Kamala Harris this week faced accusations of plagiarism over multiple sections of her book, “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.”
This is not the first such accusation, Harris has been accused of lifting a story from Martin Luther King. In 1965, King described “a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother.” King recounted how the policeman asked the little girl “‘What do you want?’ and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom’.” Harris would later tell the story of how her mother asked her “Kamala, what’s wrong? What do you want?” and I wailed back, “Fweedom.”
As found by various media outlets, the new allegations from her book would qualify as plagiarism despite the denial of the campaign. It is doubtful it will matter to many voters in the hardened political silos of this election. However, it could prompt a long-needed discussion about how we handle plagiarism in academia.
Here is a slightly expanded version of my Hill column:
“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 have pledged to weaponize reviews by targeting conservative academics in a hunt for academic wretches to hoist in retaliation. Indeed, for intellectuals who cherish the insulated world of academia, the tit-for-tat campaigns are apparently about as unnerving as a tax audit going back to your teenaged babysitting gigs.
Yet perhaps the reflexive defense of Harris could prove a positive development if critics are willing to put hypocrisy aside and embrace a new approach.
The fact is, much, if not most, non-student plagiarism is not due to a lack of ethics but a lack of diligence. It is the difference between negligent and intentional acts.
Most books and academic works take months or years to complete. Hundreds or thousands of sources can be reviewed and incorporated into a publication. In the age of computers, it is extremely easy to cut and paste your way into a plagiarism problem. Quotation marks can be lost or omitted by authors or research assistants; attributions can be omitted in basic background development. It is all too easy to lose track of original sources in production.
That fact is evident from past plagiarism controversies involving accomplished figures, including Harvard professors Lawrence Tribe and Charles Ogletree, as well as historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Steven Ambrose.
These writers have well-earned reputations that are the product of their own insights. Alex Haley’s fame was not the product of the plagiarized material in his work on “Roots.” When viewed in isolation, a paragraph or multiple references can appear damning, but these often arise in works that reach hundreds of pages.
There is a tendency to treat all such allegations as monolithic and equally culpable. Yet even homicide has lesser offenses on a range from murder in the first degree to simple manslaughter.
Moreover, there remains a striking lack of uniformity in how such allegations are treated. For popular figures like Goodwin or Ogletree, the allegations were mere speed bumps in their careers. For others who may be less popular or well connected, the same acts can result in contract terminations or even the stripping of tenure. There are no sentencing guidelines for academics and the result can turn as much on the popularity of the person as the gravity of the offense.
Defining Plagiarism
In the first century, the Roman poet Martial was upset when he recognized some verses in the work of another poet. He immediately declared the man a kidnapper or “plagiarius” of his words. With that, the term plagiarism was born.
Despite its ancient origins, the actual definition of plagiarism remains dangerously vague.
Even when an academic cites such work, the failure to do so in a specific paragraph or line can be charged as plagiarism. It is common to rely on the work of others for background history or cases that lay the foundation for a new approach. Harris’s defenders insist that much of the lifted material was background support for her own arguments.
Plagiarism hawks often dismiss such habits as a “pawn sacrifice,” where a writer will “put the citation somewhere else, or you put the citation in and have the exact words, but you forget the quotation marks.” While hawks may view this as a “tell,” it can also be an honest mistake or poor habit. In such cases, the academic is citing the work but fails to do so sufficiently.
Then there is the concept of “self-plagiarism,” which many of us view as something of an oxymoron. Universities are now cracking down on academics using their own material. Some of us have criticized this effort, but it is now taking root in many departments. Universities threaten action if you “recycle ideas” from earlier work.
Harvard’s Diversity Chief Sherri Ann Charleston was hit with a complaint alleging dozens of incidents, including self-plagiarism by her husband. The latter allegation is that her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014 was a recycling of an earlier work. LaVar Charleston was the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is accused of pawning off the old material as a new work with his wife.
The problem is that many academics write papers restating prior work or ideas before pushing them into new areas or further evolutions. Some writers are often starting where they left off, repeating earlier work and ideas before advancing the work further in a new paper.
