Sen. Liz Warren, an early adopter on the fake Indian front, suddenly has a lot of company.

Get a load of this from Legal Insurrection:

The Native American population in the U.S. grew by a staggering 86.5% between 2010 and 2020, according to the latest U.S. Census – a rate demographers say is impossible to achieve without immigration.

Birth rates among Native Americans don’t explain the massive rise in numbers. And there certainly is no evidence of an influx of Native American expatriates returning to the U.S.

Instead, individuals who previously identified as white are now claiming to be Native American.

This growing movement has been captured by terms like “pretendian” and “wannabe.”

The author of the study cited points out that in this sudden surge to claiming Native American status, it's mainly a matter of "fleeing whiteness" and most of these racial impersonators don't do so with fraud in mind.

As Legal Insurrection's William A. Jacobson notes, that's a load of hooey:

But claiming to be Native American without proof is not innocent, it’s a way to obtain potential career and other preferences to which the person is not entitled:

...which brings us to Exhibit A, Elizabeth Warren:

That was Elizabeth Warren’s problem. She had no proof, and her claims to a good faith belief were not credible considering she waited until she was in her mid-30s and climbing the law professor ladder to assert she was Native American, Even then she did it mostly quietly in a way designed to juice her hiring prospects without being so public about it that people would question the claim.

Naturally, this fraudy trend has branched out, with white woman after white woman now claiming to be black or occasionally, Latina or Asian.

The 'fleeing whiteness' argument does have some basis, given that whites are being hectored about their color, like it was some sort of bad life choice they made, by the critical race theory crowd these days. Bad choices, you see, can be corrected by good choices -- and suddenly everyone wants to be an Indian. 

Worse still, with the dominance of 'how I feel' culture growing rampant in society, brought on by the likely related transgender movement, where men who 'feel' like women move on to impersonating women, or their idea of what they think women are, plenty of whites have decided to go for it, taking the leap, claiming the fake Indian status. 'Status,' by the way, is the right word here, it's all about status, not actual lineage.

What's interesting here is that it's American Indians who have to endure the lion's share of this white folderol. Why are Indians having to put up with this more than other races?

Might it be because they have such a small share of the population that many people in the U.S. have literally never seen one? If you don't live in the Southwest, it's quite possible. If nobody's ever seen a Native American, it's therefore pretty easy then to claim status as such a seemingly mythical person since nobody's around to laugh the whole thing off the streets.

What's more, wokester theology around Indians, browbeating whites, and glurgily romanticizing Native Americans has been around since at least since the early 1970s. 

All of those pictures and videos and education in textbooks, incidentally, portray white people as the bad guy. If you talk to a real Indian, unless he's a radical activist, you're never going to get that kind of picture. I have Native American friends who have told me they enjoyed playing cowboys in their childhood cowboy-and-Indian games, just as white kids enjoy playing Indians. They don't view whites as a universal evil the way the Hollywood films and public service announcements (remember the crying Indian?) depict. And they can't stand whites romanticizing Indians the way they do. Nobody would.

Cherokees in particular have been targeted. Remember the "crying Indian"? (Only whites, you see, litter). Remember how Cher used to play Indian (Cherokee, of course) on her stage horse? Remember "Cherokee People! Cherokee Tribe! So proud to live, so proud to die..."? The actual title of the 1971 song by Paul Revere and the Raiders was "Indian Reservation," and it was Columbia Records' biggest hit:

It's a damn good song, and yes, there have been grave crimes done by the white elites against Native American people through history as narrated in the song. No argument there, although the history has been cherrypicked as if by activists looking for federal funds. But note the phenomenon we see now as telescoped through that 1971 song: It was written by a white songwriter. It features a white singer narrating in the voice of an Indian, which he isn't, which is the impersonation of a Native American right there, and double when you count the songwriter. 

The song ends with a battle cry claiming that the Cherokee nation is going to come back one day.

Umm. I don't think raising the fake Indian count through whites claiming to be Indians in search of affirmative action bennies is exactly what they meant by that defiant last line.

Image: Twitter screen shot

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