Kamala’s Plagiarism Scandal Displays the Severe Ethical Breakdown in So Many of Our Institutions

The big news of this still-young week (bracing ourselves for more) is that Kamala Harris wrote a book back in 2010 that allegedly contained numerous passages plagiarized from various confirmed sources. The audaciously titled tome is called “Smart On Crime,” and it’s now out of print but is being sold for hundreds of dollars for a hardcopy. (Be smarter and seek out digital versions, which are far less.)

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo brought these examples to light in a damning thread on Twitter, displaying the amount and severity of the instances of intellectual property theft by Vice President Harris. More than interpretational examples where mirrored thoughts or similar language was presented absent attribution, these are cases where Harris and/or her co-writer actively lifted entire passages from sources. News outlets and Wikipedia, of all sources, had entire paragraphs lifted and then copy-pasted into her text.

Serving as a true October surprise, this news outbreak was hot on social media circles. As for our conventional media? Not so much. The overall impression one sees in the press today is along the lines of head-scratching and chin-rubbing as they wrestle internally with how to address this scandal. As a prime example of the conflict in the press, here is CNN’s press expert, Brian Stelter, making a bold declaration about how the media should behave these days during an election.

Stelter directs the press to report on ALL the news of the candidates, including those that are painful, and don’t omit or flinch from the duties. He says this while his newsletter and social media feed do not utter a single word about this plagiarism news. As he chooses to bypass this troubling Kamala reality, it is not as if there are no media outlets working the story for Brian to cover.

The New York Times attempted to report on this and resorted to a pair of tired practices – shooting the messenger and focusing on conservative reactions. Yes, the outlet resorted to the old “Pounce & Seize” canard, and then the outlet had to castigate Rufo because he dared bring this matter to light.

Rufo did not perform the initial analysis. That was done by a European documents expert, Dr. Stefan Weber, who is renowned for exposing those who engaged in this practice. The Times instead worked to debunk the claims, hand-selecting five of the more timid examples and giving them to their own chosen plagiarism expert. This is somehow meant to disprove the blatant examples shown by Rufo? Hardly. That we have entire paragraphs lifted from the likes of Wikipedia – something high school students know to avoid – is as damning as it gets.

And yet, here is our press working to extricate Kamala from this self-created fiasco. It is a sign of how far some of our institutions have departed from standards that not only had been more rigid but were universally accepted. On this topic alone, plagiarism has long been a disqualifying practice. Get caught with a record of stealing others’ work and you were done. Jayson Blair — formerly of (wait for it) The New York Times — and Stephen Glass are a pair of names synonymous with plagiarism, and they were both run out of journalism.

And of course there is Kamala’s boss, Joe Biden. He had infamously seen a presidential quest derailed nearly 40 years back, when he was found to have been routinely lifting speech elements as well as some written work from his time in law school. In a matter of days he undertook new copy work – Xeroxing his withdrawal from the election. In a dose of irony, Maureen Dowd – who spearheaded the reports of Biden’s thievery for the New York Times – faced down her own accusation of plagiarizing a quote.

Yet look where we are today on this subject. We are being told that this once unforgivable sin is now to be regarded as a mere inconvenience. Back when Biden was caught, the media were not flinching, and the attitude then was along the lines of, “Well, Joe is cooked.” Today the approach is far different. First it is measured against who is being accused, and if it is a Democrat or a figure on the Left the response has become, “Well, how do we spin this?”

We saw this playing out at the start of this year, when Harvard President Claudine Gay was found to have plagiarized significantly in a number of her papers. This is an action that in her own school leads to the expulsion of a student, but when the highest-ranking faculty member was proven to have plagiarized, she was defended extensively in the school and the press. Numerous deflections were offered up, from this being a conservative hit job to racism being the cause, or this being an attack caused by DEI opposition, to the practice of stealing work being declared not enough to drum out a president of a university.

Eventually the evidence mounted to such a degree that Gay was compelled to step down. But it exposed an institutional rot that has taken hold across the higher institutions of the country – politics, the press, the university system, and publishing. Today we have the exposure of this once intolerable practice leading not to swift banishment but to skull sessions and think pieces working to reinterpret the offense. No longer are you an instant pariah in your field, you now become an example of how we need to rethink the approach to this matter. 

That schools will cast off a student but fight to retain the highest power broker over the identical offense is a bizarre paradox. That the press has come around to readdressing the severity of what had once been regarded as a deadly sin of journalism exposes the graft. Even publishers are being shown as somewhat tolerant of the act, more inclined to back away from controversy than to serve up accountability.

It all comes down to the corruption of politics. The need for power and to support the statists on the left has led to this ethics creep. Joe Biden is the tarnished example of this, as his previously unacceptable behavior is forgiven because of the nobility of his stature against the dark powers. Democrats are seen as the needed tonic to the nefarious forces on the right, so any occurrence that might impede that success becomes morally fluid.

So Kamala Harris is not likely to suffer much retribution in the circles of our nation’s institutions. Her party, the press, and the larger sphere of support venues in our culture will work to dismiss this once intolerable infraction. It shows how the breakdown of values in this country has metastasized, and what it will lead to being accepted going forward is an unsettling premise to consider.