Does Fake Kamala Plagiarize Also?

 More interesting news about Kamala Harris is coming out. According to reporter Christopher Rufo, a German plagiarism hunter named Stefan Weber discovered that Kamala Harris’s first book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer (2009). Weber claims that the book is full of plagiarized material and even has a made-up citation.

To add to the interest in this discovery, Joe Biden’s 1987 attempt to run for President of the United States ended when he was discovered to be guilty of plagiarism. Now, his vice president and wannabe successor is guilty of the same vice. Andrea Widburg wrote about the alleged plagiarism in her article published by American Thinker. 

Stefan Weber has dedicated himself to hunting down politicians who plagiarize. In 2021, the New York Times wrote that, in Austria and Germany, Weber “is the undisputed terror of academics, politicians, celebrities ad a panoply of other potential culprits.” A man who was himself the victim of plagiarism, Weber, who has “a near-photographic memory,” has morphed into a business with full-time employees. He’s the real deal, and German-speaking politicians rightly fear him.

Now, perhaps, American politicians will start to fear him, too. That’s because Weber has gone after Kamala’s early foray into authorship….

Weber took his gimlet eye to the book and discovered that Kamala plagiarized at least a dozen passages, as well as making up a non-existent source for one passage. Christopher Rufo’s team confirmed that Weber’s findings are accurate.

Widburg’s article includes a picture of the cover to Kamala Harris’s book as well as a thread from X where “Rufo lists all the stolen passages, aided by a color-coding system that makes it impossible to miss that these were not coincidental verbal parallels.” Widburg also included three things “that are worth noting.”

First, this is more evidence, if needed, that Kamala is a fake and an intellectual lightweight….

Second, we’ve learned that, for decades, there has been a veritable plague of black academics and writers engaging in plagiarism….

Third, Joe Biden’s 1986 presidential campaign imploded when, after he’d already admitted to and groveled about plagiarizing a law review article while in law school, it emerged that he was at it again during the campaign. This time, he’d copied almost verbatim a speech by Neil Kinnock, a British politician.

It would make a lovely narrative package if Kamala’s campaign were to crash and sink on the same rocks.

Have You Heard of Chris Rufo and Read Any of His Work?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have been much in the news in recent months and even years because DEI “has infested American businesses, colleges, and even our government,” according to Rob Bluey at The Daily Signal. Chris Rufo’s Quest to Abolish DEI (dailysignal.com)

Bluey has two articles from an interview he had with Chris Rufo who has been “reporting on NPR and the plagiarism plague at America’s leading universities.” Rufo also discussed “his campaign to abolish DEI….” This post will come from Bluey’s first article today with a possible second one coming from his second article. Bluey asked Rufo to give the backstory about NPR.

A month or two ago now, Bari Weiss’s outfit, The Free Press, had this great story from a longtime NPR editor who basically confirmed what conservatives have known all along: NPR has drifted very far to the Left. There’s no ideological balance. It doesn’t represent the public, and it’s run by people who are committed activists and ideologues who don’t care about the news. They care about pushing a propaganda line.

Anyone who’s really been thinking about it could see that, but hearing it from the insider caused something of a stir. And then on the back of that reporting, I did some other reporting on NPR’s new CEO, a woman named Katherine Maher, who is just like a caricature of a kind of far-left managerial leader.

I exposed some of her tweets, which were almost like parodies, left-wing haikus. They were really kind of poetic in their own way. And then I really dug into her background as a left-wing operator, regime-change activist overseas, and then turned the screws on NPR, which if it would hope to actually be public radio representing the public, really can’t have someone who is such a kind of left-wing ideologue in charge.

At a minimum, let’s be clear, the public should not be paying a cent for NPR, and I think that we’ve shifted public opinion on this in recent months in the right direction.

Rufo bluntly shared his thought that NPR should not receive any taxpayer funds because it is strictly leftist propaganda. He then took a leap into plagiarism at “America’s highest profile university leaders.”

Is it possible to reform NPR? Is it possible to reform Harvard? Is it possible to wholesale reform the federal government in the immediate term? No, that is a generational project. But what I’ve tried to do is demonstrate that at least tactically we can score victories.

As I’m thinking about different activist campaigns, I’m always thinking about three points of leverage. How can we find a target that has a kind of opening where we could do some good reporting, good investigation, good agitation, so to speak, and then how can we take away their money? How can we take away their power? How can we take away their prestige?

Ideally, two of those, of course, three of those [are] great. I’ve found that as a rule of thumb, you need to hit an institution along two of those axes in order to really be successful at changing policy, changing staffing, changing kind of programming, changing the ideological balance. Whatever your specific kind of reform is, it takes an enormous amount of pressure.

