The New York Times guide to ignoring Kamala’s plagiarism

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo found five instances of plagiarism in Kamala Harris’s book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, he revealed in a Substack article Monday.

Harris, or her ghostwriter Joan O’C. Hamilton, lifted five passages almost word-for-word from an NBC News, Urban Institute and Bureau of Justice Assistance report, as well as a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release and, most embarrassingly, Wikipedia. The book, though some of the wording is changed slightly, cites none of these sources.

“Taken in total, there is certainly a breach of standards here,” Rufo writes. “Harris and her co-author duplicated long passages nearly verbatim without proper citation and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism.”

Not only did Rufo find plagiarism, but the passages from Wikipedia were incorrectly referenced, which led to an error in Harris’s conclusion.

But what Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” describes as “vicious plagiarism fragments,” the New York Times claims to be — according to a different plagiarism expert — “not that serious.”

Writers Stephanie Saul, Vimal Patel and Dylan Freedman wrote the Times article “Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book,” published the same day as Rufo’s piece. They chose to suggest Rufo is racist, while brushing past the clear evidence of plagiarism.

“The passages called into question by Mr. Rufo on his Substack platform involve about 500 words in the approximately 65,000-word, 200-page book,” the article begins. “Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism consultant in New Orleans and the publisher of Plagiarism Today, said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.”

According to the Times, the longer the piece of writing, the less serious the plagiarism. PhD students, you’re in luck — Cockburn finally understands why dissertations are so long.

“In a review of the book, the New York Times found that none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer,” the article continues, “which is considered the most serious form of plagiarism. Instead, the sentences copy descriptions of programs or statistical information that appear elsewhere.” Because if everyone is plagiarizing, no one is?

Then Saul, Patel and Freedman infer that Rufo is racist. “Mr. Rufo, who describes himself as ‘leading the fight against the left-wing ideological regime,’ said he had not evaluated academic papers or books written by former president Donald J. Trump or his Republican running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, because they did not fit into the group’s hypothesis, which Mr. Rufo described as the theory that ‘left-wing racialist ideology leads to academic corruption.’” 

While Rufo said he and his colleagues “had examined mostly published work by white academics,” the writers pointed out that “plagiarism had shown up almost always among papers written by Black scholars, particularly Black women who work in diversity and inclusion.” The article vaguely addresses “some academics,” that have, however, “characterized the campaign as racist.”