The definition of the act does not establish the gravity of the act. Treating plagiarism as a capital offense ignores that there are vastly different levels of culpability.
Antebellum Plagiarism
Just as we need a better understanding of what plagiarism is, we may need to recognize changes in the ability to spot it before publication. For the last four decades, academic work has become faster and arguably more precarious with the ease of computer storage and copying. Yet, there is now technology that may counter that danger and reduce the excuse for academics. Various systems, including Artificial Intelligence-based systems, can check work for potential plagiarism.
If these systems prove effective and cost efficient, we may need to adopt an antebellum and postbellum classification for plagiarism cases. The war over the Gay scholarship happens to fall on this very line. The availability of plagiarism software makes future violations less excusable.
If these systems prove effective and cost efficient, we may need to adopt an “antebellum” and “postbellum” classification for plagiarism cases. The war over the Gay scholarship happens to fall on this very line. The availability of plagiarism software may make future violations less excusable.
Indeed, in a recent survey, more than 78 percent of faculty said that they used software to check the originality of student work. It may be time for academics to direct such programs on their own work as a check for inadvertent attribution problems.
I decided, for the first time, to give these systems a try for my new book on free speech. “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” is over 400 pages. I decided that I would use the work to compare these services and share the results.
I chose two of the leading services: Ithenticate and Copyleaks. Both are pricey options. For Ithenticate, I had to break the book up into 25,000 word parts and pay roughly $100 per part. That resulted in hundreds of dollars for a complete review. Copyleaks charges roughly the same.
In both systems, the review is blazingly fast and impressive. With Ithenticate, you can literally watch the results pop up in minutes.
Both reports were a bit of a heart stopper. They showed a percentage of hits that could be as high as 30 percent for my material. After I was resuscitated, my assistant explained that each of the hits showed less than one percent overlap or block quotes from cases or other works. Most were hits from something on the Internet. I had two individuals review each of the hits to make sure that there were no substantive attribution problems. That also cost money and time.
That is obviously expensive and labor intensive. Moreover, both systems could use a bit more analytical content rather than just assembling hits. However, it also offers some peace of mind. It does not guarantee that you will not be the next snared in a plagiarism scandal, but it certainly reduces the odds for you.
As these systems improve and the costs drop, there may be a point where the failure to put your own work through such a source check becomes unreasonable and even unforgivable. The future of academic plagiarism may indeed fall along an antebellum line of technology.
Harris’s alleged plagiarism is unlikely to change many minds in this election. She could have begun her book with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and it would have been at least poignant, if plagiarized.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
Jonathan: You, Fox and right-wing pundits, like Christopher Rufo are desperate to find something, anything to attack Kamala Harris in the final days before the election. Now its the allegation that Harris is guilty of plagiarism in her 2009 book “Smart on Crime”. The NY Times reviewed the book and found “none of the passages in question took the ideas
give it up, gigi
Jonathan: You, Fox and right-wing pundits, like Christopher Rufo are desperate to find something, anything to attack Kamala Harris
Dennis/Kamala: The problem isn’t finding something to criticize and call out concerning CNN’s left wing radical, Border Czar Harris.
The problem is that her political history and particularly the last four years leaves such an enormous target rich environment of lies, failures, scandals, etc. that it’s hard to choose what defects and lethal flaws she has to highlight while showing she’s the most unqualified and most dangerous candidate for president in history.
And you can’t come up with a better rebuttal to Professor Turley than making a reference to The New York Times – the same newspaper that lied to it’s gullible readers for years that The Russia Dossier was verified intelligence agency evidence – and the Biden laptop was just “Russian election disinformation”? Seriously?
Do we want four more years of this!! I’m Tim Walz and I approve this message. Is this plagiarism?
Dim bulbs on sale at Kamala Mart.
From we want fweedom to wants mo fweechit!
From judge me by my character not by the color of my skin to vote for Kamala cause she’s black…kind of sort of.
Biden’s first attempt to run for President ended when his plagiarism of an English politician was detected and publicized. Harris is still welded to Biden from head to toe as a politician – including her being revealed as also being a plagiarist.
