Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) seemed to relish the plagiarism allegations against Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday — as well he might, given that Harris’s running mate attacked Vance for what he wrote in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
“Hi, I’m JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia,” he posted on X.
Vance linked to a report by conservative journalist Christopher Rufo in which Harris is shown to have lifted several passages in her 2009 book Smart on Crime from sources without attribution, including Wikipedia. The New York Times admitted that Harris had, indeed, copied the passages, but claimed that the plagiarism was “not serious.”
The issue of authorship is certainly serious enough to have caused the Harris campaign to launch misleading attacks on Vance for the content of his memoir, which is a bestseller and has even been made into a Hollywood movie.
“Now look, [Vance] wrote a memoir at the ripe old age of 31, and he claimed to be an expert on Middle America, all the while trashing and denigrating the very community he was raised in,” Walz said in Nebraska in August, using an attack line that had become part of his stump speech. But Walz did not “denigrate” his community: his memoir is a deeply personal story about overcoming challenges and family instability.
Since Walz made Vance’s book a campaign issue, Harris’s own book is certainly fair game. And as Vance noted: at least he wrote his own.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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