Bear in mind that Steve M speaks for and attempts to influence only slightly from their left main stream liberals and Democrats.
His voice is not an extremist voice, though it is a dyed-in-the-wool, one-hundred-percenter voice.
By which I mean to say that, so far as I have seen, there is not a single issue on which he fails to adhere to the official and certified and true blue liberal position, a nudge or so to the left of the rather less litmus-test-certifiable body of Democratic office holders and politicians, wherever there is one.
As for Pocahontas, well, anybody can make a myth or weaponize history.
Steve writes,
The right-wingers who mock her [Elizabeth Warren] by calling her Pocahontas don't do it because they care about Native Americans, any more than the right-wingers who mocked Rachel Dolezal for being a white woman who claimed to be black did so because they cared about black people.
Why would caring about Indians or blacks be a reason for such mockery, anyway?
(Yeah, we all mocked Dolezal, but I'm focusing on conservatives now.)
Right-wingers believe that Warren knowingly lied about her heritage and gained employment advantages as a result.
And then he writes,
To the right, this is everything wrong with liberals: We hate white people even if (or especially if) we're white, and we think non-whiteness is so awesome we created a system that discriminates against white people -- a system Dolezal and Warren took advantage of.
Really, that's what the right believes -- and not just the right, but some people who aren't so far to the right.
And then,
If you go to Pocahontas.com now, you land here, and can read this:
The story of the real Pocahontas is quite different from the myth that has been twisted by powerful people over the generations. When Pocahontas met John Smith, he was almost 30 years old – and she was about 10 years old. Whatever happened between them, it was no love story.
In her teens, Pocahontas was abducted, imprisoned, and held captive. Oral history of the Mattaponi tribe indicates that she was ripped away from her first husband and raped in captivity. When she later married John Rolfe, he paraded her around London to entertain the British and prop up financial investments in the Virginia Company. She was about 21 years old when she died, an ocean apart from her people.
Even today, violence continues to devastate Native communities. More than half of today’s Native women have experienced sexual violence.I think Warren imagines that if she's attacked as Pocahontas by a political opponent -- maybe this year by independent Senate candidate Shiva Ayyadurai, who was born in India and calls her a "fake Indian" in campaign advertising, and eventually by Donald Trump -- she'll turn the attack around by saying something along these lines.
I hope it works.
I suspect it will work in Massachusetts, where there's a highly educated electorate, and where Warren seems likely to be easily reelected this year.
To which I posted this comment.
"To the right, this is everything wrong with liberals: We hate white people even if (or especially if) we're white, and we think non-whiteness is so awesome we created a system that discriminates against white people -- a system Dolezal and Warren took advantage of.
"Really, that's what the right believes -- and not just the right, but some people who aren't so far to the right."
Right on target.
And the perception is encouraged by the right wing propaganda that smears mainstream liberals and Democrats with the outlooks and attitudes of unrepresentative extremists who do their best to influence liberals and Democrats, claim to speak for them, or even claim to be among them.
Just as left wing propaganda would have it that every Republican has an "88" tattooed on his shoulder.
https://www.adl.org/educati...
As to the whole Pocahontas thing, there isn't a Franco-American - a French Canadian - in the country whose family doesn't maintain just such a tradition of remote Indian ancestry.
Still, few of us try to capitalize on such traditions as she has so ludicrously done.
It's not that her claim is untrue.
It's that it's silly, even if true.
I never noted my own family's claim to a remote Iroquois ancestor on any application for anything, or any census asking about race or ethnicity.
And remote Native American ancestry is just a damned flimsy reason for tribal leaders to offer political support to a personally privileged white woman of such annoying, schoolmarm tendencies.
Oh, and I just have to ask.
How does turning the Pocahontas myth on its head, using it as a club to bash and guilt-trip white people, seem to her or to you like a good way to respond to expected mockery from Republicans?
How would that not be a blatant validation of the widespread right wing conviction that liberals endorse racial hostility toward whites that you so properly point out?
File under the labels, "guilt-trip politics" and "weaponized history".
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