A conservative activist claims that Vice President Kamala Harris copied passages from her 2009 book “Smart on Crime.”
“Kamala Harris copied at least twelve sections of her book, Smart on Crime, about criminal justice. She copied content from Wikipedia.” Christopher Rufo wrote, “And we have the receipts,” on X.
Additionally, Rufo gave five instances.
The claimed plagiarism, in Rufo’s words, is “comparable in severity to the plagiarism found in the doctoral thesis of former Harvard president Claudine Gay.”
Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, a Republican running for vice president, responded to that by writing a post on X.
“Hello, my name is JD Vance. Unlike Kamala Harris, who took hers from Wikipedia, I authored my own book,” he stated.
According to Rufo’s website, Harris published “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer” while getting ready to run for California attorney general.
According to Rufo, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “serious plagiarism fragments,” according to Stefan Weber, “a famed ‘plagiarism hunter’ from Austria who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world.”
“A few of the passages he highlighted seem to contain minor infractions—reproducing small sections of text; inadequate paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, akin to those found in the doctoral thesis of Harvard president Claudine Gay,” stated Rufo.
Rufo lists several sources as examples of plagiarized work, including a 2004 Urban Institute report, an Associated Press news story, a press release from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a Wikipedia article, and a Bureau of Justice Assistance report.
“Harris took lengthy paragraphs verbatim from Wikipedia, which has long been regarded as a faulty source. Without referencing the source, she not only adopts the online encyclopedia’s veracity but also almost exactly replicates its wording,” Rufo noted.
Rufo claimed that throughout the procedure, “Harris appears to have overlooked important details and misstated a pertinent detail,” and that “her reliance on Wikipedia, an untrustworthy source, led to an untrustworthy conclusion.”
Rufo concluded by saying, “There is definitely a breach of standards here.”
Author: Blake Ambrose
