Plagiarism update: Joe Biden and Dr. Claudine Gay

Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, December 13, 2023

Harvard University has decided to stand behind embattled president Dr. Claudine Gay after she was accused of plagiarizing other scholars’ works in her 1997 Ph.D. thesis and writing four papers published between 1993 and 2017 that did not have proper attribution. Like the current resident of the White House, Gay has one significant qualification for leniency: She aligns with the political-media ruling class.

Dr. Claudine Gay ‘had a very elite education, and the Left created her, so they bear some responsibility for all of this,’ said Carol Swain. / Public Domain

Carol Swain, one of the individuals who said her work was pilfered by Gay, served as co-chairwoman for President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission in January 2021 as a response to The New York Times Magazine1619 Project.

“I feel like her whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work,” Swain said. “My blood pressure is rising today because of Harvard’s decision that what she did doesn’t constitute plagiarism, and it doesn’t rise to the level of her removal.”

“From all indications, she was always a fraud,” Swain asserted. “She should resign.”

Carol Swain, a conservative, earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1989. In 2000, she earned a Master of Legal Studies from Yale Law School.

“At first, I thought, ‘Okay, it was just a dissertation and maybe she forgot to put quotation marks, that was sloppy’— so I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, but when I saw — it was not just one thing, it was a whole career path, and it was not just me, there were other people that she plagiarized,” Swain told Breitbart News Daily host Mike Slater.

She added that Gay “had a very elite education, and the Left created her, so they bear some responsibility for all of this, because they should have caught the plagiarism. Some of her own colleagues were plagiarized.”

Swain, a former political science professor at Vanderbilt University, said the Harvard prez would have been fired “if she were a white male.”

Put “conservative” before white male there and you have a 100 percent chance of getting fired.

But non-conservative white males get away with plagiarizing others quite often. You could ask Joe Biden if he ever wakes up.

Media have documented 17 cases of plagiarism, outright lies, and exaggerations Biden has spewed over his more than half century in the public eye.

With credit going to the Washington Examiner, Des Moines Register, New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, New York Post, the Trump campaign, and others, Washington Examiner columnist Paul Bedard listed the 17:

Plagiarisms

1. Going all the way back to 1965, when he was a Syracuse University College of Law student, Biden lifted five pages of a law review for a legal report. “I was wrong, but I was not malevolent in any way,” he said when caught.

2. In 1987, he was forced out of the presidential race when he was caught stealing lines of British politician Neil Kinnock’s speeches. Maybe worse, he also mimicked some of Kinnock’s mannerisms in a style a reporter at the time called “creepy.” Political author Richard Ben Cramer said Biden knew what he was doing and even had a video of Kinnock to study.

3. Also during that presidential run, Biden stole lines from Robert F. Kennedy, according to a New York Times review. During his presidential run in 1968, RFK said, “It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. and it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.” Nearly 20 years later, Biden said, “That bottom line can tell us everything about our lives, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America, except that which makes us proud to be Americans.”

4. In 1987, Biden also borrowed from President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address when he fashioned a line off JFK’s famous phrase “Each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty.” According to the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, Biden said, “Each generation of Americans has been summoned.”

5. Biden in 1987 also pulled a phrase from then-Sen. Hubert Humphrey. Wrote the New York Times’s Dowd, “At the Democratic National Convention in 1976, Mr. Humphrey, then a senator from Minnesota, declared: ‘The ultimate moral test of any government is the manner in which it treats three groups of its citizens: first, those who are in the dawn of life, our children; second, those who are in the shadows of life, our sick, our needy, our handicapped, and those, third, in the twilight of life, our elderly.’ Senator Biden’s version offered ‘a nation noble enough to treat those at the dawn of life with love, those at the dusk of life with care and those who live in the shadow of life with compassion.’ ”

6. In 2000, according to the New York Post, Biden was caught pulling lines from a federal judge’s opinion for an article in the Harvard Journal on Legislation about his Violence Against Women Act.

7. During his 2020 campaign, the Washington Post said Biden pulled policy platforms and wording from several groups, including a word-for-word proposal from the XQ Institute.

8. He also used whole sections of Bernie Sanders campaign plans in their joint unity task force paper, said the 2020 Trump campaign.

9. For his 2020 “Build Back Better” theme, Biden adopted the slogan from former President Bill Clinton’s “Building Back Better.”

Tall Tales

1. Biden said in 2008 that a helicopter he was riding in was “forced down” near Osama bin Laden’s lair in Afghanistan. Actually, it was just waiting out a sandstorm, wrote former Washington Examiner reporter Alana Goodman, now with the Washington Free Beacon.

2. Biden has falsely claimed to be a coal miner and from a family of coal miners, a claim pulled from Kinnock, according to Slate.

3. In 2007, he said he was “shot at” while in Iraq. The truth is that he was in the green zone when a mortar landed several hundred yards away, reported the Hill.

4. Biden said in 1993 that he called Slobodan Milosevic a “damn war criminal” to his face during the siege of Sarajevo. Three out of four aides in the meeting wouldn’t corroborate.

5. Biden has said he was a civil rights leader, participating in sit-ins. Never happened.

6. Biden said he criticized former President George W. Bush in several long meetings. A Bush aide said he couldn’t remember Biden in any meetings and added that the former president “would never sit through two hours of Joe Biden.”

7. Biden recently retold how his Delaware house caught fire, almost killing his wife, dog, and cat and melting his Corvette. Fox and the Associated Press reported that it was just a small kitchen fire.

8. And then there is his million miles story told to Amtrak conductor Angelo Negri. Biden claims that Negri congratulated him during a train trip to visit his dying mother. CNN tore that story apart, writing, “Biden’s story is false in two ways. First, he could not possibly have had this exchange with Negri: He did not reach the million-miles mark as vice president until September 2015, according to his own past comments, but Negri had died more than a year earlier, in May 2014. Second, Biden’s mother was not dying at the time he reached the million-miles-flown mark. In fact, she had died more than five years prior.”


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