The Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberger reports that former state Rep. Anthony Sabatini, who is challenging Rep. Daniel Webster in the GOP primary for Florida's conservative 11th District, "wildly plagiarized" his 2012 honors thesis for the University of Florida.
Sollenberger says that the very first sentence of the document is a "near-verbatim version" of one from a book about Friedrich Nietzsche (whose first name Sabatini constantly misspelled as "Freidrich"), while other passages come from Wikipedia without any sourcing or quote marks. The head of Stanford University's English Department, who called Sabatini's work "a fascinating text from a plagiarism standpoint," also told the reporter, "Many of the references to his secondary sources seem largely fabricated, right down to the page numbers."
Sabatini, who did not respond to Sollenberger's request for comment, was elected to the state House in 2018 even after photos surfaced showing him in blackface during his time in high school, and he spent his four years in office picking fights with his party's leadership. Sabatini sought a promotion last year when he ran for the newly gerrymandered 7th District, but Kevin McCarthy's allies also didn't want to have to deal with him.
McCarthy's side instead aided a super PAC that ran ads against him in the primary, with one person later telling the Washington Post that Sabatini was one of the candidates who "would have been legislative terrorists whose goal was fame." The state representative lost 38-24 against now-Rep. Cory Mills, and he announced months later that he'd take on Webster in the 11th District. Webster himself only won renomination last year 51-44 against Laura Loomer, a far-right troll who is considering another try for a seat that includes the gargantuan retirement community of The Villages.
