To promote her new book, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), is telling a familiar lie about being fired because she was pregnant — and the legacy media have let her get away with it.
On Tuesday, while promoting “Persist,” a policy-focused memoir, Warren told Rachel Martin of NPR’s “Morning Edition”:
I tell the stories about being fired from my job, because I was pregnant. … I talked about in the book about being a mother. I talked about being fired because I was pregnant. I talked about what it was like when I couldn’t get childcare. What I want to see is change.
Later in the day, Warren repeated her talking points to Meghan McCain on ABC’s “The View”:
I start with what it’s like to be a mother, and how motherhood changes everything and — sometimes in some really tough ways. I talk about getting fired for being pregnant.
The Massachusetts senator said she used her personal stories to illustrate that inflexible, top-down government “policies are personal. They touch our lives.”
No one on “The View” or NPR alerted their viewers that the story had been debunked, by Sen. Warren herself.
The story became a staple of Warren’s failed 2020 Democratic presidential campaign. During one debate, she tweeted:
I got to live my dream of being a public school teacher. But by the end of my first school year, I was visibly pregnant. The principal said, “Good luck!” and didn’t ask me back. But I got back up, and I fought back. That’s why I’m standing here today.
But there are several problems with her story.
First, it contradicts the public record, which the Washington Free Beacon made public. In 1970-1971, Warren worked two days a week as an elementary school speech pathologist in Riverdale, New Jersey. The Board of Education actually voted to renew Warren’s contract on April 21, 1971, at $3,000 a year (approximately $20,000 in 2021 dollars). The local newspaper reported the vote the next day. But two months later, the paper reported Warren was “leaving to raise a family” and “resigned for personal reasons.”
Second, Warren’s account of being fired due to pregnancy contradicts what Warren herself said during an interview on March 8, 2007, when she told a college audience:
I was married at 19 and graduated from college after I’d married, and my first year post-graduation I worked in a public school system with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an “emergency certificate.”
A temporary teaching certificate gives people the right to teach in public schools while they go back to college to earn the standard certification. She said that, when she began taking education courses, she realized she was not fit to be a schoolteacher:
I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, “I don’t think this is going to work out for me.” I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years, and I was really casting about, thinking, “What am I going to do?” My husband’s view of it was, “Stay home. We have children, we’ll have more children, you’ll love this.” And I was very restless about it.
Warren tried to square her story by saying she had lacked the courage to speak her truth as an Ivy League professor. “After becoming a public figure I opened up more about different pieces in my life and this was one of them,” she told CBS News.
In other words, Warren claims she shaded the truth in 2007, at the age of 57, in a local TV interview where she had nothing to gain — and only found the courage to tell the truth 12 years later, while campaigning as a victim of sexism for the most powerful position in the world.
Warren’s veracity has been called into question on other topics, as well.
Somehow, none of Warren’s interviewers have asked her to explain the discrepancy on the air.
Only a few interviewers have questioned Warren’s new book indirectly.
Sara Haines of “The View” began the segment with the ironic choice of words: “You … got fired for being pregnant, which is just hard to believe.”
“Warren was (and is) a storyteller,” notes a book review posted by WBUR, the Boston affiliate of taxpayer-funded NPR.
The book is “a series of stories, then plans. It’s campaign-trail Warren, in book form.”
“Whatever questions her book leaves unanswered, perhaps the most insistent one that Persist as a whole poses — because it is a politician’s book — is: ‘What are you trying to sell me?’”
Ben Johnson (@TheRightsWriter) is the Media Reporter at The Daily Wire. He previously worked at the Acton Institute, FrontPage Magazine, and LifeSiteNews. He’s the author of three books, including Party of Defeat (2008, with David Horowitz).