Kamala Harrisâs Plagiarism Problem
The vice president appears to have airlifted sections of her book, Smart on Crime.
CHRISTOPHER F. RUFO OCT 14, 20241/2
Kamala Harris has become famous, in part, for her unique rhetorical style. She switches freely between various accents and peppers her speeches with catchphrases: pondering falling âout of a coconut tree,â discussing âthe significance of the passage of time,â and moving the nation toward âwhat can be, unburdened by what has been.â To her supporters, the vice presidentâs 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 Harrisâs rhetorical universe: plagiarism.At the beginning of Harrisâs political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as Californiaâs attorney general,she and co-author Joan OâC Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutorâs Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according toStefan Weber, a famed Austrian âplagiarism hunterâ who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world,Harrisâs book contains more than a dozen âvicious plagiarism fragments.â Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressionsâreproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasingâbut others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gayâs doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
Letâs consider a selection of these excerpts from Harrisâs book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here,she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:
âIn Detroitâs public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nationâs largest cities receive diplomas.â
Thereâs more. In another section of the book, Harris,without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own,copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:
âHigh Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the cityâs West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.
The High Point Strategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, North Carolina; in Providence, Rhode Island; and in Rockford, Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional citiesâ.
In a section about a New York court program,Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipediaâlong considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopediaâs accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harrisâs language, with duplicated material in italics, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:
https://christopherrufo.com/p/kamala-harriss-plagiarism-problem