And so one of the things that I’ve been trying to study as I’ve been working on this in practice is how does that work? How does pressure work? How do institutions work? How does money, finances, [and/or] budget work? And then trying to figure out how, through storytelling, through reporting, through more direct activism, how can you start to shift those conditions?

The theory is that over time, if we can do this enough, if we can do this successfully, if we can demonstrate how to wield power in a meaningful way and in a way that makes things better, you could have more significant reforms building up over time.

Rufo and Bluey discussed Rufo’s book “America’s Cultural Revolution” a bit. Then Bluey asked Rufo about higher education. “How big of a problem is the plagiarism scandal?”

You’re kind of limited by time resources, but certainly when we broke the story that the president of Harvard was a plagiarist, she had plagiarized a large number of passages in her doctoral thesis. Then there was some additional reporting from Aaron Sibarium at the Washington Free Beacon. And then some follow-up reporting from me that showed she had plagiarized the majority of all of her academic papers. She was the president of the most prestigious university in the world. That’s untenable.

Of course, as we started to look elsewhere, we’re finding plagiarism everywhere. We’re finding particularly extreme high rates of plagiarism among DEI administrators. It seems like DEI administrators at universities have a hard time completing doctoral thesis without plagiarizing material. And we found them even in some of the more left-wing ideological academic departments. We’re uncovering plagiarism, but discovering it is somewhat tedious, time-consuming work.

After explaining the difficulty of uncovering plagiarism, Rufo stated that “plagiarism is very much a real problem.” In addition, the work being done by the plagiarists is “actually awful as a matter of quality … the papers are [not] good. These papers are awful [and void of substance.” The bottom line is that the papers do not “create new knowledge or suggest ways to improve our societies.” He ended this part of the discussion by stating that it is the fraudulence that “gets people’s attention.” He concluded by saying that he considers the plagiarism campaign to be “quite fun,” and promising that more stories will be produced in the future.

The discussion then switched to critical race theory or diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Bluey suggested that these “policies have diminished the importance of merit” and asked if there was “any hope” for change or if change is already taking place. Rufo gave Bluey hope.

It’s already changing in many places.

One good example is that many universities after COVID scrapped the requirements for SAT scores for college admissions. And the reason was, I think, twofold. One is that they were correctly sensing that affirmative action, which is nice euphemism for racial discrimination, was going to be correctly deemed unconstitutional by the courts, which has happened. And they also, in a deeper way, they’ve been grappling with what are very real racial disparities for a variety of complex social scientific reasons.

All of the educational interventions, hundreds of billions of dollars, have not been sufficient in closing what’s called the achievement gap and, therefore, closing a disparity in college readiness. So rather than comply with the law, and rather than be honest about disparities, college administrators said, “If it’s going to be illegal and if we’re giving up on closing disparities, we should just scrap the requirement for test scores.”

The theory did not work, just as many people could see. If we want “the best universities … the best students … a fair and equal process,” doing away with requirements does not work. Rufo indicated that some universities are pulling back and reinstituting SAT requirements. Some of them have done away with “their DEI statements voluntarily.” Seven red states have “abolished the DEI bureaucracies,” and “upwards of 20 states” are expected to follow them.

“Public opinion has also shifted,” and people are recognizing that things do not work according to their theory. However, Rufo admitted that the fight is just beginning even though conservatives are now in a better position for fighting the battles.

Bluey asked for practical advice for students about the worth of attending colleges and universities. Is education worth the cost? Rufo answered that it was a “hard question” as well as “a very personal question” that each family must answer for themselves. However, he gave “two components to the right answer.

The first is that there is a popular line or meme in some conservative circles: Don’t go to college, go to trade school, drop out of college. College is not a good investment. College is indoctrination center. College is not the right way.

Frankly, some of the trades are very lucrative, and the highest paying trades are probably more lucrative than the lowest paying college majors. But still, in general, there is a return on a college education. Politically speaking, a good functioning and successful conservative political movement has to have college graduates and elite college graduates. That’s a fact.

[Rufo emphasized that the Founding Fathers were college graduates – “lawyers, large landowners, physicians, scientists, merchants. Those are high prestige, high education, high intelligence kinds of fields.”]

Given that we’re now 250 years later in a more complex economy with higher levels of general education with larger post-secondary institutions, the idea that we could have a successful political movement without a large number of very smart, very educated people, I think is misguided. It’s actually a completely wrong position.

The second part of the answer is then, therefore, what do you do as an individual? Then it becomes a little more complex. But what I would say is that if you are a child or if you’re a young person, if you have intellectual gifts, you should absolutely go to college, and you should absolutely go to the best college that you can get into for your desired field of study for whatever personal calculations you have to make.

If you have your head on straight, if you’re independent-minded, if you can connect with the right people, it’s still a worthwhile endeavor and we should not give up on universities. We should fight to make universities better. That’s my view.

