Vox.com writer Matthew Yglesias offered a preview on Thursday of how liberals supporting Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., plan to defend her ahead of 2020 from the scrutiny on her past claims of being an “American Indian.”
In a series of tweets, Yglesias declared that “you know the fix is in” against her because reporters “choose to cover Warren primarily through the lens of this stuff rather than on her record and her ideas.”
This is a pre-emptive strike against the media for covering the legitimate issue of Warren’s history of professional advancement while claiming to be a minority, the same way that Hillary Clinton’s supporters blamed the media for following up on her emails throughout the 2016 campaign.
The email scandal captured Clinton’s propensity for intense secrecy and she dragged it out by deleting thousands of messages from a private server, messages that arguably belonged to the American people in the first place.
It’s a joke to suggest that the media should not have covered such an obvious story.
But for Warren, the dogged coverage of her extensively documented past as a white person who said she was an Native American isn’t because it’s more important than her policy record. It’s because the Democratic Party, which sets the agenda for the media, has made race paramount in politics.
There is no corner of the national discourse untouched by identity politics, so long as liberals and the media are involved.
Ahead of President Trump’s speech Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast, the Washington Post said that Trump was likely to use the occasion to “play on white evangelicals’ fears.”
Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., are also running for president at the front of the pack mostly because they’re attractive minorities. Before the media anointed them front-runners, Americans knew almost nothing about either of them.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., yet another candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination, readied for her campaign by tweeting that America’s future was “female” and “intersectional” (though I suspect by “intersectional,” she didn’t mean a white lady hopscotching between ethnicities).
When liberals and the media obsess over the assumed victimhood of minorities and women, why wouldn’t Warren’s ethnic transitions be the story?
Scrutiny for Warren is not because of a bias among reporters. It’s what the Democratic Party asked for.
