I’m old enough to remember when accusations of plagiarism were enough to sink a presidential campaign. Namely, the first bite at the apple for our (barely) sitting president. Today, such a story goes uncovered by a media that willfully neglects to perform its most basic duty of asking questions, and instead chooses to form a protective phalanx around the current Democrat presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
To her supporters, the vice president’s rhetorical flourishes represent the values of compassion and optimism. To her detractors, her reliance on platitudes and tautologies demonstrates her unfitness for the presidency.
But, as we have discovered in this exclusive report, another element appears to exist within Kamala Harris’s rhetorical universe: plagiarism.
At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
That’s pretty detailed, and he details the allegations with specificity, both in his newsletter and in an X thread. The New York Times, cognizant of the gravity of the allegations, immediately moved to firefight the plagiarism charges in an item titled Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book. You know things are serious when the media go to ye olde “Republicans Pounce.” Or seize, in this instance.
There appears to be one major hole in the Times’ reporting:
Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism consultant in New Orleans and the publisher of Plagiarism Today, said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.
“This amount of plagiarism amounts to an error and not an intent to defraud,” he said, adding that Mr. Rufo had taken relatively minor citation mistakes in a large amount of text and tried to “make a big deal of it.”
The aforementioned plagiarism consultant appears to have taken exception with the Times’s characterization of his work:
Embed bailey
Full analysis of the book may well yield more plagiarism. In the meantime, it appears that Bailey only analyzed what was given him by reporters, which raises its own set of concerns (for more specific analysis of the Times’s article, click here).
This should be a major story. However, as of this writing, the plagiarism allegations have NOT been reported on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN. or MSNBC. The Regime Media have chosen, at least for the time being, to ignore substantiated allegations of plagiarism.
As has often been the case, most recently with the Biden Administration’s response to Hurricane Helene, one can reasonably expect the Regime Media to Trumpwash the Harris plagiarism allegations. That is, they’ll sit on the story until it can be sanitized with a Trump-adverse angle.
Once this angle has emerged, that becomes the scandal, as opposed to the actual scandal: the sitting Vice President of the United States getting caught plagiarizing significant portions of her book just 3 weeks from the presidential election.
If it weren't for Regime Media, we'd have none at all.
