The Media Shouldn’t Overlook Kamala Harris’ Plagiarism
In 2009, Kamala Harris co-authored a book called Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. Its purpose was to outline her criminal justice policies in advance of her campaign for California attorney general.
The book has attracted the attention of conservative writer and activist Christopher Rufo, who contends that Harris and co-author Joan O’C. Hamilton plagiarized several passages. Rufo’s analysis—which relies on the work of Stefan Weber, a noted exposer of plagiarism—finds that there are at least 12 sections of the book in which sentences or entire paragraphs were copied from another source without proper attribution.
“Taken in total, there is certainly a breach of standards here,” writes Rufo. “Harris and her co-author duplicated long passages nearly verbatim without proper citation and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism. They not only lifted material from sources without proper attribution, but in at least one case, relied on a low-quality source, which potentially undermined the accuracy of their conclusion.”
Readers may disagree about the severity of some aspects of the plagiarism: Harris borrowing from her own work or not paraphrasing sufficiently. But there are more striking examples of entire passages being lifted from other sources without citation. This is definitely a no-no, and meets the standard definition of plagiarism.
In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the… pic.twitter.com/9FpsxQE8Sz
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024
Similar transgressions ended the career of Harvard University President Claudine Gay, who resigned after conservative writers—including Rufo, but initially The Washington Free Beacon‘s Aaron Sibarium—uncovered numerous instances of plagiarism in her academic work. One can certainly argue that Gay, a professional academic and leader of the most prestigious educational institution in the country, should be held to a higher standard than Harris. But plagiarism is often taken seriously when politicians are caught engaging in it. In fact, then-Sen. Joe Biden’s first stab at running for president all the way back in 1988 came to an abrupt end after it was discovered that he had plagiarized a speech from a British Labor Party leader.
Indeed, even plagiarism involving merely quasi-political figures attracts considerable media attention. In 2016, Melania Trump gave a speech at the Republican National Convention, a section of which contained phrasing that was similar to a previous speech made by Michelle Obama. The media did not hold back. In recapping the incident, Vox reported that the plagiarism episode was “one of the biggest stories” from the RNC, and that
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