Thread by @realchrisrufo on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "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. We have the receipts. 🧵
The investigation was conducted by Dr. Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian "plagiarism hunter" who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world. We independently confirmed multiple violations, which are comparable in severity to the plagiarism found in former Harvard president Claudine Gay's doctoral thesis. We can begin with a passage in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited AP/NBC News report:
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 excerpt, with abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:
In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia's accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris's language, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:
Harris also copied language from a Bureau of Justice Assistance report report, which was linked in the the Wikipedia entry. Here is the passage in Harris's book, with duplicated material in the other column:
Finally, when attempting to write a description of a nonprofit group, Harris simply lifted promotional language from an Urban Institute report, and failed to cite her source:"
Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book - The New York Times - "A report by Christopher Rufo says the Democratic presidential nominee copied five short passages for her 2009 book on crime. A plagiarism expert said the lapses were not serious... Mr. Rufo said that while he and his colleagues had examined mostly published work by white academics, plagiarism had shown up almost always among papers written by Black scholars, particularly Black women who work in diversity and inclusion. “We can speculate as to why,” Mr. Rufo said, but he suggested that academic studies that lead to careers in diversity, equity and inclusion were not as rigorous as some others. Some academics, however, have characterized the campaign as racist."
Tom Cotton on X - "A good reminder that many “journalists” are little more than left-wing activists."
Richard Hanania on X - "I like how there’s a ready made expert on every conceivable topic that pops up in the news."
I almost wish I were back in university today, so I could plagiarise freely because "experts" said it was no big deal
Criticising or exposing the failings of black people is racist
Meme - Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @realchrisrufo: "The Washington Post went on a jihad against Melania Trump for lifting a few turns of phrase. But when Kamala Harris did this more than a dozen times, the paper explained that it was okay because Kamala didn't know how to use a computer."
Meme - Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @realchrisrufo: "Somebody hang this in the Louvre. The New York Times claims that I "seize[d] on" Kamala Harris's serial plagiarism. Admits later in the story that it is, in fact, plagiarism. And then calls noticing that fact "racist.""
"The five passages that Mr. Rufo cited appeared to have been taken partly from other published work without quotation marks."
"Some academics, however, have characterized the campaign as racist."
Meme - John Hasson @SonofHas: "When Rand Paul is accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia VS When Kamala is accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia"
"Senator Rand Paul Is Accused of Plagiarizing His Lines From Wikipedia"
"Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book"
Aaron Sibarium on X - "EXCLUSIVE: In 2007, Kamala Harris plagiarized pages of Congressional testimony from a Republican colleague. And in 2012, she plagiarized a fictionalized story about sex trafficking—but presented it as a real case. It's not just one book; it's a career-long pattern.🧵
On April 24, 2007, Harris testified before the House Judiciary Committee in support of a student loan repayment program. Virtually her entire testimony about the program was taken from that of another district attorney, Paul Logli of Winnebago County, Illinois...
Harris has sought to portray herself as the candidate of honesty and integrity, in part by touting her record of prosecuting child sex crimes. But as California attorney general, she didn’t just copy boilerplate language without attribution. In one of the lengthier passages reviewed by Free Beacon, she lifted a fictionalized story about a victim of sex trafficking—and presented it as a real case. The story came from Polaris Project, a nonprofit that runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline. By June 2012, the project had posted vignettes on its website that were "representative of the types of calls" the hotline receives and "meant for informational purposes only."... The only detail she changed was the location. The Polaris Project described a young woman, "Kelly," who had been forced to engage in prostitution and was rescued by law enforcement in Washington, D.C. But in Harris’s telling, Kelly had conveniently been found in San Francisco. The change effectively gave Harris credit for a rescue that never occurred, at least in her state. O.H Skinner, Arizona’s former solicitor general, said the move reflected a common perception of Harris among legal officials at the time...
The story from the hotline wasn’t a one-off. In a 2010 report on organized crime, Harris copied several passages from Bill Lockyer, one of her predecessors as California attorney general, without attribution. In the 2012 report on human trafficking, she copied a paragraph from Wikipedia. And in a 2014 report on transnational gangs, she copied several sentences from Roger McDonough, a New York State judge, as well as McDonough’s footnotes.
