Kamala Harris Caught Plagiarizing..a LOT!

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Kamala Harris is, among other things, a crook. 

How big a crook depends on your perspective, but the revelation that Harris plagiarized big swathes of her book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. Released in conjunction with her campaign to become the Attorney General of California, the book is still on sale at Amazon, suggesting that she has made some money off the book for a number of years. 

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It's not much of a book, admittedly, but Kamala Harris is not much of an intellect either, so what do you expect? The "crook" part comes in because the plagiarism helped her make money. Academic dishonesty is a violation of a code; copyright violations cost you real money if you are caught and sued. 

Christopher Rufo, who has helped expose other examples of plagiarism in the academic world, did not do this investigation himself but is informing us of the work done by Dr. Stefan Weber, whose shtick is finding plagiarism. What motivated him to examine Harris' book I cannot say, but he certainly found some egregious examples of Harris ripping off the work of others.

The irony of this is sweet, given that her current boss is himself a plagiarist. You may recall that the fabulist Joe Biden ripped off a speech (and some of the biography) of Neil Kinnock in his first race for president. Biden has spent his life as a sort of Walter Mitty, inventing and reinventing his life story, so it is no surprise that he needed to steal some material to embellish his life story. 

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Harris' plagiarism is of a different sort than Biden's and comes from a different place as well. Biden is very sensitive about his rather ordinary life and ordinary intellect, so he puffs himself up to make up for these perceived deficiencies. Biden is average and wants to be more. 

Harris, though, is incapable of even ordinary thought, so she needs a bigger crutch. Hence her plagiarism of substantive content. 

Harris, too, has been reinventing herself in her own way. Less so about her life story, although the "middle class" bit is a stretch. But compared to Biden (or, in some cases, Trump, who uses hyperbole rather than lies or plagiarism to juice things up a bit), Harris needs to polish up her intellectual bona fides. She is, after all, quite stupid. 

Hence the need to steal from others. There is no "there" there, so she steals the work of others

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At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.

However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)

I do think that there are mitigating circumstances. It seems unlikely to me that Harris can write more than a few words without serious help and equally unlikely that she sat down to read the book she "coauthored," so she may be completely unaware that she has been profiting for years off the work of third parties. The plagiarism may have been committed by her coauthor, for all we know. 

All writers borrow to some extent or another. We are not omniscient, nor do most people have many original thoughts. I often quote from others, and while I have my share of original opinions, I stand on the shoulders of giants (and many not-so-giant people). Even Elon Musk, who does amazing work as an entrepreneur and engineer, is not inventing out of thin air. Contrary to those who denigrate his achievements, he is a remarkable engineer (as those who work with him), but he is part of a team and is building on work done by others. 

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But there is "building upon," and then there is stealing, and they are very different indeed. Harris stole. 

Is this disqualifying? It's a stupid question because the reason she stole in the first place is disqualifying: she is not smart at all. She is vapid, thoughtless, and scarily incompetent. Whether she stole some passages in a book is hardly the most crucial question. What matters to America is what she would do as president. 

And we know what she would do: follow the orders of those much smarter than she. And those orders would be nothing good. 

UPDATE: One of our readers has been trying to post something about this on another media site and is being censored, which is exactly what you would expect in today's Big Tech environment. 

UPDATE #2: CONSERVATIVES SEIZE!!

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