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October 14, 2024

Kamala seems to have plagiarized significant portions of her first book

By Andrea Widburg

Christopher Rufo reports that a German plagiarism hunter has discovered that Kamala Harris’s first book, 2009’s Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, is filled with plagiarized material and even a made-up citation. There’s something poetic about the fact that Joe Biden’s vice president and wannabe successor is a plagiarizer, given that Biden’s 1987 presidential run was wrecked over that same vice.

Stefan Weber has dedicated himself to hunting down politicians who plagiarize. In 2021, the New York Times wrote that, in Austria and Germany, Weber “is the undisputed terror of academics, politicians, celebrities and a panoply of other potential culprits.” A man who was himself the victim of plagiarism, Weber, who has “a near-photographic memory,” has morphed into a business with full-time employees. He’s the real deal, and German-speaking politicians rightly fear him.

Now, perhaps, American politicians will start to fear him, too. That’s because Weber has gone after Kamala’s early foray into authorship. The book’s cover is important because, while the Amazon page for the book identifies both Kamala Harris and Joan O’C. Hamilton as co-authors, the cover clearly shows that this is Kamala’s book and that Hamilton just helped out:

Source: Amazon. Fair Use for editorial purposes; red box and arrow added to the original.

Weber took his gimlet eye to the book and discovered that Kamala plagiarized at least a dozen passages, as well as making up a non-existent source for one passage. Christopher Rufo’s team confirmed that Weber’s findings are accurate.

In an X thread, Rufo lists all the stolen passages, aided by a color-coding system that makes it impossible to miss that these were not coincidental verbal parallels. This was outright intellectual theft:

There are three things going on here that are worth noting:

First, this is more evidence, if needed, that Kamala is a fake and an intellectual lightweight. I’m betting no one is surprised to learn that her book lifts passages from other writers without attribution.

Second, we’ve learned that, for decades, there has been a veritable plague of black academics and writers engaging in plagiarism, going back as far as the 1960s. In the modern era, Harvard President Claudine Gay was the biggest fish (and she may also have faked data), but multiple others have been doing the same (e.g., here and here).

I blame a combination of (a) the huge sense of entitlement leftism has given black academics and writers and (b) affirmative action, which puts a heavy burden on people incapable of bearing that burden without cheating. The pressure to produce is so great that black academics will even plagiarize from other, more honest black academics.

Third, Joe Biden’s 1987 presidential campaign imploded when, after he’d already admitted to and groveled about plagiarizing a law review article while in law school, it emerged that he was at it again during the campaign. This time, he’d copied almost verbatim a speech by Neil Kinnock, a British politician.

It would make a lovely narrative package if Kamala’s campaign were to crash and sink on the same rocks.  

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