On Drudge, just now:



I don't really know what Drudge is trying to say, but the women — Ivanka and Elizabeth Warren — both have bands around their heads (I know Ivanka's is an entire hat) and the men's heads are more differentiated:

1. Musk's head is enclosed within a space helmet, 2. Bezo displays baldness glossily, 3. Eminem, like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, has his noggin inside a baseball cap wrapped in a hoodie.

I was going to discuss Elizabeth Warren's crudely photoshopped "Indian" headband (and arrows), but I took a moment to click to see what Jeff Bezos has on that tray, and it's the entire body of a cooked iguana and he's posing seemingly eating a chunk of it!

From the text of "Bezos Says He’ll Spend ‘Amazon Lottery Winnings’ on Space Travel"(Bloomberg):

The Amazon chief executive officer wasn’t the only billionaire at the glitzy event at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. West Coast industrial real estate tycoon Ed Roski and Frederik Paulsen, a Swedish pharmaceutical titan and pole explorer, perused the tarantula, cockroach and roasted iguana appetizers amid 1,200 guests including James Lovell, the first person to journey twice to the moon, on Apollo 8 and Apollo 13.

Boldface added. Eat what you're told! I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)...

But, okay, here's the Elizabeth Warren article Drudge links to: "Elizabeth Warren refuses DNA test to prove Native American heritage." There's no "Indian" paraphernalia in the photo there (at the New York Post). I think it's grotesque and irrelevant to demand a DNA test.

Grotesque, because it's okay for people to enjoy the fun of a possibly somewhat accurate scientific test of their origins, pushing another person into getting tested is evocative of the Nazi era. We should not care.

Irrelevant, because though Elizabeth Warren did make claims of having a particular ancestry, it's only important in 2 ways, and neither has anything to do with whether she was correct about having Native American ancestry.

The first way it matters is that it might relate to her honesty, but the DNA test wouldn't reveal whether she really believed what she said at the time. Maybe she was bullshitting all along, or maybe she has a tendency to jump to conclusions she likes without very much evidence. A DNA test, going either way, would not shed any light on her honesty, since she never claimed to have a belief based on a DNA test.

The second way it matters is that Elizabeth Warren promoted herself, in her career, to some extent, by using the diversity factor of Native American ancestry. Her choice to do this reflects on her character, and I don't see how your assessment of that should change if you knew that a DNA test says she was wrong.

Most people learn their ancestry by listening to what they are told growing up, and they believe it. What if a person who thought he was 1/4 African American checked the "African American" box on a college application, got admitted under an affirmative action policy, and later discovered he was mistaken? The school demanded that he answered a question and he answered it the way he believed was true. Is there anything against his character? No!

You might think affirmative action and giving credit for "diversity" is ethically wrong, but that goes to the character of the institutions that use that policy, not to the applicants who seek positions within those institutions.

But maybe you think the claim of Native American ancestry is different, because so many Americans believe they have some Native American "blood," and not all make public claims about it (and because the tribes have an enrollment procedure, so maybe there should be a rule against making a claim unless you are enrolled).

I know at least 2 individuals who have beliefs about their Native American ancestry — beliefs similar to the way Warren felt back when she made her claims — but they chose not to speak of it and not to give any institution the ability to give them affirmative action or to use them in their boasts about "diversity" (as Harvard used Warren). In my judgment, those two demonstrated superior ethics to Warren's. But a DNA test should have no effect on my judgment.

IN THE COMMENTS: Qwerty Smith brings out a subtlety about evidence. While the test results may have no relevancy to any question at issue, the refusal to take the test is evidence — evidence of aspects of her current state of mind — and that evidence may be relevant to an issue we care about:

The refusal to take the test is revealing and unjustified, because the reasons she had for believing she was Native American have been debunked. Consequently, her primary motive for avoiding the test must be to make it impossible to definitively refute her claim by leaving open the possibility that she has native ancestry for reasons unrelated to her family's stories.

I suspect that Warren sincerely believed that she had native ancestry and then tried to use it in a cynical effort to get ahead professionally. Cynical, because she supports affirmative action, presumably for reasons distinct from the possibility that a certain random minority of white people can justly use it to get ahead.

Her doubling down in the face of counter-evidence, by contrast, shows that she is unprincipled and dishonest.

I don't necessarily agree with Qwerty's interpretation of the evidence of her current state of mind, but I greatly appreciate his breaking out what is a separate evidence question. I used to teach the law school class "Evidence," and one of the problems was about a person accused of murder who believed in the superstition that a murdered person's body would bleed if touched by the murderer. Even though the test is worthless — we know corpses don't bleed like that — his refusal to touch the body is some evidence of what's in his head and makes it more likely that he really is the murderer. But you still have to interpret the evidence: there are some reasons why an innocent believer in the superstition would decline to touch the corpse.

In this light, I still see good reason for Warren to refuse. To be willing to take the test would generate evidence of her belief that she was correct, and she might want to create that evidence, which has meaning, whatever the result of the test shows. But I see the reason to decline to create that evidence, just as I see reason not to take the corpse test or a lie detector test, even when you are innocent. For one thing, your willingness seems to vouch for the accuracy of the test and for the significance of the results. If Warren believes, as I do, that it doesn't matter what's in the DNA, she's right to decline to engage in a performance that creates the impression that the DNA matters.

And this is why I don't think the evidence of refusing to take the test has much weight. It's relevant in that it makes a fact in issue more/less likely to be true, but the probative value is low.