In 1835, President Andrew Jackson wrote his Letter to the Cherokee Nation, which briefly argued the benefits of removal west, which ultimately became the Trail of Tears.  Jackson didn't flat-out lie, but he was disingenuous.   Flash forward 185 years. and we have Elizabeth Warren's Letter to the Cherokee Nation, a turgid document that reads like a badly written law review article, which if anything is more disingenuous and dishonest than Jackson's infamous letter.  As a peek into the mind of the Democrats' former presidential frontrunner, and the hypocrisy of the left in general, it is scarily revealing. 

Don't follow the link above to read Warren's letter if you value your leisure and sanity.  I've done it for you at some cost, not only in time and mental anguish, but also in some very good bourbon.  It's a ponderous epistolary monstrosity, clocking in at twelve densely written single-spaced pages, with 89 (!) footnotes.  Varying in tone from groveling to obstinate, choleric to good-humored, prickly to pleasant, it seeks to exonerate Warren from her claims of Cherokee ethnicity while establishing her bona fides as a champion of American Indian interests.

In reality, the letter shows Warren for what she is: a dishonest, striving narcissist with a strongly authoritarian bent, very much in the do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do philosophy of the modern left.  It is carefully structured to defend Warren's deliberate false claims of Cherokee heritage, which at the very least suggests she was a diversity hire at both Penn and Harvard, both of which listed her as a "minority professor."  She claims in the letter that she "never benefitted financially or professionally" from her false claims, citing a fawning 2018 Boston Globe article, which is sort of like "my lawyer says I didn't do it!" 

While it can't be conclusively proven that Warren's false claims resulted in her hires and advancement, it can't be disproven, either, regardless what her acolytes in the media claim.  That she did it in a professional context shows that Warren herself believed that the claims would be advantageous, or she wouldn't have made them.  For a ruthlessly ambitious person like Warren, any other conclusion is nonsensical. 

Warren also addresses her DNA test in a highly disingenuous manner.  First, she implies that the DNA test actually produced results that support her claims, when in fact it was just the opposite.  Rather, Warren, demonstrating her fundamental dishonesty, initially touted her DNA test results because they revealed a smidgen (probably less than 1%) of possible Native American heritage, a claim that was initially supported by friendly media.  Only when conservative media and politicians mocked the plainly ridiculous claim did Warren back off.  But in the letter, there is no mention of this — only that "DNA does not determine tribal citizenship" and that she "caused real harm" to American Indian communities by making the claim.

More hypocritical still is Warren's newfound avowal that she is a "white woman, and that is how I identify."  Warren is at pains in the letter to apologize for identifying as a Cherokee and describes in painful detail all the Cherokees she's apologized to, from tribal chiefs to tribal citizens, publicly and privately, presumably genuflecting all the way.

But why by Warren's own standards and those of the far left was she wrong?  Isn't identification in most other leftist contexts an entirely subjective endeavor?  Warren cries now that she was wrong to identify as a Cherokee, based upon what she says were her own honest subjective beliefs, based upon family lore she learned as a child.  Yet Warren has no qualms about accepting the subjective ideation of a nine-year-old boy that he's actually a girl.  Not only that, but she's declared that if elected, such a child will help select her education secretary. 

Yet sex is far less mutable and far more biologically defined than race or ethnicity.  Race itself is arguably a purely human construct.  Sex most definitely is not.  Warren was careful to say in her Cherokee letter that DNA does not define American Indian ethnicity (which is the position of the tribes), but ethnicity and race are a far cry from sex.  Sex clearly does biologically define human beings, regardless of subjective sexual tastes, desires, or the ideation of individuals as to what sex they think they should be.

Warren takes the position that her honestly held but false subjective belief that she was an American Indian was a horrible error.  So does she endorse puberty-retarding hormonal treatments and even surgical procedures (such as mastectomies) on minors based upon the subjective ideations of children that they are the wrong sex?  And how can she even promote as she does "gender-affirming procedures" for transsexuals in her Medicare for All proposals?  That's worse than Warren's dishonesty regarding her heritage.

Image: Edward Kimmel via Flickr.