The new examples add to the allegations of plagiarism published last week by conservative activist Christopher Rufo, which focused exclusively on Harris’s 2009 book Smart on Crime. Experts who reviewed those allegations, including Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today, argued that they comprised such a small portion of Harris’s work that sloppiness—not malice—seemed like the most plausible explanation for them... But a review of Harris’s oeuvre—including books, popular articles, congressional transcripts, and reports she authored as attorney general—found a more extensive pattern of plagiarism than has been previously reported. It spans five publications, including her sworn congressional testimony. And it comes after months of criticism, from both left and right, that the Harris campaign has few ideas of its own.
The plagiarism could become a potent symbol of that critique in the last days of a dead heat. In an article about Rufo’s allegations, the New York Times noted that "none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer." he new examples—in which Harris lifts pages of original material from other lawyers—undermine that defense and suggest that not all the passages were copied in error. Some contain tell-tale signs of intent, such as small tweaks in punctuation and the removal of minor details.
The symbolism could be especially resonant given that Logli, who has been donating to GOP candidates since 1994, is not the only Republican Harris has been accused of parroting. She endured a different sort of plagiarism scandal in August when she promised to eliminate taxes on tips—two months after her rival, Donald Trump, had promised to do the same. "This was a TRUMP idea," Trump fumed on Truth Social at the time. "She has no ideas, she can only steal from me." Also in August, Harris proposed boosting the child tax credit to $6,000 five days after J.D Vance proposed boosting it to $5,000. Vance joked that it was only a matter of time before she put on a red tie and promised to make America great again.
Harris, who in 2019 supported taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained migrants, has also promised to build a border wall... "The obvious question is, who exactly is Kamala Harris?" asked Branko Maretic in Jacobin magazine. "That’s a question she herself may have trouble answering."
Joe Biden, Rand Paul, Melania Trump, and Ben Carson have each endured their own plagiarism scandals. Like Harris, Carson was even accused of plagiarizing in Congressional testimony, though that allegation only involved two paragraphs, not 1,200 words. All of those scandals received sustained media attention and were at times framed as synecdoches for a candidate’s shortcomings. When the Trump campaign denied, in 2016, that Melania Trump had plagiarized two paragraphs from Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democratic convention speech, a Vox "explainer" said the denials were "a testament to Trump’s character." The Harris campaign has likewise denied that the allegations published last week are anything to write home about. "Rightwing operatives are getting desperate as they see the bipartisan coalition of support Vice President Harris is building to win this election," a campaign spokesman, James Singer, told media outlets last week."
There's nothing wrong with plagiarism if black women do it, and anyone who notices is sexist and racist
Melissa Chen on X - "I recall when plagiarism use to be something that ended presidential campaigns. That was 1988 though. And it happened to her current boss (remember him?)."
Vasanth Seshadri on X - ""The lapses were not serious" is today's "Only a few apartments have been taken over""
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "BREAKING: CNN confirms my reporting that Kamala Harris plagiarized her book, Smart on Crime. This is exactly how it worked with Claudine Gay: the NYT tried to obfuscate; CNN told the truth; other publications followed. Eventually, even the NYT admitted that it was plagiarism."
Andy Ngo 🏳️🌈 on X - "Read this thread. It shows how presidential candidate Kamala Harris, praised by the liberal establishment for her intelligence and eruditeness, plagiarized large sections of her book."
Thread by @realchrisrufo on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The New York Times is lying about my plagiarism story and I have the receipts to prove it:
1. The Times claims that I only argued that Kamala Harris plagiarized "five sections" involving "about 500 words." But this isn't true. In my story, I wrote that Stefan Weber argued there are "more than a dozen" instances of "'vicious plagiarism.'" This past Saturday, I provided the Times not only with my written analysis, which argues that there are "more than a dozen," but with Weber's full dossier, which included 18 allegations of varying severity. So, the Times deliberately withheld this crucial contextual information from its readers and from the supposed plagiarism expert, who, based on this limited information, called it "not serious." They could have easily confirmed the "more than a dozen" point, but instead, lied by omission.
