By Kelly O'Connell —— Bio and Archives May 14, 2012
Comments | Print This | Subscribe | Email Us
A Northwestern University peer review of her 2005 paper ripped it apart, arguing "the methods were so poor they gave cover to those who want to dismiss the problems of the uninsured — they can say the only paper out there uses a suspect method." ABC News suggested she was exercising a hidden agenda to promote a government-run health system. Sure enough, President Obama in 2009 seized on her findings to argue for socialized medicine: "The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds." In fact, as ABC pointed out, the claim cannot be supported by empirical evidence. Asked where he got the flawed data, the White House cited the 2005 study by "Professor Warren."An extensive expose of Warren's shoddy methodology of her desultory compositions was penned by Megan McArdle, senior editor for The Atlantic, in an article titled Elizabeth Warren and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad, Utterly Misleading Bankruptcy Study:
Elizabeth Warren has another study out showing that medical expenses contribute to more than half of all bankruptcies--indeed, this time, it's 70%, up from the 50% she found in 2001. Now, it is possible that this is true. The fact that it seems to disagree with every other study I've ever read that is not authored by Elizabeth Warren, and also, the self-reports of the people in her study (only 1/3rd attribute their bankruptcy to a health problem) could just be a fluke. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's wrong. Yet upon closer examination, it turns out it's not just wrong, but actively, aggressively wrong. Warren and her co-authors have obscured important and obvious facts that call the integrity of the work into serious question. There is, of course, a large amount of terrible advocacy masquerading of social science out there, and too many journals and journalists abet it. But this is particularly troubling because Elizabeth Warren is now in charge of overseeing the TARP program for Congress. What other inconvenient facts is she shielding us from?The clear point of McArdle's article is Warren sacrifices academic integrity to service her progressive gods, schlepping for Marxist beliefs. Another writer states, "The studies suffer from what economists and statisticians call "selection bias," meaning the sample is not random." This bias becomes even clearer when it turns out that several of Warren's writing partners are themselves Marxists. Despite being blocked from stewarding CFPB, Warren is still a crucial "academic" source for Obama's drastic health measures. McArdle discusses Warren's poor research in another article titled, Considering Elizabeth Warren, the Scholar, stating,
Does this persistent tendency to choose odd metrics that inflate the case for some left wing cause matter? If Warren worked at a think tank, you'd say, "Ah, well, that's the genre." On the other hand, you'd also tend to regard her stuff with a rather beady eye. It's unlikely to have been splashed across the headline of every newspaper in the United States. Her work gets so much attention because it comes from a Harvard professor. And this isn't Harvard caliber material--not even Harvard undergraduate.
The census records for 1860 list the allegedly Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford, as "white." Also, Warren's family isn't listed in the Cherokee registry.More hilariously, Warren claims she checked the box as a Native American to "meet others like me." This fails the sniff test for several reasons. First, what was she seeking--other Aryan-looking "American Indians" bearing miniscule blood relation to each other? Second, who would have stopped Warren from attending any Native shindig had she simply wanted to appear? Is it not absolutely absurd to claim the WASPish, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Warren chose Native status for any reason other than self-advancement? Did she gain in her career from claiming to be Native American? Obviously she was insecure enough to feel she could not make it to the Ivy League without falsifying her status. But consider whether Warren would have admitted having a drop of Black blood before the Civil War; or whether she would have claimed a Jewish grandparent to the authorities in Berlin in 1938. Ponder Warren's nonsensical claims reported by ABC News:
That same day, when speaking to a local reporter, the Oklahoma City native recounted a story of how her Aunt Bee used to envy her grandfather's "high cheekbones" - described as a physical characteristic of many Native Americans. "I still have a picture on my mantle at home, and it's a picture of my mother's dad, a picture of my grandfather, and my Aunt Bee has walked by that picture at least a 1000 times, remarked that her father, my Pappa, had high cheekbones, like all of the Indians do, because that's how she saw it, and your mother got those same great cheekbones, and I didn't. And she thought this was the bad deal she had gotten in life" Warren said.But the story reveals further rich details. First, a person willing to pass themselves off as a Native American on a 1/32nd claim would also be willing to simply fabricate the claim of family Native pride, no? Writes Michael Patrick Leahy on Warren's Native bona fides:
Elizabeth Warren, the current Democratic candidate for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, has for 25 years asserted that she has Native American ancestry but has never produced one bit of credible evidence to support that assertion. Shockingly, several of the law schools that have employed her have accepted her assertion without requiring her to provide evidence to support the claim.Warren, in fact, simply did not have the record to become a law professor at a good school until she began to fake her Native American roots, according to IBD:
This begs the question: If Warren's scholarship is so deeply lacking academic vigor, how did she land a full professorship at Harvard? Her curriculum vitae shows she bounced from college to college, working as a lecturer or researcher, for a full decade after graduating from Rutgers Law, ranked 82nd by Top-Law-Schools.com. (She got her bachelor's degree from the University of Houston, one of the least competitive colleges in the country). She was offered a full professorship after she started listing herself as a minority. Harvard hired her in the mid-1990s, when the school was under fire for not having enough minority professors.Ironically, while no hard evidence tying Warren to Native Americans was found, despite mainstream media claims to the contrary, she has been tied to an Indian killer. In fact, states the Boston Globe:
Paul Reed, Utah genealogist & American Genealogical Society fellow, found primary documentation showing Warren's great-great-great grandfather Jonathan Crawford served in a Tennessee militia unit that rounded up Cherokees before they were force-marched to Oklahoma in the infamous "Trail of Tears."
Kelly O’Connell is an author and attorney. He was born on the West Coast, raised in Las Vegas, and matriculated from the University of Oregon. After laboring for the Reformed Church in Galway, Ireland, he returned to America and attended law school in Virginia, where he earned a JD and a Master’s degree in Government. He spent a stint working as a researcher and writer of academic articles at a Miami law school, focusing on ancient law and society. He has also been employed as a university Speech & Debate professor. He then returned West and worked as an assistant district attorney. Kelly is now is a private practitioner with a small law practice in New Mexico.