Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for the presidential election, has been accused of plagiarizing some parts of her 2009 book “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.”
Conservative watchdog and activist Christopher Rufo on Monday published a summary on his Substack headlined “Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem: The vice president appears to have airlifted sections of her book, Smart on Crime.”
Rufo credits “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber for identifying “more than a dozen ‘vicious plagiarism fragments'” in her 248-page book, which she co-authored.
“Some of the passages [Weber] 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,” Rufo wrote, adding Harris did not respond to a request for comment.
From lifting “verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report” to reproducing “extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release” to grabbing long strings of wording from a flawed Wikipedia page, “there is certainly a breach of standards here,” Rufo wrote.
“Harris and her co-author duplicated long passages nearly verbatim without proper citation and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism,” he added. “…Of course, Harris, like many other public figures, may have relied entirely on a ghostwriter to draft her book. But that is not exculpatory: Harris, at the end of the day, put her name on the cover.”
Harris is just the latest in a string of scholars and other high-profile individuals to be accused of plagiarism.
Most recently, a complaint filed with the University of Washington alleged that Professor Robin DiAngelo, a white critical race theorist, plagiarized minority scholars and others, largely within her dissertation, The College Fix reported last month.
She was cleared of any wrongdoing in late-September.
In May, a diversity, equity, and inclusion administrator faced allegations of plagiarism as well, in this case the leader of the Cultural North Star program at the UCLA School of Medicine.
MORE: AP says plagiarism ‘new conservative weapon’ against higher ed
IMAGE: Lev Radin / Shutterstock
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