We’ve heard a lot about Biden’s D-Day speech. We saw the poopy-pants moment, heard him use this solemn historic commemoration to attack Putin directly and Trump indirectly, and noted how Jill hustled him out double-quick, leaving the assembled WWII vets without any direct congratulations from America’s Commander-in-Chief (proof that he pooped?). But Biden’s speech had some good parts, though, notably when he spoke about events on June 6, 1944. That was weird but now we know how that happened. He plagiarized.

Joe Biden essentially plagiarized Ronald Reagan’s famous 1984 speech at Pointe du Hoc today in Normandy. Watch these clips side by side. Wow: pic.twitter.com/jeGgTS2Nnm

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) June 7, 2024

There are a few things to say here.

First, you should never let a man whose idea of oratory is to alternate between a whisper and a shout copy a man who was famed for his speeches. Most especially, you shouldn’t copy one of that famed orator’s greatest speeches. The contrast is incredible. Reagan’s voice is beautiful, his tempo is perfect, and his emotional modulation is spot on. Biden just yells. It’s a painful reminder of how far we have fallen.

Second, this isn’t Biden’s first plagiarism moment. Biden’s penchant for “borrowing” from others began in law school when he plagiarized content from a law review journal. Then, in 1987, he destroyed his first run for president by plagiarizing John and Bobby Kennedy and Neil Kinnock, a British politician:

Back in 1965 and 1987, Joe was a dishonest dim bulb, but he was also mentally competent. However, when he started his third successful presidential run in 2019, Joe’s bulb was burned out. Everything from that date forward was the product of the people surrounding him, bringing me to my final point:

Third, plagiarism is the new norm among Democrats. In 2019, Biden’s campaign admitted that it used word-for-word quotations without attribution to fill out the campaign’s policy plans. The campaign did unattributed word-for-word copying from Bernie Sanders’ writings. This happens because the people who work for Biden are often credentialed but uninformed, lazy, and unethical. This is generational and tied to the Democrat reverence for degrees from the “right” institutions.

We’ve certainly seen plagiarism and research scandals dog all sorts of people in academia. Claudine Gay, Harvard’s one-time president, is an accused plagiarist. Columbia’s president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, is an accused plagiarist. Alade McKen, Columbia University’s head of DEI, is an accused plagiarist. Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor, is an accused plagiarist. Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned when it emerged that papers naming him as the principal author were found to have “manipulation of research data.” Indeed, Wiley, an academic publisher, has had to retract over 11,300 “compromised” studies in just two years and is now closing 19 journals.

Those are just some of the names of people—all Democrats—who have been embroiled in scandals around plagiarism and information manipulation. They have a toddler’s approach to intellectual content: “What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is also mine.” And I guess that’s an appropriate place to end this post, given that Joe Biden’s intellectual capacity is regressing steadily so that he’s pretty much a mental toddler.

Actually, I’ll throw in one more thing to end, which is Tom Lehrer’s brilliant, amusing take on plagiarism:

Image: X screen grab.