(Congress Report) – Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party presidential nominee, is now being accused of plagiarizing huge chunks of content for her book, ‘Smart on Crime,’ published back in 2009 when she was running for Attorney General in California. Efforts being made by the New York Times to help support Harris are actively making this bad situation even worse as fresh developments arise.
It all started on Monday when conservative activist Christopher Rufo released a series of plagiarism allegations concerning her book, which was co-authored by ghostwriter Joan O’C Hamilton. The New York Times published a report soon after stating that “none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer, which is considered the most serious form of plagiarism. Instead, the sentences copy descriptions of programs or statistical information that appear elsewhere.”
Rufo returned fire with more excerpts from ‘Smart on Crime,’ posting on X, “We can keep this going for a while. She copied the language verbatim.”
The posts made by Rufo come about as a result of an analysis completed by Stefan Weber, who took his findings and posted them online.
MORE PLAGIARISM: This is a seventh instance of significant plagiarism by Kamala Harris. She copied the language verbatim from a California government website, substituting a single word, rather than paraphrasing it or putting it in quotations. We can keep this going for a while. pic.twitter.com/yHONocMSBh
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 15, 2024
OH NO, MORE PLAGIARISM: This is the eighth instance of significant plagiarism by Kamala Harris. Although she cited the source, she copied long stretches of verbatim language, without paraphrasing or putting it in quotations. This is what they teach you not to do in high school. pic.twitter.com/6JNRrJ6HHQ
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 15, 2024
“Harris copy-pasted a Wikipedia article into her book ‘Smart on Crime’ (2009). In total this documentation highlights 27 fragments of plagiarism in her book. Plagiarism fragments can be proven from p. 10 to p. 185,” Weber wrote, according to The Western Journal.
Weber also said, “Kamala Harris copied virtually an entire Wikipedia article into her book without providing any attribution to Wikipedia.”
“Kamala Harris fabricated a source reference, inventing a nonexistent page number,” he remarked in his analysis, also pointing out, “The self-promotional content from Goodwill Industries was copied verbatim without citing the source (Goodwill Industries was her ‘primary partner’ on in the “Back on Track” program).”
“In many other instances, even when a source was cited with a footnote, the text was directly copied and pasted without using quotation marks. Quotation marks would have been the most transparent and honest approach, also in non-academic books,” he added. “Further signs of dishonesty may be evident when sources were copied but specific details were altered, such as replacing a Subway store owner with a sandwich shop clerk (p. 124) or highlighting Southeast Asia in the context of the US gang problem (p. 184).”
Weber then completed his analysis by asking what the findings reveal about Harris herself. Is she a compulsive liar and cheat who always looks to take the easy way out, namely by passing off the work of others as her own? Was it the ghostwriter who plagiarized and not her? We can’t know for sure at the moment. Either way, it’s not a good look.
What definitely needs to happen is an apology from the publisher. The work of others was stolen in order to complete this project. A lot of money was made off the tome and those cited were not given their proper credit. That’s wrong, regardless of who is to blame for the actual act of plagiarism.
As far as Harris is concerned, this definitely stains her credibility and trustworthiness, though to be honest, not much of that existed in the first place.
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