Bereft of ideas, in a hurry to join the Woke Orthodoxy, radical scholars and politicians are rushing their research, often cutting and pasting huge chunks of other people’s work, or making up findings as they go. In the latest case, as the Free Beacon reports:
“The celebrity Cambridge education professor Jason Arday, whose rags-to-riches memoir from Simon & Schuster lands August 11, has repeatedly lied about his charitable fundraising prowess, 16 years of records reviewed by the Free Beacon show—and the publishing house is stealthily editing his biography in an effort to clean up after him. “The revelation comes as Arday’s scholarly work and inspiring life story are under heavy scrutiny in Britain from journalists and at least one other academic, who have presented evidence of sweeping plagiarism and rampant fabulism by the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s 800-year history.”
Of course Simon & Schuster is not cancelling the book. Their mouths watering at the prospect of international profits, publishers believe this rags-to-riches story is too good to relinquish. Instead, they are “cleaning up” passages deemed too exaggerated.
Arday is not the only radical so lustful for the title he does not do the work. Consider:
Harvard’s woke president Claudine Gay was fired after it was disclosed that she had lifted near identical passages from other scholars for her doctoral dissertation, even stealing the acknowledgements! Left-wing defenders said she had just forgotten to attribute them with citations. Finally pressure from conservative critics, compiling additional examples, forced her out.
Running for president in 1987, Joe Biden was caught lifting entire passages from a speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock and “borrowing” without attribution speeches by the late Dem candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Later it was discovered Biden had also plagiarized a law review article in law school. Biden described these as oversights, but he did drop out of the election.
Princeton University history professor Kevin Kruse was a frequent media commentator on race, politics and history and a contributor to the infamous 1619 Project that claimed America was founded not in 1620, when the Pilgrims came searching for religious liberty but in 1619, when the first slave arrived. Kruse was outed by another academic, who found Kruse had plagiarized his doctoral dissertation and other works. Kruse described these sins as “oversights” and “misunderstandings.” Once plagiarism was a deadly sin among the universities — but Cornell, where he wrote his dissertation, looked the other way. Princeton attributed the errors to “careless cutting and pasting.”
Clearly, this represents a double standard, an erosion of scholarly norms. Some have called it left-wing intellectual privilege — rules for thee and not me.
But it is worth exploring whether it is also a commentary on the vapidness of the Communist mind. Their ideas are not original. Nor are they worthy.
The whole Left-Wing agenda is about tearing down what was there — from America’s history to its traditions of free speech, from the flag to the family — and replacing them with dogma.
And it doesn’t take a scholar to know that the Communist manifesto — state ownership of all production, totalitarian control over human movement — is a disaster. Just ask anyone who escaped Cuba, Venezuela or the Soviet Union.
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