Elizabeth Warren may be lying about her past again. During campaign stops, Warren has reportedly angered her brother David Herring by calling their father a “janitor.” David Herring calls this characterization of their father’s work “false.”
The story first came to light in a Boston Globe article on December 23.
The Globe reported: “Families can also disagree on the details of a shared life. According to a family friend, David has disagreed with the way Warren calls herself the daughter of a janitor as she describes the work her father found after losing a job as a salesman after his heart attack.”
“When she called her dad a janitor during the early stages of this, David was furious,” said Pamela Winblood, a longtime friend of David and a supporter of Warren’s campaign. According to Winblood, “He said, ‘My Dad was never a janitor.’ I said, ‘Well, he was a maintenance man.’”
While the difference between a maintenance man and a janitor may seem insignificant to some, Herring would appear to know and understand the difference and not like his sister’s characterization of their father as a janitor. Warren, it seems, might be playing loose with the facts of her upbringing again.
Warren has stated that she doesn’t understand why the “janitor” characterization would bother her brother. But she has referred to her father as a “maintenance man” before. In 2007 interview at UC-Berkeley, she said of her father, “maintenance man in an apartment house — that was his last job.”
And in a 2012 speech, Warren gave a more specific description of her father’s last job. “My father had a series of jobs, his last one was mowing lawns and cleaning swimming pools for an apartment house.”
Is this by itself a big deal? Not really. It’s more a matter of semantics. While janitor and maintenance man are not interchangeable, they’re also not in completely different worlds either. While the new “janitor” nomenclature may be a way to make her upbringing sound a little tougher than it might have been, is that really a big deal?
For Warren, perhaps it is. It is more fuel to the fire for those who consider her a phony elitist who has made up other things in her past.
For years, Warren has been dogged by accusations that she lied about having Cherokee heritage in order to further her career. In October of 2018, she released the results of DNA testing, which showed that, while she did have some Native American ancestry, she was likely only about 1/1024th Native American — far less than she had been claiming for years.
Despite mockery of her claim of native ancestry by President Trump and others, Warren stood by her story until she was confronted about the DNA test by a voter in Sioux City, Iowa. Warren attempted to clarify her position.
“I am not a person of color; I am not a citizen of a tribe,” she said. “Tribal citizenship is very different than ancestry. Tribes and only tribes determine tribal citizenship.”
Then, at a town-hall in early October, Warren made the claim that she was once fired from a teaching position because she was “visibly pregnant.”
Warren explained the situation: “By the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant, and the principal did what principals did in those days. Wish me luck and hire someone else for the job.”
But later, video of Warren seemingly contradicting herself on the subject surfaced. Later, the Washington Free Beacon obtained county records showing that her employer at the time, the Riverdale Board of Education, actually approved a contract for a second year, which Warren declined.
So, Warren was not fired for being pregnant, her father was not a janitor, and she is definitely not a Native American. What portions of her narrative about herself are true? Can we believe anything this woman says?
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James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects with a primary focus on the ongoing anthropogenic climate-change hoax and cultural issues. He can be reached at [email protected]
