Kamala Harris s Plagiarism Problem – by Christopher F. Rufo
To her supporters, the vice president s rhetorical flourishes represent the values of compassion and optimism. To her detractors, her reliance on platitudes and tautologies demonstrates her unfitness for the presidency.
But, as we have discovered in this exclusive report, another element appears to exist within Kamala Harris s rhetorical universe: plagiarism.
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.)
It would be surprising if this were *not* the case.