But will the Democrat-Media Political Complex do the same to Harris as they did to Biden’s first attempt to be president – call her out as a lying plagiarist?
Never mind; that was just a rhetorical question.
Here’s a rhetorical question:
What were your MOS, Awards, Campaign, and Theater?
What is your IQ, Credit Score, Networth and volume of empty space in your cranium?
All double digit numbers I am positive! Just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character.
:The Wolf
Pulp Fiction
Quentin Tarantino producer
🤣
Here’s a rhetorical question: What were your MOS, Awards, Campaign, and Theater?
And a rhetorical question in the same vein as yours for you in return, Anonymous Navy Gun Bunny: Why did you decide to go the Navy bums ‘n buggery poop chute instead of going Army Airborne parachute?
And why your constant obsession with my MOS, awards, campaign and theaters, no matter what the topic of the day’s column? Particularly the vast majority that have absolutely no military angle in content or in my responses?
If your mother told you I’m your father, I assure you I never once had to pay to get laid, so that rules me out as the one to hate as your unknown father. The one who gave your mother a $5 bill for services rendered.
“We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war,” Tim Walz.
Tim Walz never “carried” a weapon in a war.
Tim Walz attempted to steal valor.
Sound familiar?
The totality of Camel “Nose Under The Tent” Harris’ CV is Willy Brown.
Camel is a barren woman with less than no raison d’être who believes herself superior, above endeavor, infinitely entitled to and owed, not an office but a crown.
Camel plagiarizes of her superiority because the work and fealty of others are due her.
Camel has never established an enterprise, created a dollar of wealth, held a position in a private enterprise that created wealth, attracted substantial campaign contributions, earned a vote, won a primary, or won an election outside of Willy Brown’s influence in the once-American, one-party communist state of California.
Kamala Harris’ “democracy” is nothing more than corruption, dictatorship, and coup d’etat.
Camel is an incorrigibly vacuous, empty pantsuit and imitating wannabe.
KamalaSalad’s is a colossal campaign entirely bereft of an actual candidate.
In the case of Camel, there is definitively NO THERE, THERE!
This charlatan is All Hat and No Cattle!
That she is a plagiarist is merited knowing that she is herself a mere representation of another person’s language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions. We may not know all of who and what she really is, but we are slowly and surely finding out.
Harvard’s Diversity Chief Sherri Ann Charleston . . . her husband, LaVar Charleston . . . was the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Now there’s a couple of grifters for you.
you should be able to tell by the context is someone is talking about an experience they had or an experience someone else had. If they present a story about someone else as if it was something that they did, that’s not an innocent mistake of accidentally dropping quotes.
David Lang
Dear Prof Turley,
Word salad. Unburdened by what has been. .. I didn’t fall out of a coconut tree.
Look, I once googled ‘how old is the Tao’, and the first hit was Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech. ‘If you rely exclusively on one author’s work it’s plagiarism .. . If you rely on many it’s research’. *Quoteth the toad of truth
Obviously, intent and context matters.
Otoh, if imitation is the purest form of flattery . .. “There are good people on both sides”.
*plagiarize this …
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BWQofJOPeS4
I guess that when you let your students or your ghost writers write your papers or books you should be more diligent in checking to see if they have stolen some other person’s thoughts. On Kamala’s part she just said you’ve got to just publish the book before you can read it. She learned this tactic from Nancy Pelosi who said you’ve got to pass the bill before you can read it. What can you expect from an elitist with an I’ll never get caught mentality. The go to plan is if I do get caught I’ll just blame it on someone else. Please see the border crises is Trumps fault. It’ so ingrained as to be thought of as normal. Once a bo weevil is baked in the cake you can never get it out.
Berkeley Girl and Knucklehead are extremely weak candidates Jonathan. Given that, they almost have to plagiarize.
Self Plagiarism also occurs in Medicine but not always where you think it might. Most people would initially jump to the published medical literature as the main site of plagiarism. However the more ubiquitous site is in the patient record.
Over the past 25 years there has been a huge push to move to EMR’s (electronic medical records) for ease of recording and storing information whether it be lab reports, x-rays, surgeries, lung function tests etc.
