As Nov. 5 looms, Vice President Kamala Harris has a new problem: plagiarism.
On Monday, activist Chris Rufo posted a thread to social media platform X in which he shared evidence from an investigation that Harris had plagiarized “at least a dozen sections” of her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime.”
To the surprise of absolutely no one, mainstream leftist media outlets are now rushing to her defense while her own campaign runs damage control.
The New York Times did a comedically poor job in covering for Harris by using the logic that Rufo’s accusations amount to around 500 words in Harris’s book, which is over 200 pages and 65,000 words.
So it’s OK because it’s just a little bit of plagiarism?
One passage the Times mentioned that Rufo brought to light involves crime in High Point, North Carolina. Here, Rufo showed how Harris lifted a paragraph for her book directly from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris’s… pic.twitter.com/qrwHE8AAgk
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024
As the Times admitted, Harris did not put quotations around this paragraph in her book, but included a footnote with a citation to the college.
Is Kamala Harris the worst presidential nominee in decades?
Contrary to the Times, which thinks the footnote gave appropriate credit, that is still plagiarism.
Harris tried to present the passage as her own in the form of a paraphrase while indicating to readers she took the information from the college.
In reality, this is a direct quote, and not her words. The only thing she changed was “%” to “percent.”
The Washington Post sounded equally idiotic trying to defend her.
In the Post’s words, “Harris was not involved in the formatting of outside excerpts and citations, which have been the focus of the latest criticisms, the person said, adding that those details would have been handled by her co-author and editors.”
Harris wasn’t involved in those decisions and therefore, can’t be blamed. Sounds familiar.
Washington Post consulted Plagiarism Today publisher Jonathan Bailey, who gave an equally poor explanation Harris’s actions.
Bailey said of her work, “It’s sloppy. It’s bad.” But, he added, “I don’t think it’s evidence of deliberate and malicious plagiarism.”
He told the Post what is seen in Harris’s book is not out of the ordinary for work from the late ’90s through the early 2000s, when the internet became more common for research but software to detect plagiarism did not yet exist.
His reasoning is totally absurd. We are supposed to excuse Harris’s plagiarism from 2009 because the software we have to detect it today did not exist.
According to the Post, Harris campaign spokesman James Singer tried to flip the narrative, branding her critics as “rightwing operatives” who “are getting desperate as they see the bipartisan coalition of support Vice President Harris is building to win this election.”
He tried making more excuses, saying, “This is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the Vice President clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout.”
Singer failed to address the issue of presenting quotes as her own words here and oddly wanted the public to look past the issue entirely, given it was published 15 years ago.
Whether it be from the New York Times, the Washington Post or her own campaign, nobody can seem to own up to the fact that Harris simply stole someone’s work and said it was her own.
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