In the authenticity election, Kamala Harris loses in a landslide.
In the authenticity election, Kamala Harris loses in a landslide.
The latest collective weirded-out “who are you?” comes in the wake of the revelation of plagiarism in Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, a book ostensibly written by Kamala Harris and Joan O’C. Hamilton in 2009. As German plagiarism expert Stefan Weber and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo demonstrate, the presidential candidate and her coauthor passed off long, verbatim passages from NBC News, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release, the Urban Institute, and, yes, even Wikipedia as their own.
Before the disclosure of Harris repackaging the words of others as ones that she wrote, she appropriated any number of accents. Last week, she spoke in a Jamaican accent while discussing hurricane relief with Stephen Colbert. “Hello to all of my Divine Nine brothas and sistas,” Harris said at a Congressional Black Caucus dinner last month, “and my soror. And to all my HBCU brothas and sistas.” In Detroit, the Democratic Party presidential nominee relied upon dialect that calls no distinct spot on the map home. “Ya betta thank a union memba for sick leave,” she instructed the audience. “Ya betta thank a union memba for paid leave. Ya betta thank a union member for vacation time.
