Kamala Harris is, among other things, a crook. 

How big a crook depends on your perspective, but the revelation that Harris plagiarized big swathes of her book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. Released in conjunction with her campaign to become the Attorney General of California, the book is still on sale at Amazon, suggesting that she has made some money off the book for a number of years. 

It's not much of a book, admittedly, but Kamala Harris is not much of an intellect either, so what do you expect? The "crook" part comes in because the plagiarism helped her make money. Academic dishonesty is a violation of a code; copyright violations cost you real money if you are caught and sued. 

The investigation was conducted by Dr. Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian "plagiarism hunter" who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world. We independently confirmed multiple violations, which are comparable in severity to the plagiarism found in former Harvard… pic.twitter.com/P9DTpZS4kV

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024

Christopher Rufo, who has helped expose other examples of plagiarism in the academic world, did not do this investigation himself but is informing us of the work done by Dr. Stefan Weber, whose shtick is finding plagiarism. What motivated him to examine Harris' book I cannot say, but he certainly found some egregious examples of Harris ripping off the work of others.

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… pic.twitter.com/9FpsxQE8Sz

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024

The irony of this is sweet, given that her current boss is himself a plagiarist. You may recall that the fabulist Joe Biden ripped off a speech (and some of the biography) of Neil Kinnock in his first race for president. Biden has spent his life as a sort of Walter Mitty, inventing and reinventing his life story, so it is no surprise that he needed to steal some material to embellish his life story. 

Remember back when the media took plagiarism seriously?

Back in 1988, Biden was shown to have plagiarized multiple other politicians - a scandal so devastating that he was forced to drop out of the race.

You won't hear any of today's journalists talking this way about Kamala. pic.twitter.com/ZLpn1B8xI1

— Bill D'Agostino (@Banned_Bill) October 14, 2024

Harris' plagiarism is of a different sort than Biden's and comes from a different place as well. Biden is very sensitive about his rather ordinary life and ordinary intellect, so he puffs himself up to make up for these perceived deficiencies. Biden is average and wants to be more. 

Harris, though, is incapable of even ordinary thought, so she needs a bigger crutch. Hence her plagiarism of substantive content. 

Harris also copied language from a Bureau of Justice Assistance report report, which was linked in the the Wikipedia entry. Here is the passage in Harris's book, with duplicated material in the other column: pic.twitter.com/aU7CbP0ODm

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024

Harris, too, has been reinventing herself in her own way. Less so about her life story, although the "middle class" bit is a stretch. But compared to Biden (or, in some cases, Trump, who uses hyperbole rather than lies or plagiarism to juice things up a bit), Harris needs to polish up her intellectual bona fides. She is, after all, quite stupid. 

Hence the need to steal from others. There is no "there" there, so she steals the work of others. 

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.)

I do think that there are mitigating circumstances. It seems unlikely to me that Harris can write more than a few words without serious help and equally unlikely that she sat down to read the book she "coauthored," so she may be completely unaware that she has been profiting for years off the work of third parties. The plagiarism may have been committed by her coauthor, for all we know. 

Hi, I'm JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia. https://t.co/tkZvK8LrI3

— JD Vance (@JDVance) October 14, 2024

All writers borrow to some extent or another. We are not omniscient, nor do most people have many original thoughts. I often quote from others, and while I have my share of original opinions, I stand on the shoulders of giants (and many not-so-giant people). Even Elon Musk, who does amazing work as an entrepreneur and engineer, is not inventing out of thin air. Contrary to those who denigrate his achievements, he is a remarkable engineer (as those who work with him), but he is part of a team and is building on work done by others. 

Both of Kamala Harris's parents had PhDs. Her father worked at the most prestigious university on the West Coast. Her mother worked at the most prestigious university in Canada. And yet, somehow, she never learned that you can't plagiarize from Wikipedia.

Unfit for office.

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024

But there is "building upon," and then there is stealing, and they are very different indeed. Harris stole. 

Is this disqualifying? It's a stupid question because the reason she stole in the first place is disqualifying: she is not smart at all. She is vapid, thoughtless, and scarily incompetent. Whether she stole some passages in a book is hardly the most crucial question. What matters to America is what she would do as president. 

And we know what she would do: follow the orders of those much smarter than she. And those orders would be nothing good. 

UPDATE: One of our readers has been trying to post something about this on another media site and is being censored, which is exactly what you would expect in today's Big Tech environment. 

UPDATE #2: CONSERVATIVES SEIZE!!

New York Times basically admits Kamala plagiarized and there were “lapses” in her book but then blames *Conservatives* for noticing and pointing it out. Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/KS96pv8Iki

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 14, 2024

The New York Times is lying about my plagiarism story and I have the receipts to prove it:

1. The Times claims that I only argued that Kamala Harris plagiarized "five sections" involving "about 500 words." But this isn't true. In my story, I wrote that Stefan Weber argued there… pic.twitter.com/gAyPdbwZIn

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024