When former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke intimated in early 2017 that he would be joining Donald Trump's nascent administration, CNN obtained a copy of Clarke's master's thesis from the Naval Postgraduate School and revealed that Clarke had copied blocks of text from other sources. The borrowed passages, as CNN noted, had footnotes identifying their sources, but they failed to "indicate with quotation marks that he is taking the words verbatim."
Few responses to CNN's revelation encapsulated the giddiness of the academic left more than that of Kevin M. Kruse, a Princeton historian and rising social media star. When the Clarke plagiarism allegations surfaced, Kruse invoked his own credentials to condemn the transgression: "I'm a professor. This is textbook plagiarism." Clarke, he continued, "plagiarized to get an academic degree." When talk radio host Dan O'Donnell pointed out that Clarke had at least footnoted his sources, Kruse wasn't impressed: "We'd expel a student who pulled this."
