Week by week, the poll numbers are slipping for Kamala Harris. While the best indicators are that it’s still a tight race, the momentum is clearly with Donald Trump. History also indicates that polls drastically underestimate Trump’s vote. Whether that holds true in 2024 remains to be seen, but Democrat strategists will be well aware that both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were well ahead of Trump in the polls at this stage of the campaign. Harris is just behind.
There’s been whispers among hopeful Democrats of an ‘October Surprise’. Well, they’ve got one – just not the one they’d hoped.
Dr Stefan Weber, an internationally famous “plagiarism hunter,” has discovered that Kamala Harris “plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal justice book, Smart on Crime,” Christopher Rufo reports.
The 2009 work of non-fiction, co-authored with Joan O’C Hamilton was, per Wikipedia, “[f]irst published as Harris (then the San Francisco district attorney) was beginning her 2010 campaign for California Attorney General” and “outlines her vision of how the criminal justice system should function.“
‘Co-authored’? In other words, ghost-written, only with a credit. Even then, they couldn’t do original work.
In his summary of findings, Dr Weber writes, “Kamala Harris copied virtually an entire Wikipedia article into her book without providing attribution to Wikipedia.”
Most damning is that “Harris fabricated a source reference, inventing a nonexistent page number,” he said.
The first would be an instant fail, if you submitted it as an assignment. The second, though, is an even worse act of academic fraud.
This comes just two months after the Harris campaign was caught plagiarizing Joe Biden’s campaign site by copying and pasting his issues into their issue page.
Ok, so no big deal, right?
This is a very big deal, especially for a presidential candidate three weeks from Election Day. Have we ever had a presidential candidate busted for such naked acts of plagiarism before? As a matter of fact, we have. Back in 1988, Joe Biden’s serial plagiarism cost him any chance of surviving the Democrat primary.
In any case, we need only imagine the media hysterics had the same story about Trump emerged. We don’t need to imagine that the same media who lied through their teeth about Hunter Biden’s laptop will do all they can to try and bury the revelations of Harris’ mendacity.
Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, launched a pre-emptive strike.
Cue the corporate media "fact checkers":
— JD Vance (@JDVance) October 14, 2024
"Vance's tweet is missing important context. Kamala Harris only copied some of her book from Wikipedia."
Right on cue, indeed, the New York Times made exactly that excuse.
The New York Times admitted Monday that Vice President Kamala Harris had plagiarized multiple passages in her 2009 book, Smart on Crime, but claimed that the copying was “not serious” and a small portion of the whole book.
When all else fails, attack the source.
The Times shifted the focus from Harris to Rufo, whom it implied is a racist: “Mr. Rufo is part of a loose confederation of conservative writers and activists who, during the past year, have tried to expose plagiarism among academics, many of whom have been Black scholars who work in the field of diversity and inclusion. … Some academics … have characterized the campaign as racist.”
Exposing the serial cheating and lying of high-ranking black academics, including the president of Harvard, is ‘racist’? Next, they’ll be demanding that black students get parachuted into elite institutions on lower grades than anyone else.
Oh, wait…
