This Is the Dumbest Controversy

If your sticking point on Elizabeth Warren is that she’s “flip-flopping” on her story about getting fired because of her pregnancy, your head is full of rocks, and if you emptied it out, you’d simply float away.

On Monday, the Washington Free Beacon reported on records that it claimed “contradicts” Warren’s campaign stump speech, in which she says that she was fired from her job as a teacher after she became visibly pregnant. Minutes from an April 1971 Riverdale, N.J., Board of Education meeting show that the board voted to extend Warren’s teaching contract for a second year. A second record of minutes from June 1971 later show that Warren resigned from her position, and that her resignation was “accepted with regret.”

While at first this might seem contradictory, it’s also possible that Warren could have been told that her contract extension was dropped after her pregnancy began showing. On top of that, does anyone think that a school board’s minutes from 1971 would accurately reflect a pregnant woman being wrongly fired? Give me a break.

Even retired teachers from the school Warren taught, while not familiar with her or her situation, described the protocol back then as exactly so. From CBS News, emphasis mine:

Interviews with retired teachers who worked for the Riverdale Board of Education at the same time as Warren suggest that while they do not remember Warren or the circumstances of her leaving the school, the workplace culture at the time may have left Warren with no option but to move on when her pregnancy became apparent.

Two retired teachers who worked at Riverdale Elementary for over 30 years, including the year Warren was there, told CBS News that they don’t remember anyone being explicitly fired due to pregnancy during their time at the school. But Trudy Randall and Sharon Ercalano each said that a non-tenured, pregnant employee like Warren would have had little job security at Riverdale in 1971, seven years before the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed.

“The rule was at five months you had to leave when you were pregnant. Now, if you didn’t tell anybody you were pregnant, and they didn’t know, you could fudge it and try to stay on a little bit longer,” Randall said. “But they kind of wanted you out if you were pregnant.”

Warren herself has responded to these claims on Twitter and to CBS News, standing by her assertion that once she became visibly pregnant, she was fired.

Fox News, too, has “resurfaced” a 2008 video of Warren saying she was on an “emergency certificate” as a teacher and later decided that teaching wasn’t for her. The smoking gun! Because no way does our interpretation of our lived experiences and how much we decide to share with the world ever change. Nope. Never.

Behold, I present to you, dear reader, the dumbest concern troll of them all:

Yes, the electorate is really shaking in their boots over this one, because never has this ever happened to another woman in the world before:

Dare I say, this entire story is dumber than Jacob Wohl’s claim that Warren was shacking up with a Marine from last week. Please, go back to worrying about literally anything else about her candidacy.