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Elizabeth Warren: "Pocahontas" for President?

Elizabeth Warren: “Pocahontas” For President?
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Popular progressive icon Elizabeth Warren announced her presidential candidacy last weekend, but the firebrand’s campaign might be plagued by her controversial assertion of Native American heritage.

Warren is best known for championing populist progressive causes such as bank reform and regulating Wall Street, making her political career as one of the most outspoken Congressional forces against those two interconnected entities. The Massachusetts Senator also supports the policies of Medicare-for-All and doing whatever is needed to combat climate change, especially as it relates to implementing the so-called "Green New Deal" that freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just co-sponsored.

Warren is also a very proud proponent of minorities, so much so that she previously identified as one during her younger years. The presidential hopeful nowadays blames her family for telling her stories about her supposed Native American heritage that's become ever less believable after a DNA test late last year revealed that she might only be between 1/64th-1/1024th of that ethnicity, despite scandalously claiming on her 1986 Texas State Bar registration card that she's a member of that group. Trump famously seized on her self-identified ethnicity to taunt her with the nickname "Pocahontas", who was a famous Native American woman from the US' early colonial period, in what his supporters think is a funny joke but her backers decry as racially insensitive.

In her defense, Warren has repeatedly asserted that there's a difference between tribal citizenship and tribal sovereignty, and that this whole media hoopla is designed to distract from her populist message. She's evidently eager to get back on message and move past this controversy, but Trump and his supporters just won't let it go. Their narrative is that she can't be trusted if she lied her whole life about being a minority in order to take advantage of affirmative action policies, which she consistently denied benefiting from. She sees herself as a self-made woman who didn't abuse the system to get ahead.

Nevertheless, she now has more of an opportunity than ever to surmount this scandal by using the spotlight to her advantage to amplify her stump speeches. Out of all the Democratic presidential candidates who have announced their intention to run thus far, she's definitely one of the most experienced, well-known, and popular. America was first introduced to her during the 2016 campaign when her sharp attacks against Trump and effort to help reconcile the Sanders and Clintonite factions of her party generated national attention, and by the looks of it, they're going to keep hearing a lot more about her for nearly the next two years.

Andrew Korybko is joined by Whitney Webb, journalist and staff writer for MintPress News, who specializes in covering US foreign policy in the Middle East and Latin America as well as the influence of corporations and lobby groups in US politics and Chris Driscoll, co-host of Carson's Corner on Blogtalk Radio, a show that covers activist politics, and he was also Ralph Nader's media director for his 2008 campaign for president.

Want to sound off and share what you think about this? Send us an email at radio@sputniknews.com or find us on Facebook!    

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