Conservative political activist and writer Chris Rufo has published a series of exposés to his X (Twitter) feed, showing how multiple passages in Kamala Harris’ 2009 book Smart on Crime, co-authored by her and Joan O’C Hamilton, were lifted from other, uncredited sources.
The most embarrassing for the Harris camp is that she has been shown to have copied an entire paragraph from the popular open online encyclopaedia Wikipedia virtually unchanged. That is a major faux pas even for a struggling high school student, let alone the District Attorney of San Francisco and law school graduate, as Kamala Harris was in 2009.
In her chapter about the Midtown Community Court, Harris’ book includes two consecutive sentences that are clearly lifted from a Wikipedia article, the only change being that the words ‘in order to’ have been shortened to just ‘to’ in Harris’ version; and the name of the court has been hyphenated for some reason.
EXCLUSIVE: Kamala Harris plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal-justice book, Smart on Crime, according to a new investigation. The current vice president even lifted material from Wikipedia.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024
We have the receipts. 🧵
In the same publication, virtually unedited passages appear from sources such as The Associated Press, a report from the Bureau of Justice Assitance, and a press release from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, without any citation.
‘The most embarrassing for the Harris camp is that she has been shown to have copied an entire paragraph from Wikipedia’
The accusations of plagiarism originally came from Dr Stefan Weber, an Austrian academic who has become famous in the German-speaking world as ‘the plagiarism hunter’. He is known for routinely scrutinizing the originality of the work of major political and academic figures.
‘Kamala Harris copied virtually an entire Wikipedia article into her book without providing attribution to Wikipedia,’ Dr Weber wrote in his original report.
Evidently, due to their left-leaning bias, the mainstream press in Germany was very reluctant to pick up his latest accusation of plagiarism ahead of this year’s US presidential election. It took the right-wing American news site Breitbart and Chris Rufo to shed light on the scandal.
Kamala Harris Plagiarism Scandal Can Have Dire Consequences
Chris Rufo’s accusations of plagiarism have claimed a major victim already. In January 2024, the former President of Harvard University Claudine Gay had to resign after it was revealed by Rufo that she had inappropriately used other people’s work in her writings.
Interestingly, President Joe Biden, with whom Kamala Harris ran on the same ticket four years ago, has also gone through a plagiarism scandal during an election campaign. In 1988, he was forced to drop out of the Democratic presidential primary race after it was uncovered that he had copied the speech of a British politician named Neil Kinnock at one of his campaign events.
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