THE Vice President Kamala HarrisDemocratic presidential candidate, was accused of plagiarizing parts of her 2009 book Smart on Crime: A career prosecutor’s plan to make us saferthat he wrote with Joan O’C Hamilton: he copied entire paragraphs from Wikipedia, included others without citing the sources, and yet in others he invented the attributions. Conservative analyst Christopher Rufo published this Monday on his website an entry entitled, where he details this plagiarism, Kamala Harris plagiarism problem: The vice president appears to have airlifted sections of her book, Smart on Crime. Rufo attributes the identification of “more than a dozen fragments of plagiarism” to a report of more than 40 pages by the famous plagiarism hunter Stefan Weber. Among his anecdotes is one similar to one told by civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. in an interview.
The text shows that the Democratic candidate extracted an entire part of the text from an article from the Associated Press news agency, published in April 2008 on low graduation rates. In another section of the book, Harris included large sections of a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release almost verbatim without attribution.
The popular plagiarism hunter did a side-by-side comparison, as you can see below, showing that Harris lifted part of his book from Wikipedia without properly citing the online encyclopedia as the source.
THE the accusations sparked an intense debate on the Internet. Harris supporters accused Rufo of trying to stir up controversy for political purposes. while his detractors expressed outrage at the claims.
This isn’t the first time Harris has been criticized for her book.. During his 2020 presidential campaign, critics opposed his past as a prosecutor and questioned whether the positions raised in the book Smart on crime they did not correspond to the work he did when he was a prosecutor.
We can begin with a passage in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she excerpted verbatim language from an unquoted AP/NBC News report: pic.twitter.com/pZv5mD3m5t
– Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024
Another example includes language copied directly from a Bureau of Justice Assistance report. About West Palm Beach Crime Statistics.
In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced lengthy sections of a press release from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying several paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the… pic.twitter.com/9FpsxQE8Sz
– Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024
“Some of the passages which [Weber] highlighted ones appear to contain minor transgressions -read small sections of text; insufficient paraphrase-, but others appear to reflect more serious offenses, similar in severity to those found in the Harvard president’s doctoral dissertation.Claudine Gay,” Rufo wrote.
Anecdote equal to Luther King Jr.
The book’s story in which Harris shares an anecdote from his childhood that bears strong similarities to a story told by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965. Harris explains a time when she was separated from her parents during a civil rights march in Oakland, California. In describing the moment her parents found her, the story is very similar to the one told by the famous civil rights leader. Harris said: “My mother talks about how I was complaining and she was like, ‘Honey, what do you want?’ What do you need? And I looked at her and I said, ‘Freedom,'” he says in the book.
In a 1965 interview with the magazine PlayboyThe civil rights icon said she witnessed a similar interaction between a young African-American girl and a white police officer: “I will never forget a moment in Birmingham when a white police officer approached an African man of seven or eight years”. An American woman who “walked in a protest with her mother,” King told the magazine at the time. The policeman asked him abruptly: “What do you want?”, and the girl looked him straight in the eyes and replied: “Freedom”.. “I didn’t even know how to pronounce it, but I knew it. It was magnificent. Often, when I found myself in very difficult situations, the memory of this girl came to my mind,” Luther King Jr. said at the time.
Harris has yet to respond publicly to these latest allegations. On the other hand, Donald Trump’s partner, JD Vance, and the son of the Republican candidate spoke out: “Hi, my name is JD Vance, I wrote my book, not like Kamala, who copied it from Wikipedia”the Ohio senator said on Monday.
Hi, my name is JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia.
– JD Vance (@JDVance) October 14, 2024
Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Junioralso spoke, emphasizing that “like everything else, Kamala’s book also seems fake”evoking without citing all of Kamala Harris’ changes of opinion on her political positions.
Uh-oh. Like everything else about Kamala Harris, it appears her book is also fake.
– Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 14, 2024
Instead, these new plagiarism accusations add not only to Kamala Harris’ flip-flop on her left-wing policies to appeal to middle-class voters, but also to the lies of her No. 2 Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota. Walz lied about being deployed to Afghanistan and being a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, as the Pentagon calls that country’s war, and about being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests.
