’t misrepresenting,” Levenson repeated.
Of course, none of the others cared about that. “Once you confuse people - " Cavuto began.
Levenson had a great response: “I know she probably had the most-attended inauguration in history, probably colluded with the Russians, and it’s probably her hair. So there’s enough lies in politics.”
Nan Hayworth baselessly suggested Warren had deliberately called herself Native American because she’s “caught up in the identity politics of the Democratic party.”
But Cavuto got to what was probably the real point of this discussion: finding an excuse to kill Warren’s candidacy. Or at least label it as dead. “Is this the kind of stuff, in a crowded field, fairly or not, that will kind of kick her to the side?" Cavuto "asked." "I don’t know if that’s right, it just is what it is. All the more so in a crowded field.”
Hayworth agreed. “She has a formidable reputation for the kind of institutionalized arrogance on policy that the Democrats are favoring this year,” Hayworth said. But, she added, Warren “has a big identity problem.”
Levenson called the primary season a “season of ideas.” But not on Fox. Despite the many issues Warren discusses on her website, Fox only wanted to talk about her identity.
Watch the real purveyors of identity politics below, from the February 7, 2019 Your World.