The discussion went on to cover K-12 public schools with Bluey asking if there is any hope for reform in public schools. Rufo explained that parents are looking at their alternatives and options. Parents are also “demanding an education that reflects their values, not the values of university humanities departments.” Rufo indicated that we are seeing some changes.

Parents have more options for educating their children now than at any previous time in America. The public schools must be reformed, according to Rufo, because they are not going away. However, states are beginning to allow “parents to take their education dollars anywhere to any school of their choice. That is a game changer. It changes the whole system.” Rufo continued, “it makes public schools better and more competitive, and it gives parents this great resource where they can take typically between $7,000 and $8,000 per year per child to any institution of their choice. That’s going to, over the long term, create better options.”

Bluey told Rufo that his “investigative reporting and activism” led to the changes. Rufo then admitted, “It’s still hard as a parent. The policy fight is much easier, but the fight still “requires a huge effort” that must be adapted to “your kids’ personalities and whatever struggles and challenges they’re facing.” Rufo advised parents to “Do the best that you can, except that no school and no system is going to be perfect,” just try to do the best that your means can do.

I encourage you to stay tuned because I may have more information from Rufo in the following days.

 

Why Is Plagiarism Okay for University Presidents but Not Students?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday is the simple fact that any organization – family, business, church, community, state, nation, or even terrorist group – must have unity of purpose rules, standards, or laws to build unity. There is no unity in any organization when some people are treated one way, and other people are treated another way.

There is currently a national conversation about plagiarism. Many universities have some crazy ideas when it comes to hiring professors and presidents of universities. Case in point is Claudine Gay’s ouster as Harvard University president for plagiarism. She was allowed to resign – not fired – and is still being paid about one million dollars by the university.

Every single class that I have taken for the past eight years has had instructions about plagiarism and how to avoid it. Plagiarism is theft – theft of ideas, theft of words, and theft of credit for doing the work.  Gay is an outright thief!

Representative J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) explained why plagiarism is not the “most important point about Gay’s resignation. According to Vance, the most critical point is that she was hired in the first place – “the most prestigious job in higher education – with such a thin record of academic accomplishment.” He listed several reasons why hiring her was such a bad idea. 

Gay has never published an article – even a plagiarized one – that really mattered or advanced scholarship significantly. She got her job not through merit but because she checked a box. In this, she is not an outlier but a representative of a system of education that rewards mediocrity.…

Our entire elite is like this. People who got their jobs because they checked boxes, not because they achieved something amazing or accomplished something meaningful. That is now the purpose of our elite universities: to give credentials that signal fake merit rather than rely on real excellence.

After pointing out the problem with Gay, Vance then castigated all elites who received their credentials by checking a box. He mentioned several distinct types of elites –

·         Public health experts “who want you to mask toddlers in their schools to stop the spread of a respiratory virus. These public health experts are not smart or accomplished….”

·         Economists “who tell you that mass migration raises the wages of the working class or has no effect on housing prices…. These economists are not smart or accomplished….”

·         Foreign policy experts “who will tell you that we should allow East Asia to make all of our steel, phones, and pharmaceuticals while sending all of our weapons to a war in Eastern Europe that has little to do with our core national interests. These foreign policy experts are not smart or accomplished….”

·         Attorneys “who tell you that Donald Trump committed ‘insurrection’ and should be thrown off the ballot. They have no special legal knowledge. They are political hacks pretending to be lawyers, and they are not smart or accomplished….”

·         Doctors “who tell you to prescribe experimental pharmaceuticals to gender-confused children. These doctors are not smart or accomplished….”

Vance said that all the categories of so-called “experts” – public health experts, economists, foreign policy experts, attorneys, and doctors – “are not smart or accomplished” because they “have a credential from an institution that cares more about box-checking than merit.” He then gave the following explanation:

The real story of Harvard is not Claudine Gay’s firing but this: you are ruled by thousands of people who are just as mediocre. Their power relies on tax advantages from the federal government, a DEI bureaucracy backed by Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, and the implicit consent of millions of Americans.

I say we withdraw that consent and all the favors that come along with it.

Gay was hired because she is a Black woman, not because of merit. As long as our families, educational systems, communities, or nations continue to have different laws and standards for diverse groups of people, there will always be division. The non-favored will be called racists, sexists, etc., while wondering why they are treated unfairly. As the unfairness continues, division will grow until there can be no unity.

Why Is Integrity So Important in Our Universities?

It finally happened! Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University on Tuesday and ended her tenure as the shortest in the history of Harvard University – September 2023 until January 2024. In her resignation, Gay did not include any scandals that caused the resignation. 