The unexpected thing that crept in was the Cut and Paste visit record. Each time a patient visits a provider be that an MD, DO, NP, RN, psychologist , etc there is a visit record. You are supposed to type up or dictate a summary of the visit and then that goes into the database for future reference. What happens when the physician simply cuts and pastes the previous visit record into the new current record. Then you get a long series of visits that show no change. And the whole point of the record is negated. Even if the doctor, patient, nurse, problem or chief complaint are still the same there is still a difference in the visit. Something always changes. The BP is never always the same, or heart rate or breathing or weight. A record of change is important and can highlight significant events.
It also casts doubt about whether the exam was ever done or was really as complete as it says it was. Who will know. And it does happen.
Think about that.
GEB,
Thank you for that insight. Very interesting. Be interesting to compare modern electronic records with written ones from a few decades ago for accuracy.
* false visits charged to insurance, medicaid and Medicare. Nothing is sent to the false patient. Should be a red flag.
It would be my guess that the plagiarism is the product of the many “ghost” writers in her career. I don’t think she has anything to do with published papers other than lend her name to the titles because she is not a competent enough writer to create anything longer than a lame catch phrase.
I stopped reading to write this comment when you wrote that plagiarism is easy to fall into, in these days of online/electronic sources and cut-and-paste. NO! Mr. Turley you are too kind to plagiarists. I have a Ph.D. from Stanford, a few patents and about 10 published papers. Not an academic powerhouse (I left to go into technology) but no one — NO ONE — “cuts and pastes” without understanding exactly what they are doing. If you find a choice source it is your obligation to read it, digest it, and restate it in your own words with connections to the point you are making. If it is an insight or a new idea that was advanced you absolutely 100% MUST cite the source. Right there, not somewhere else. If it is data you are using to support your arguments, you absolutely 100% MUST cite the source. Right there, not somewhere else. If it is common historical knowledge that could’ve been found in many sources and you are using it to set the stage or provide background info, it is your OBLIGATION to re-write it in your own words, NOT use someone else’s.
Anonymous1105AM-
I applaud your integrity and discipline to make sure you don’t plagiarize. I appreciate especially the willingness to to do it right at the time of writing. It takes tremendous disciple but it can be done. There are lesser lights out there that do not have that discipline or even strive for it. I never thought a Doctor would copy and paste a note until I saw them start to occur and we had to start communicating through the whole group that this was not acceptable. Unfortunately it also requires vigilance
Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer
By Kamala Harris? Seriously? Are we certain she didn’t plagiarize someone at The Babylon Bee? I honestly couldn’t care less about her suspected plagiarism. There’s not one word, sentence, paragraph or chapter she could lift from someone else’s work that would make her remotely believable.
To plagiarize Bob Grant, she’s a fake, a phony, and a fraud.
Jonathan: Your debate at Harvard with Prof. Kennedy highlights how your “free speech” crusade is mostly confined to universities and the bakers of cakes. When it comes to the real threats to free expression you are silent. Here’s a case that illustrates my point.
On Thursday in Florida US District Judge Mark Walker granted a TRO against another attempt by Gov. DeSantis to suppress “free speech”. DeSantis had ordered his Surgeon General to bring criminal charges against TV stations for airing pro-abortion ads. What’s that about?
DeSantis’s 6-week abortion is not popular in Florida. Floridians Protecting Freedom (FPF) gathered enough signatures to restore abortion rights in the state’s constitution on the November ballot. DeSanti has tried every possible way to prevent that and ordered his “thought police” to search out and find “fraudulent” signatures on the ballot initiative. Hasn’t worked. DeSantis then claimed the “Yes on 4 campaign” ads on TV are “fake” and “dangerous” and ordered his Health Dept. General Counsel to send cease-and desist letters to multiple TV stations threatening criminal prosecution if they continued to air the pro-abortion ads. That’s when FPF filed a lawsuit in federal district court.
