Senator Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test gimmick is the dumbest action she’s taken on the controversy over her alleged abuse of affirmative action with her fake Cherokee ancestry.

Warren’s previous tactics had consisted of remaining quiet, calling it a family legend or claiming that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. Those tactics weren’t very viable, but they helped to mute the scandal.

Then Elizabeth Warren decided to get serious about running for president in 2020. She conducted outreach to American Indian groups. Her people planted the usual stories in her pet papers, mainly the Boston Globe, claiming that she hadn’t benefited from her fake claim.

And then she pulled the DNA gimmick.

The gimmick is really stupid because Warren has now done, what she had previously denied doing, lay a very public claim to American Indian ancestry. And that will invariably infuriate the Cherokee and other tribal groups and activists.

Especially considering how worthless the basis for her claims are.

There were five parts of Warren’s DNA that signaled she had a Native American ancestor, according to the report. The largest piece of Native American DNA was found on her 10th chromosome, according to the report. Each human has 23 pairs of chromosomes.

“It really stood out,” said Bustamante in an interview. “We found five segments, and that long segment was pretty significant. It tells us about one ancestor, and we can’t rule out more ancestors.”

He added: “We are confident it is not an error.”

Detecting DNA for Native Americans is particularly tricky because there is an absence of Native American DNA available for comparison. This is in part because Native American leaders have asked tribal members not to participate in genetic databases.

“The tribes have felt they have been exploited,” explained Lawrence Brody, a senior investigator with the Medical Genomics and Metabolic Genetics Branch at the National Institutes of Health. “The amount of genetic data that is available from Native Americans is sparse.”

To make up for the dearth of Native American DNA, Bustamante used samples from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia to stand in for Native American.

Her claim to Cherokee ancestry is actually based on samples from… Peru.

And, as has been noted, it’s quite possible that Warren’s DNA has less of that ancestry than the average American.

Warren now has a real problem with Cherokee activists. And she’s on record making a false claim to an ancestry that she doesn’t have.