(LifeSiteNews) –– Vice President Kamala Harris has been accused of plagiarizing passages in her co-authored 2009 book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.
Dr. Stefan Weber, an Austrian “plagiarist hunter,” was the first to point out problems with the book Harris wrote with “book collaborator” Joan O’C. Hamilton. According to Weber’s report, Harris “copied virtually an entire Wikipedia article into her book without providing any attribution.” It alleges that Harris “fabricated a source reference, inventing a non-existent page number.”
The report also takes issue with the way Harris presented cases she had not herself prosecuted with the phrases “we prosecuted.” According to the report, Harris also made small changes to verifiable, or omitted verifiable, facts to strengthen her argument. In one case, she used material from another co-written work without crediting her co-author or citing the article. In total, Weber’s report “highlights 27 fragments of plagiarism.”
Harris had produced the book during her campaign to become the attorney general of California.
The story was taken up yesterday by journalist Christopher Rufo, who asserted that Harris had “lifted verbatim language from an uncited AP/NBC news report,” “reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice release,” “stole long passages directly from Wikipedia,” “copied … from a Bureau of Justice Assistance report,” and “lifted promotional language from an Urban Institute report, and failed to cite her source.”
In addition, Rufo noted that Wikipedia, which is not considered reliable, is a “low quality source.”
According to the Semafore news platform, the Harris campaign dismissed the plagiarism allegations as the work of “rightwing operatives.” whereas the contender for Harris’ current job, JD Vance, posted Rufo’s findings to X (formerly Twitter) with the comment “Hi, I’m JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia.”
Hi, I’m JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia. https://t.co/tkZvK8LrI3
— JD Vance (@JDVance) October 14, 2024
The New York Times was inclined to dismiss Weber’s and Rufo’s findings, saying that the “passages called into question by Mr. Rufo on his Substack platform involve about 500 words in the approximately 65,000-word, 200-page book.” (The Grey Lady also suggested, by citing “some academics” – whom it does not name, that Rufo’s research into plagiarism is racist.)
CNN, however announced that it had “found that Harris and O’C. Hamilton failed to properly attribute language to sources.”
The X personality Wokal Distance, who states that he is a fellow of the Center for Renewing America, wrote on X that people have overlooked “a huge story” behind Rufo’s research into Kamala Harris’ plagiarism. It is that “the integrity of America’s elite institutions has been destroyed by fraud, lying, low standards, and political corruption.”
In a long “Twitter stream” Wokal Distance explained why the Kamala Harris plagiarism story – especially in view of the Claudine Gay plagiarism story – is so important:
Our society is held together by a number of interconnected social, economic, education, and governmental institutions. The capital those institutions function on is trust, competence, and knowledge.
The way institutions maintain trust is by ensuring the people they employ are competent, and the knowledge/information that is used by those institution meets the highest standards and criteria for accuracy and truth. When that those standards are met, everything is fine.
However, just like how the housing market in 2007 relied on fraudulent mortgages, our elite institutions rely on incompetent people and bad information created using corrupt, biased, and politically motivated, theories and ideas. *THAT* is the story people are missing.
Over the last several years, a number of things have happened which demonstrate that the knowledge, information, theories, and ideas coming out of elite institutions are created by politically motivated activists who are using fraudulent theories with low standards.
A terrific example of this is the grievance studies affair, in which [James Lindsay], [Peter Boghossian] and [Helen Pluckrose] went undercover and wrote a several intentional and obviously absurd papers and got them accepted in prestigious academic journals.
Another example comes from [Christopher Rufo] and [Aaron Sibarium] who have shown that a number of high-profile people in elite institutions, including the Vice-President of the U.S. and the Former President of Harvard created their work using plagiarism.
The result is that the academic journals, academic studies, institutions of elite education have taken a bunch of flawed, biased, corrupt, and politically motivated theories, packaged them together, and then sold them to institutions filled with incompetent people.
In the same way banks lowered their standards and filled mortgage-backed securities with fraudulent loans, our elite institutions lowered their standards and have filled their academic journals and prestige publications with woke nonsense written by incompetent activists.
The result is that all of our important social institutions (schools, hospitals, governments, etc.) that rely on elite institutions to get them good information are being handed politically motivated garbage written by woke activists and told that it is real knowledge.
Political activists in fields like Critical Race Theory, post-colonial theory, and Gender Studies created fraudulent academic journals with poor standards as a vehicle to publish biased papers and studies. Then they claim all of that is legitimate knowledge and scholarship.
Now huge numbers of institutions rely on journals, studies, and so forth that are filled with nonsense. When people realize this, the credibility, reputation, prestige, and funding of elite institutions which spread that nonsense is going to evaporate. When that happens it will create a domino effect causing other institutions that depend on the elite institutions to face a crisis as well. If the crisis is deep enough, and enough incompetent, biased, politically corrupt activity is exposed, a domino effect across institutions will occur.
The result will be a collapse of the highest and most prestigious elite institutions in the same way we saw the collapse of giant, rich, prestigious, financial institutions (like Bear Sterns) during the 2008 financial crisis. The start of that is what we are seeing right now.
This is the story that everyone is missing. What [Rufo] is doing is not just pointing out a few plagiarists; he is showing the rot and corruption of our elite institutions and pointing out that the legitimacy of many of these institutions is a mirage.
READ: Kamala Harris tells childhood story, accused of plagiarizing Martin Luther King
Harris has come under suspicion of plagiarism before, most notably for appropriating and adapting an anecdote by Martin Luther King, Jr., who said he would never forget a “little Negro girl” of about 7 or 8 who, when asked by a stern policeman at a Birmingham civil rights rally what she wanted, replied “feedom.” In her version of the story, which is cited in Weber’s report, Kamala claims to have been at the Birmingham civil rights rally as a “toddler” who demanded “fweedom.”
Meanwhile, Harris’ current boss, Joe Biden, was himself caught out for plagiarism in 1987 during the run-up for the Democrat presidential nominee. Biden had appropriated a passage from a well-known speech by Britain’s Labour Party then-leader Neil Kinnock without attribution, and the controversy was such that Biden dropped out of the race.
LifeSiteNews has reached out to Joan O’C. Hamilton, the ghostwriter who “co-wrote” Smart on Crime with Harris, but has not yet received a response.