Judge Walker firmly slapped down DeSantis. He ruled that threats by the health department amounted to “viewpoint discrimination” and that FPF presented “a substantial likelihood of proving an ongoing violation of its First Amendment rights through the threatened penalization of its political speech”. In an ironic twist Walker relied on the right-wing SC court ruling in May of this year in NRA v. Vullo that government can’t coerce third parties into censoring speech it doesn’t like.
DeSantis’s attacks on the First Amendment are legend. He has banned books, tried to censor university professors and public school teachers and even tried to suppress free speech in workplaces. On commentator about DeSantis’s attacks on free expression has said: “Welcome to Florida where Democracy and Free Speech go to die!”
DeSantis keeps losing in court. But that hasn’t stopped him. He is doing what DJT aspires to–acting as an authoritarian who uses ever lever of power to prevent prevent speech he doesn’t like. What is happening in Florida under DeSantis should be a national scandal. Will you discuss this existential threat to “free speech” in one of your columns? Probably not because you see the First Amendment only as something to protect conservatives.
P.S. John Wilson, the FL Health Dept. General Counsel, quit over being ordered to send the threatening letters to the TV stations. In a statement Wilson said: “A man is nothing without a conscience. I cannot join you [DeSantis] on the road that lies before the agency”.
Get your own website, freeloader.
Jonathan: Your debate at Harvard with Prof. Kennedy highlights how your “free speech” crusade..
Dennis, You Cheap Fake Friend, you forgot to use your friend’s blog to give us your Jonathan: Breaking News! update… so I’ll happily do that for you:
Hopeful Senate candidate Adam Schiff of Trump-Russia Dossier fame and his conflicting ‘principal’ residences in mortgage, election papers raises felony election fraud concerns
Law enforcement experts said the documents should form the basis for prosecution. “These are serious, documented allegations which carry significant criminal penalties if substantiated,” retired FBI supervisory special agent Jeff Danik said after reviewing the documents. The FBI veteran noted the Justice Department “maintains a robust fraud enforcement section that routinely investigates similar allegations” and “the 10-year statute of limitations available in bank fraud investigations would allow for an expansive inquiry.”
https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/hkdadam-schiffs-primary-residence-claims-mortgage-election
HOLY SCHIFF, Dennis! Your hero Adam Schiff is in another massive Schiff Show after being caught red handed! Yet again! Just as incapable of telling the truth as Biden and you!
Do you think a Trump DoJ would give him a Clinton/Biden/Biden Jr. Get Out Of Jail card after he ran the prior Trump-Russia Dossier illegal election fraud?
You’re welcome for me lending you a helping hand Dennis – I will take your silence and absence as your thanks for me helping you out.
* Pro abortion ads? If you’d paid attention to the scotus opinion re mifepristone , DANCO made it clear they ready to market. The commerce of abortion. Was the ad dancing girls like the marketing tv ads for Jardiance? Little songs about after that date I’m free now and fell so well and free? 🎶 LA LA LA. Thing?
As expected mifepristone has no follow up visit and females are dying—> at an acceptable level.
I didn’t read the rest of your soul crushing essay…
* proofread. They are ready to market…
Feel, not fell
Btw Dennis, DANCO had already gotten 750, 000 dollar fine for smuggling Chinese mifepristone into the USA. Didn’t phase them.
Since reporting is not mandated there will be no way to know how many die, how many rape victims and children of rape will not be tracked and pedos unfound.
The deaths are at an acceptable level.
Dennis
While Walker “got it right” – he is also at odds with the body of free speech decisions on his issue for decades.
The Adds DeSantis sought to kill were providing false medical information that if beleived could result in people making dangerous even fatal medical decsions.
SCOTUS has unfortunately allowed that type of apriori censorship – atherewise the FDA would be unable to regulate drug adverstisements or drug or food packaging.
I would love to see Walkers running properly applied to ALL medical adds – but it will not be.
More disturbing is that YOU and Walker do not grasp that you are hypocrits.
The FL Surgeon General can not threaten censorship over false medical adds – but the FDA can ?
Please I would love to hear you explanation of the difference ?
As to the moral aspects of this – DeSantis’s conduct is no less moral than that of the FDA.
