Four Cherokee women went to Boston this week to try to meet Elizabeth Warren to show Warren genealogical evidence proving that Warren has no Cherokee ancestry, and to explain to Warren why her continued insistence that she is Cherokee is offensive.
One of the Cherokee women, Twila Barnes, is a genealogist who has written extensively at her blog about Warren’s lack of Cherokee ancestry, and is part of a group of Cherokees who demand that Warren tell the truth.
I have linked to Barnes’ posts many times and have spoken with her about her genealogical findings and evidence. Unlike Warren, I actually cared about the evidence.
Last week, the women sent e-mails and made a phone call to Warren’s campaign press secretary, Alethea Harney, requesting a meeting. Harney never responded to the e-mails and did not call back.
When Harney did not respond, the women went to the press and announced that they were flying to try to meet Warren since their outreach to Harney was unsuccessful. Harney told The Boston Herald that the Warren campaign would reach out to the Cherokee women and set up a meeting with staffers. Instead, the Warren campaign ducked the women.
The Warren campaign also sought to isolate the Cherokee women and falsely accused them of working for the Brown campaign.
The Warren campaign set out to try to demonize me and by association, the Cherokee women. The Warren campaign alleged that because I was a “right wing extremist” and because I had contributed a few hundred dollars to Brown almost 2 1/2 years ago during the Coakley race, the Cherokee women were illegitimate.
Note that the Warren campaign never has tried to delegitimize or contradict the actual evidence the Cherokee women had showing that Warren is not being truthful. Instead, the Warren campaign attacked the messengers of the evidence.
Never to this date has the Warren campaign disputed the findings by Barnes and other Cherokee genealogists that Warren is not Cherokee. Not once.
The purpose of the delegitimization was to isolate the Cherokee women, to suggest that if they received assistance of any type, they were illegitimate.
Yet that standard does not apply to Warren, who goes to Hollywood to meet with liberal entertainment moguls who stuff large checks in her pockets, and who huddles with liberal Emily’s List and other progressive groups who offer both financial and logistical support. Warren is a veritable money raising vacuum machine, and has a huge campaign infrastructure behind her:
she’s created her own money machine, powered by the progressive blogosphere, female donors, women’s groups and other collections of Democratic activists.
But the Cherokee women are not allowed any form of support. The Cherokee women have to do it on their own, according to the parameters set by the Warren campaign and its media sycophants.
Warren, with her $10,000,000 in the bank from power brokers, is untainted, but if the Cherokee women receive help of any type they are illegitimate.
These were proud Cherokee women who came to Boston in good faith in the hope that Warren would do the right thing, meet with them, look at the evidence, and stop making false claims to be Cherokee.
And they were met with Alinsky Rule No. 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy.
Warren’s behavior has been disreputable and should be disqualifying. Warren talks a good game about fighting for the downtrodden at the same time that she steps on the backs of generations of Cherokees.
The way Warren has treated these Cherokee women is the way a schoolyard bully treats physically weaker classmates.
Yet miraculously and in a myriad of ways Warren always portrays herself as a victim. Warren tells stories about being Cherokee, yet somehow is the victim when Cherokees demand she tell the truth.
The Cherokee women have announced that they hope to return to Boston one more time over the summer, and then again for at least one of the debates. They will be holding a fundraiser in the near future so they can bring a larger group.
Unlike Warren, the Cherokee women will not receive huge sums of money from Hollywood, Wall Street, Emily’s List, high tech executives, or any of the other levers of power in society. The only thing they will have on their side is the truth.
Do not let Elizabeth Warren isolate the Cherokee women and cut them off from support. They deserve all our support.
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