“I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia.” That criticism, from vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, was only the latest salvo in what has become known as the “the Plagiarism War.”
Like virtually every aspect of our lives, plagiarism has become politics by another means. It is hardly new. President Joe Biden admitted to plagiarism long ago. The seriousness of the allegation often depends on how sympathetic the media is toward the author.
Vice President Kamala Harris was accused of plagiarizing her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.” Immediately, the New York Times ran a column citing a “plagiarism consultant” named Jonathan Bailey who suggested that, while Harris plagiarized from sources like Wikipedia, it was nothing to “make a big deal of it.”
Bailey took to social media Monday to confirm he had not done a full analysis of the book and that his “quotes were based on information provided to me by the reporters and spoke only about those passages.”
The response set off conservative media, which argued that the mainstream media would have had a very different response if the allegations were made against Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal.”
The fact is, an opponent of Trump could probably copy “War and Peace” word-for-word and would still be showered with literary awards in this political environment.
After Harvard President Claudine Gay became embroiled in the controversy over antisemitism on campuses, conservative activist Christopher Rufo and writer Christopher Brunet scanned her work for possible plagiarism. They found numerous examples in her work, going back to her 1997 dissertation. Soon after, Harvard’s diversity chief was accused of more than 40 incidences of plagiarism going back to her own dissertation.
The controversy leaves many professors in an uncomfortable silence, while others........