Did Kamala Harris plagiarize sections of her 2009 book? It sure looks like it. Christopher Rufo has uncovered significant evidence of Harris taking the work of others word for word and passing it off as her own, and it’s damning. Nowadays, when many Americans take for granted that politicians lie, this may not seem like a big deal, but it is. The plagiarism calls into question Harris’ honesty, her integrity, her trustworthiness, and even her most celebrated area of alleged expertise, as the plagiarism took place in a book that was designed to establish her credibility as a prosecutor.
JD Vance knows it’s a big deal. “I saw today, actually,” Vance said Monday, “a story that Kamala Harris apparently copied some significant chunks of her book from Wikipedia. So if you want a president with their own ideas, vote for Donald Trump. If you want a president who copies her own ideas from Wikipedia, vote for Kamala Harris.”
The New York Times knows it’s a big deal as well, which is why it published an 1100-word piece on Monday trying to explain away Harris’ plagiarism and portray the whole matter as an unfortunate example of just how low the foes of the sainted Harris will go. In the Times’ version, “conservative [a four-alarm word for the Times and its hapless readers] activist Christopher Rufo” is making a mountain out of a molehill. He “had taken relatively minor citation mistakes in a large amount of text and tried to ‘make a big deal of it.’”
That was the assessment of one Jonathan Bailey, whom the Times identifies as “a plagiarism consultant,” without explaining what exactly a “plagiarism consultant” is or how one attains such a lofty position. Bailey, the Times informs us magisterially, “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.”
See, if you’re a Democrat, you can get away with ripping off entire paragraphs of other works and claiming them as your own, as long as you fit the thefts into a document of sufficient size. And not only that, but our moral superiors have also determined that Harris’ plagiarism was the wrong kind: “The New York Times found that none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer, which is considered the most serious form of plagiarism. Instead, the sentences copy descriptions of programs or statistical information that appear elsewhere.” So relax, peasants, and vote for Kamala as you have been told to do.
Back in the real world, however, Rufo found several examples of paragraphs that Harris purloined so exactly and extensively that they would derail the career of any politician with an R after his or her name. An NBC News report from 2008 stated:
In Detroit's public schools, 24.9 percent of the students graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis Public Schools and 34.1 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District….Nationally, about 70 percent of U.S. students graduate on time with a regular diploma and about 1.2 million students drop out annually….The report, issued by America's Promise Alliance, found that about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation's largest cities receive diplomas.
Compare for yourself. Harris wrote:
In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.
The Wikipedia passage that Vance noted stood this way in Dec. 2008, before Harris published her book:
The Midtown Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses and social service agencies in order to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. Unlike most conventional courts, the Midtown Court combines punishment and help, requiring low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service while at the same time offering them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.
Harris:
The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service, while at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.
These are not “relatively minor citation mistakes.” These are examples of someone passing off someone else’s research as her own. Rufo also points out that in cribbing from Wikipedia, Harris made a revealing error. She was offering a citation for her claim that “illegal vending was down 24 percent,” and Rufo notes that “on Wikipedia, the ‘24 percent’ figure was apparently tied to a different report, which found that ‘arrests for unlicensed vending,’ rather than unlicensed vending as such, ‘fell by 24 percent’ (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.”
Related: This Could Turn Out to Be the Biden-Harris Regime’s Costliest Mistake Ever
Once again: this matters, or at least it used to matter. In September 1987, Young Joe Biden, hoping to become president before he became a doddering figurehead, delivered a speech that mixed class warfare rhetoric with his own experiences and those of his family. It was gripping stuff, but as it turned out, it wasn’t his class warfare rhetoric at all. Biden had lifted it all from a speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Admitting he had made “mistakes,” Biden bowed out of the race.
Thirty-seven years ago, lies and plagiarism were still enough to end a presidential campaign. Why aren’t they now? Because Harris is (supposedly) black and undeniably female and because, Old Joe’s 2024 experience notwithstanding, leftists (unlike patriots) tend to stand by their own. The American people just have to settle for politicians who are even less honest than those of previous eras. And that’s exactly what we’ll get.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member