I have no idea whether the FL abortion law is “popular” – nor do you.
I do know that voters in FL face a barrage of lies regarding that legislation.
Those of you on the left have told us constantly that governemnt should be able to censor false information that might alter peoples vote.
This certainly qualifies.
Judge Walker did not rule that the “Yes on 4 adds were not dangerous o fake”, he properly ruled the government can not engage in apriori censorship. Not even in an election.
While I support his ruling – I would separately ask why is it that opponets of the law can not win AND be truthful ?
Dennis – this nonsense regarding DeSantis is old and tired.
There is a limit to the books that can be availabl in an elementary library.
It is not “banning books” to say that K-12 libraries can not carry the equivalent of Hustler.
If you desparately need to supply porn to your children – it is readily available – no one has banned it.
Restriction of the material in a K-12 library is NOT book banning or a 1A violation.
It is just a recognition of the reality that schools are not going to have every book ever published and choices must be made.
If you want to feed your kids a diet of porn, home school them.
Even DeSantis is not restricting what you provide your kids in your home.
As to the restrictions on Florida State university – just make it private and be done with it.
But the rest of us should not be subsidizing the ideological insanity that is colleges today.
Dennis,
You are not well acquanted with the truth.
What you call book banning – was upheld by the courts.
What you call censoring Disney was upheld by the courts.
Some parts of DeSantis’s laws regarding State Colleges were blocked.
The effort to apriori ban false abortion advertising was blocked.
I wonder if you or Walker are going to rule against the FDA banning false advertising of medicine or food ?
No dennis what is happening in Florida is NOT a national scandal.
What is happeing in Florida is small and happening in Public.
The suppression of truthful information about Covid was scandalous.
The suppression fo right wing political speech was scandalous,
The suppression of the hunter biden laptop story was scandalous.
So attempts to thwart false advertising about abortions in Florida are scandalous, and an existential threat ?
But the actual censorship for years of truthful information about covid or the hunter biden laptop – those are “meh” ?
Left wing nuts would have nothing without hypocracy.
WOW! Maybe Gigi and George are really Kamala Harris incognito!
I bet if you use a plagiarism checker app on Turley’s columns you would find he occasionally engages in it.
I bet if you use a plagiarism checker app on Turley’s columns you would find he occasionally engages in it.
I bet you and Dennis, George, Gigi, Fish Thing have already tried that and found nothing.
Which is why the desperate allegations. Go Kamala!
Let’s not forget that Turley also engaged in plagiarism. He often copies and pastes entire sections from articles written by college fix. When College Fix was asked about it they had been “flattered” that Turley used their articles as sources of content.
Turley is not immune from the easy task of copying someone else’s work. How else would he be able to ‘write’ so many columns every day?
You have some examples to cite here by way if illustrating your claim, no doubt?
Let’s not forget that Turley also engaged in plagiarism… Turley is not immune from the easy task of copying someone else’s work. How else would he be able to ‘write’ so many columns every day?
None of us have forgotten that George is psychopathic serial liar who hates Turley on behalf of the Democrats as much as he hates Trump.
George pretends he doesn’t notice (?) that at the top of all of these articles is something like this “Here is a slightly expanded version of my The Hill column:” Meaning that he’s explicitly saying this is a copy of an already published column. In this case, one published in The Hill three days ago. It’s a version of HIS earlier work Here’s that column, George, you feckless pathological liar…
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4935406-is-kamala-harris-a-plagiarizer/
Notice George, Dennis, Gigi, and FishAnus it wasn’t Fox News, that you hate almost as much as you hate Professor Turley and Trump? The Hill is as rabidly Democrat commy left and pro Border Czar Harris as all of you are.
But here’s a thought George:
Maybe Professor Turley’s output of columns that he’s paid for outdistances your output of lies about Professor Turley is because he gets paid far to write analysis pieces than you get paid to post sophomoric lies in Professor Turley’s blog?
Your lies, BTW, that are essentially copies of Democrat lies that you change a bit and then reproduce here. One could point out that you repeating their lies and complaints as a Democrat apparatchik is essentially a form of plagiarism.
