Fact Check: Doubts About Elizabeth Warren’s Pregnancy Story Raised by Female Socialist

CLAIM: Conservatives are using an old “sexist trope” by attacking Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) for her “authenticity.”

VERDICT: False. Doubts about Warren’s latest tale were first raised by a female socialist.

Thomas Kaplan writes in the New York Times that Republicans and conservatives have questioned Warren’s claim that she was fired from a teaching job in 1971 because she was “visibly pregnant.” In doing so, Kaplan writes, they have “employed a tactic — questioning a female candidate’s authenticity — that is at once often a sexist trope in politics and a strategy used against Hillary Clinton in 2016.”

The article appears as “news analysis,” not opinion.

Unfortunately, for Kaplan, there are three problems. The first is that doubts about Warren’s pregnancy tale were first raised by left-wing Jacobin magazine wrier Meagan Day, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Second, Warren has made a habit of telling false stories. For years, she falsely claimed Native American ancestry — and fundraised off (correct) efforts by critics to debunk her story, just as she is doing now with her pregnancy story.

More recently, her campaign has consistently exaggerated crowd sizes at her events, and Warren has repeatedly evaded questions — even from well-meaning liberals — about whether she would raise taxes on the middle class to pay for her “Medicare for All” plan. Warren’s “authenticity” is in doubt because she keeps putting it in doubt.

Third, questioning a candidate’s honesty is the bread-and-butter of politics. Journalists and opponents always challenge what candidates say. To claim that the normal course of politics is a “sexist trope” is absurd. It is also an effort — arguably, a sexist one — to shield a female candidate from scrutiny, as if she could not win on the merits.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.