U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris plagiarised some parts of a book she wrote fifteen years ago, according to an Austrian researcher who published evidence of the fraud on his blog. While conservative commentators and politicians have mocked the Democratic presidential candidate, left-wing media have instantly come to Harris’s defence by denouncing the allegations as “racism.”
The book, entitled Smart on Crime, was released in 2009, when Kamala Harris was the district attorney of San Francisco, and was considering a run to be California’s attorney general—an election she won a year later. The book was written with the help of a ghostwriter.
Researcher Stefan Weber—who has been called a “plagiarism hunter”—made his findings about the book available on his blog, revealing that there are 27 instances of some form of plagiarism. He concluded, for example, that an entire Wikipedia article was copied into her book without attributing it to the source.
Kamala Harris also had the audacity to cite a story by civil rights leader Martin Luther King as her own.
In an interview with Playboy magazine in 1965, King said:
I will never forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother. ‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom.’
In her book, Harris writes:
My mother used to laugh when she told the story about a time I was fussing as a toddler. She leaned down to ask me: “Kamala, what’s wrong? What do you want?” and I wailed back, “Fweedom.”
Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance—whose own memoir became a bestseller—mocked Kamala Harris on his X social media account commenting: “Hi, I’m JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia.”
Kamala Harris is running against former President Donald Trump, who is the Republican nominee. The elections are scheduled to take place on November 5th, with many polls showing that the battle is within the margin of error in crucial swing states.
As Christoper Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research commented: “Harris and her co-author duplicated long passages nearly verbatim without proper citation and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism.”
Rufo was instrumental in the downfall of Harvard’s first black president, Claudine Gay, after publishing material alleging that Gay had plagiarised academic work over much of her career.
Not surprisingly, as soon as the allegations against Harris were published, The New York Times instantly hurried to her defence, citing an expert on plagiarism who said that “the errors were not serious,” and that Rufo had tried to “make a big deal of it.”
The newspaper then went on to remind its readers that Rufo is a conservative activist, noting that he has exposed plagiarism mostly amongst “black scholars who work in the field of diversity and inclusion,” and that “some academics have characterized the campaign as racist.”
Christoper Rufo chided The New York Times for suggesting that noticing Kamala Harris’s plagiarism is somehow “racist.” He mocked the paper for “framing me as the villain of the story, rather than the plagiarism by a presidential candidate.”
The conservative activist then shared a screenshot on his X account of an e-mail that had accidentally been sent to his team by Kamala Harris’s publisher, Chronicle Books, which is evidently panicking about the potential consequences of the plagiarism allegations.
The vice president of the publisher, Lauren Hoffman, has instructed her team not to respond or comment on any inquiries regarding “Smart on Crime” as this “is a very sensitive topic.”