2. The Times claims that "none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer." This is preposterous. Harris not only copied multiple paragraphs of other people's work verbatim, but she often lifted those ideas directly and at face value. In one case, she came to the wrong conclusion because she copied Wikipedia—i.e., she stole a bad idea, copied the language verbatim, and got the point wrong. This is the Full Monty of plagiarism. The Times's claim doesn't hold up at all; it's just a way of downplaying the transgression of Kamala Harris, as they tried to do initially with Harvard president Claudine Gay. Their claim is not supported by the evidence:
3. The Times provides one example of the plagiarism from my story, which suggests that it was a minor copy-and-paste of two short sentences:
But this is supremely misleading. The violation was not two sentences, but, rather, five sentences. Here is the actual extent of this plagiarism instance, which is much more severe than the Times suggests. She copied-and-pasted two paragraphs and simply added the word "additional":
4. The Times suggests that noticing Kamala Harris's plagiarism is somehow "racist," even though the paper has covered plagiarism by many other political figures, including conservative minorities, such as former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, without suggesting that doing so was "racist." This is just a way of laundering in a smear to complement the absurd headline that my reporting on plagiarism by a presidential candidate is "seiz[ing] on" a transgression that is "not serious"—in other words, framing me as the villain of the story, rather than the plagiarism by a presidential candidate.
My rule of working with journalists is simple: If you treat me fairly, I treat you fairly. After publication of the Times piece, I called the reporter and editor at the Times to ask politely for a correction. The editor, Mary Suh, had nothing but excuses. And so, we're going to fight this one out. They should issue a correction, but, even if they do not, I will correct the record in public."
Meme - Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @realchrisrufo: "This is stunning: The New York Times "plagiarism expert" now confirms that the paper deliberately withheld the full Kamala Harris plagiarism report from him and that, after analyzing the full claims, Harris's plagiarism is "more serious" than he told the Times."
"Yesterday, Christopher Rufo published an article accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of plagiarizing her 2009 book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. In his article, he cited five passages in the book that bore strong similarities to earlier works. That day, the New York Times called me and asked me to examine those five publicly available passages. I studied the passages and found that they were indicators of poor writing processes but did not make up a large portion of the work. As such, while I agree that the passages represent plagiarism and are issues that need to be addressed, they are relatively minor as far as plagiarism goes. At the time, I was unaware of a full dossier with additional allegations, which led some to accuse the New York Times of withholding that information from me. However, the article clearly stated that it was my “initial reaction” to those allegations, not a complete analysis. Today, I reviewed the complete dossier prepared by Dr. Stefan Weber, whom I have covered before. I also performed a peer review of one of his papers in 2018. With this new information, while I believe the case is more serious than I commented to the New York Times, the overarching points remain. While there are problems with this"
Meme - Joe Duarte 🏜️ @ValidScience: "It's incredible how corrupt the @nytimes is. From the Gaza hospital hoax, hiring leftist activists to be reporters, and now this: "Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism consultant in New Orleans and the publisher of Plagiarism Today, said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document. “This amount of plagiarism amounts to an error and not an intent to defraud,” he said, adding that Mr. Rufo had taken relatively minor citation mistakes in a large amount of text and tried to “make a big deal of it.” Given the size of the document? Yeah, that's not relevant at all. Plagiarism isn't okay because books are long. By now, you should know that anyone leftist media cites as an "expert" is going to turn out to be a partisan leftist. Indeed, Bailey (@plagiarismtoday ) is a partisan leftist, with ridiculous pronouns on his bio, and who previously downplayed the academic plagiarism uncovered by @realchrisrufo and @aaronsibarium over the past year. He even called it "bad faith", a common leftist term whose meaning is unclear. (Insincere? Or that the people so labeled are bad people?) Bailey obviously cares much less about plagiarism, and is willing to downplay it, if the plagiarists are authoritarian leftists like himself. He's not an appropriate source on this topic. Notably the NYT's Dylan Freedman **only cited Bailey** – just the partisan leftist, no one else. That's a common form of corruption in leftist media. They often only cite leftists. Part of my project on media reliability and bias will capture bias in sourcing like this, and break down the use of the label "expert" in various ways, including political orientation, the subjects the media thinks we need "experts" for (should be very interesting), etc. The NYT called these "short passages". Use of optional adjectives to downplay or highlight something is another form of bias we can measure."
Crémieux on X - "This is one of the more interesting plagiarism cases so far, because it raises the issue of what you do when you hire a ghostwriter and they commit fraud in your name. Both things are looked down upon, so do you fess up to hiring the ghostwriter or take credit for the fraud?"