Professor Turley is also obviously be a lot smarter, more knowledgeable, more competent, and a lot more engaging to audiences than your daily parroted lies as your responses to his columns.
George, you are a lying Cheap Fake Democrat American.
“Turley also engaged in plagiarism.”
That is called defamation.
Nothing like being accused of plagiarism when you are a student in college. Back in 1966-1967 at Emory University my English Professor in Poetry (really) accused me of plagiarism in a long essay on “The Tyger”. Needless to say there has been much published on that poem and I tried diligently to give it my best effort. Like Professor Turley I was mortified when I got no grade and was told to report to the prof with all my evidence and notes. Emory had made a big deal about plagiarism to incoming freshman and the penalties that could accrue. I was very worried. A multi-hour session of quotes and publications and foot notes followed but I was able to refute every charge. The reason I did that was because I had outstanding English teachers in the Atlanta Public Schools and they prepared me, thankfully. The Prof was unforgiving and still needed to sink the knife somewhere so after the session he just picked up the paper and wrote C and prepared to leave. I naively asked if he would reread the paper and then grade it. His words to me as he wandered on down the hall was “I don’t have to”.
Plagiarism is serious and implies a lack of respect for the originators of the original thought but it should be a teaching tool for students with appropriate penalties and yet more and severer penalties for those in the upper stratum of academia or politics or any profession.
Plagiarism in 1966 carried some severe penalties including getting kicked out of school, loss of your deferment, immediately you are subject to the draft, and soon on a plane(possibly to Viet Nam) So yes I was very worried.
Sometimes little acts can have very severe repercussions.
GEB that’s a shame your English prof acted like such a jerk to you. In the category of misery loves company, at a time when I was a pre-med, I took a biology course where inexplicably the lab instructor could give each student a subjective grade in the range 0-40. Although I completed all labs on time and got good marks on them, she just didn’t like me and gave me zero for the subjective grade. That dropped my grade for the course overall from an A- to a C, which is pretty devastating for someone intending to apply to med school.* Eventually though I decided to pursue degrees in Computer Science and never did apply to med school. I think that experience was part of the reason.
*I appealed to the head of the lab instructors, who revised it to 15/40, which upped the final grade to a B-. I heard the next year they got rid of the subjective grade.
Old a from Kansas-unfortunately we had no outlets to complain through. We did not even get to grade the profs. Remember it was 1966-1967, you know Prehistory.And yes that particular Prof was a true Jerk in every sense of the word. Loved the poem though, one of my favorites
My similar experience was not in college (I forced to go, and had no real interest in it) but at the hands of a HS Biology teacher. I avidly read Scientific American, and when they had an article on suspended animation experiments on mice, using liquid NO2 for freezing, and cardiac electro-shock for resuscitation, I decided that would be my annual biology class project. So I wrote to DuPont in Delaware (about an hour’s drive) asking how I could get some of that substance. They wrote back a very polite letter that translated to “Let a 16 yo have LNO2? not ‘no’, but ‘Hell no!’ 🙂 I (foolishly, no doubt) plunged ahead and tried the experiment anyway, putting the mice in my mother’s freezer in place of the LNO2, and using a heated spatula to substitute for the shock. Of course, resuscitation failed (but it also did so in the original experiment reported in SA), but in my view it was still a valid, if ill-advised, experiment. I wrote it up in accurate detail, and submitted it. A week later my paper was returned with “You never did this!” scrawled across the title page in red ink, and a grade of zero. On another occasion this same “teacher” bragged to our class that, since he did not want to take the time to actually read and objectively grade term papers, he took the stack of papers for the entire class to the top of the stairs in his home, dropped them, and based the grade for a paper on how far it traveled.
Awful and unethical!
In the part of the above article where it discusses so-called self plagiarism, there is a paragraph (mentioning Claudine Gay) that contains a word-for-word repeat of one or two sentences from the previous paragraph. Is that an attempt at irony? Hmmmm.
What an astute observation! He added a few quotation marks, but there’s still no citation. It’s like a kidnapping succeeded by involuntary self-immolation.