As noted by Tyler O’Neil, “The incident arguably illustrates the effectiveness of conservative critics in drawing attention to Gay’s many scandals, and the fecklessness of a university so rooted in diversity, equity, and inclusion that it refuses to acknowledge the ideological roots of the scandal.” 

So, what was so controversial that Gay was forced to resign? According to O’Neil, Gay testified about antisemitism on campus at a hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives and gave the wrong answer.

Toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., asked Gay and two other university presidents whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violates the “code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment” at their universities. All three of the women hedged, saying the answer depends on context.

Three days later, Gay told The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, that she was “sorry” and noted that her “words amplify distress and pain.” She said she had “got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” adding that she “failed to convey what is my truth.”

Stefanik, a Harvard graduate, condemned Gay’s apology.

“No, Dr. Gay. You were given an opportunity to speak your truth,” Stefanik responded to Gay on X, formerly Twitter. “And you did. Not once. Not twice. Not 5 [times]. Not 10 [times]. I asked you 17 [times] (!!!) in the hearing about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates [Harvard’s] code of conduct. You spoke your truth under oath 17 [times]. And the world heard it.”

Liz Magill, President of the University of Pennsylvania gave the same answer as Gay in the antisemitism hearing on December 5, and she resigned four days later due to pressure from donors. Also resigning was the chairman of Penn’s board of trustees. O’Neil noted:

On Dec. 10, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Chris Rufo published the first in a series of plagiarism accusations against Gay, comparing sections from the Harvard president’s 1997 dissertation to works published by others.

On Dec. 12, Harvard announced that it had reviewed Gay’s published work after receiving accusations in October about three of her articles. The university cleared Gay of accusations that she had violated its standards for “research misconduct,” but said the review discovered “a few instances of inadequate citation.” Harvard announced that Gay would request “four corrections in two articles.”

On Dec. 22, the New York Post revealed that Harvard had sent the newspaper a letter in late October warning of a defamation lawsuit if it were to publish accusations of plagiarism. The letter claimed that the passages in question “are both cited and properly credited.”

Also in December, Jay Greene, a senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, and Max Eden, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, drew attention to the paucity of Gay’s academic record. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)

“Over about two decades, Gay has written 10 journal articles and no books,” Greene and Eden wrote. “This is about half the average rate for a political science professor, even at a middling university. By comparison, Amy Gutmann—who, like Gay, is a political scientist and until early last year served as president of the University of Pennsylvania—has published more than a dozen books and well over 100 articles.”

Furthermore, Greene and Eden noted that “Gay’s institutional rise was marked by a pattern of destroying the careers of genuinely brilliant black scholars who had the stature to point out her mediocrity.” They wrote that Gay led the charge to undermine black Harvard economist Roland Fryer and black Harvard Law professor Ronald Sullivan, who had agreed to serve as an attorney to help defend Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein from sexual assault charges.

Reporters and analysts went through works Gay’s published work, finding example after example of text blocks apparently lifted from other writers without attribution. The steady drip-drip-drip of information, coupled with conservative outlets such as The Daily Signal demanding answers and repeatedly raising the issue of DEI in education, appears to have led Harvard to reconsider.

These examples led Greene and Eden, among many others, to conclude that Gay had been an “affirmative action pick,” an example of the university’s prioritizing goals for "diversity, equity, and inclusion" over scholarly merit.

Gay resigned due to too much evidence of her lack of merits for the position, but she was quick to blame racism and other causes rather than acknowledging her own problems. O’Neil wrote that the “public campaign to reveal DEI corruption zeroed in on Gay because she arguably represented the worst of ‘woke’ ideology – a woman elevated more for her skin color than for her merit, promoting ethe cause of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and overlooking the rising threat of antisemitism from the Left.” …

“There were so many reasons that justified Gay’s removal as president that it is hard to say which one ultimately tipped the scale,” Greene, the Heritage education scholar, told The Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday. “She was a plagiarist who destroyed the careers of rival black scholars on her way to the top, idly stood by while Jew-hatred ran rampant on campus alleging a newly discovered commitment to free speech, fostered a dangerous expansion of DEI, and was fundamentally unqualified for the position in the first place. Any one of these should have disqualified her from leading Harvard.”

Greene called Gay’s removal an “essential step forward” but “clearly insufficient” because “almost all of the issues that justified her removal remain serious problems at Harvard.”

“The university is clearly unwilling to uphold scholarly standards against plagiarism,” Greene said. “The DEI cudgel she used to destroy rival black scholars can be used to accuse others of fostering hostile environments. Harvard continues to selectively enforce its code of conduct to permit anti-Jewish activity but not activity affecting other, protected groups. The DEI bureaucracy and the discriminatory oppressor/oppressed dichotomy it promotes remains undiminished. The board that selected her despite her manifest lack of qualification for the position remains in charge.”