As one gets older, one finds solace in the little extras in life, the little things you don’t usually notice.
The flowering tree that’s unusually fragrant this year. An especially well-made burger from your favorite greasy spoon. A long email or message from an old friend you haven’t caught up with in ages. A “CONSERVATIVES POUNCE!!” story in The New York Times where the inadvertent hilarity goes beyond the headline.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the “CONSERVATIVES POUNCE!!” meme, Kevin D. Williamson, then of National Review, penned a handy guide to it in 2018:
“When a Republican does something stupid or wrong and gets criticized for it, the story is that a Republican has done something stupid or wrong. When a Democrat does something stupid or wrong, the story is ‘Republicans pounce!’ on the episode, cynically looking to wring some petty advantage out of the mess. For those who lean Democrat, that is a much more pleasant story to report.”
The establishment media have since found a thesaurus kicking around their collective newsrooms and have found a few synonyms for “pounce,” with “seize” being the most popular.
Thus, when the Kamala Harris plagiarism story broke, I was heartened to see this headline/subheadline in Monday’s Times: “Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book; A report by Christopher Rufo says the Democratic presidential nominee copied five short passages for her 2009 book on crime. A plagiarism expert said the lapses were not serious.”
Rufo — with the aid of others, it must be noted — had indeed “seized” upon the facts that large portions of Vice President Kamala Harris’ unremarkable 2009 book “Smart on Crime” were indeed lifted, without citation, from other sources. Among those sources: the notoriously biased Wikipedia.
Yes, Harris (and/or her ghostwriters; who knows whose hand was on the MacBook keyboard when the eminently missable volume was being written?) had committed the unpardonable sin that community college professors across this fruited plain warn against: Don’t even cite Wikipedia, much less copy it.
And trust me, we’ll get to the matter of the plagiarism in a second, just in case you haven’t been fully caught up in the latest transgressions the media has been willing to overlook in order to keep the “joy” and “vibes” of the August Harris-Walz campaign going as the leaves begin to turn and Election Day gets closer.
Do you believe the plagiarism allegations against Kamala Harris?
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But, in addition to the “CONSERVATIVES SEIZE!!” headline in the notoriously biased New York Times, do note the subheadline in which the newspaper also notes that it had consulted a “plagiarism expert,” and he’d said “the lapses were not serious.”
Said “plagiarism expert” promptly pounced/seized on that part, saying he’d done no such thing.
So, here’s some of the plagiarism identified by Rufo — a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute known for both the think-tank’s City Journal as well as his own independent journalism — and Dr. Stefan Weber, described by no less than the Times itself as a “‘plagiarism hunter’ terrorizing the German-speaking world.”
Well, now he’s doing a number on the English-speaking world, as well:
We can begin with a passage in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited AP/NBC News report: pic.twitter.com/pZv5mD3m5t
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024
In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris’s… pic.twitter.com/qrwHE8AAgk
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024
Finally, when attempting to write a description of a nonprofit group, Harris simply lifted promotional language from an Urban Institute report, and failed to cite her source: pic.twitter.com/WpcC0SkpT5
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024
That’s not a good look, particularly in the wake of a spate of high-profile plagiarism cases that derailed several top lefty academics over the past year.
To be fair to the candidate, I don’t know that Harris has even read the book, much less written it. However, the Times — pretty much one of America’s two newspapers of record, shoddy though its reputation may be these days — was willing to brush off these claims as minor.
“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. Ms. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, wrote the book with another author when she was the district attorney in San Francisco,” the “CONSERVATIVES SEIZE!!” story stated.
“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, which is considered the most serious form of plagiarism. Instead, the sentences copy descriptions of programs or statistical information that appear elsewhere,” the article continued, admitting, however, that “five passages that Mr. Rufo cited appeared to have been taken partly from other published work without quotation marks.”
But then the Times brought in the big guns: “Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism consultant in New Orleans and the publisher of Plagiarism Today.” He’s the one who supposedly justified the subheadline, since “his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.”
“This amount of plagiarism amounts to an error and not an intent to defraud,” he was quoted as saying. Rufo, according Bailey, according to the Times, according to Bailey, was trying to “make a big deal of it.”
And then Bailey “POUNCED!!”
From a post he published on the social media platform X:
“For those coming here from the NY Times Article. I want to be clear that I have NOT performed a full analysis of the book,” the quoted plagiarism expert wrote. “My quotes were based on information provided to me by the reporters and spoke only about those passages.”
For those coming here from the NY Times Article. I want to be clear that I have NOT performed a full analysis of the book. My quotes were based on information provided to me by the reporters and spoke only about those passages.
— Jonathan Bailey (@plagiarismtoday) October 14, 2024
The Times does not make that clear. It introduces Bailey’s quote by writing “that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.”
The implication is that he assessed the criticisms in comparison to the entire book.
But the reality is, Bailey was given the passages the Times wanted him to examine, he considered them, then gave a quote, which was turned into an overall assessment that “the lapses were not serious.” And that was then turned into part of the summary headline.
Journalisming, folks!
Rufo also posted a rejoinder to this, noting that his team would get in touch with Bailey with a fuller report on the book:
My team will send you the full dossier with more than a dozen of the accusations. The New York Times was dishonest with you. Even CNN confirms that it is absolutely plagiarism. It’s not too late to salvage your reputation and tell the truth. Set the record straight. pic.twitter.com/nw5LCQXIeO
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 15, 2024
I’m not sure whether Mr. Bailey — who has his pronouns in his X bio — is going to “salvage [his] reputation and tell the truth,” as Rufo puts it.
However, it is telling when someone apparently at the top of the NYT’s collective contact list on plagiarism stories puts out a quote implying that the newspaper had misrepresented what he said and what he was opining on.
And considering that the conditions under which he gave his opinion are not spelled out clearly in the article, it’s damning.
The only shock is that this could come as a shock to anyone.
All I know is that the odds have to be non-zero that there’s some permutation of this headline in the Times on Tuesday or Wednesday: “Conservatives Seize Upon Plagiarism Expert Pouncing Upon Trusted Media Source’s Debunking of Harris Plagiarism Allegation Seizure. Also, Seize. And Pounce.”
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