CNN compares text from Monica Crowley's book about the 2009 stimulus package to text from a podiatrist's website in 2004
Monica Crowley is a Liar
CNN has just dropped a bombshell story about Donald Trump’s pick for national security communications adviser Monica Crowley. Identified in the damning report are over 50 instances plagiarism (in multi-sentence and paragraph chunks) located in her 2012 book titled “What the (Bleep) Just Happened.”
Calling Monica Crowley a plagiarist is insufficient for two reasons. First, a vast majority of Americans don’t really understand what plagiarism is, and another large portion of Americans don’t care about plagiarism whether they understand it or not.
Second, Crowley used her plagiarism to intentionally lie. One of the most egregious examples of Crowley’s twisted ethics involves her disparagement of the 2009 stimulus package created by the Obama administration to save our economy from financial crisis during our most recent recession. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reports “In one instance, Crowley lists a variety of so-called ‘pork’ items she claimed were part of the 2009 stimulus package.”
The “pork” items Crowley cited were not in the 2009 stimulus package. That was the moment Crowley became a liar to support her political rhetoric.
We all know by now that conservative pundits have abandoned any moral obligation they may have once felt to provide factual information to the public.
But Crowley went beyond this, because Kaczynski discovered that the “pork” items were lifted wholesale from a 2004 source that Crowley did not cite, along with the other embarrassingly numerous examples of stolen text in her book.
Crowley stole a published opinion from 2004 in order to support her lie about the contents of the 2009 stimulus package.
And this is the person Donald Trump has chosen for one of the highest national security communications positions in the country. Crowley will be responsible for spinning national security information released by our government to the public.
Think about that for a moment.
My final point: HarperCollins, one of the biggest publishing companies in the world, did not run Crowley’s manuscript through basic plagiarism identification software that every high school teacher in the country uses to check student homework. Teenagers are being held to a higher standard of evidence than our government.
Or, HarperCollins did find the egregious plagiarism, and did not see fit to at least add the appropriate citations to Crowley’s book and remove factually incorrect information.
So HarperCollins is either grossly incompetent at editing the books it publishes, or suffers from the same horrifying level of moral failure as Crowley. My guess is the latter, given that HarperCollins did not bother with a bibliography for Crowley’s book at all. Not a single reference or credit was given to the authors of the sources Crowley used to ghost-write large portions of her book.
We cannot trust our incoming government officials to feel any responsibility to tell the truth to or act with integrity towards the people they govern, and we cannot trust traditional media to do the very basic job of fact-checking any more than we can trust new media to differentiate between legitimate and fake news websites.
It’s time to stop expecting people to be appalled by plagiarism.
Call Monica Crowley a liar, over and over again. Refuse to discuss anything pertaining to Monica Crowley aside from the fact that she is a liar. This is the only thing that works to permeate the public consciousness at this point. We know it works because Trump did it to Hillary Clinton, very successfully. The only difference in this case is that there is evidence proving Monica Crowley is a liar.
Having in-depth philosophical conversations, analyzing current events in detail and caring about factual reality and sources should never stop being a crucial part of political and scientific awareness. But we need to start using small words and direct attacks, because the general public cannot pay attention.
Monica Crowley is a liar.
