Progressive Media Outs Bill Ackman's Wife's (Apparent) Plagiarism in Retaliation for His Role in Outing Claudine Gay's Plagiarism

No time to go into details about this now, but:

(a) All plagiarism should be busted.

(b) People who plagiarize in their dissertations should lose their Ph.D.s

(c) It certainly looks like Oxman (Ackman's wife) plagiarized.

(d) There is an effort to defend Oxman with some of the same lame arguments used to defend Gay.

   One of the main arguments used by both sides is: this was just lazy or inattentive failure to include quotation marks.

   I'm sure that has happened in the history of scholarship. I'm sure just about every stupid error humans are capable of has been committed at some point. But, in the main, that's not what's going on in such cases. For one thing, the lengthy passages quoted by Oxman would be enclosed in quotation marks, but would be inset/indented and single-spaced in the familiar way. One could also make a formatting error of that kind. But neither such error should happen repeatedly. 

   And, note, in the passages in question, some of Oxman's own words are interspersed with the copy-and-paste bits from Wikipedia. (Of course using Wikipedia as a source in and of itself is odd...but that's really kind of beside the point.)

   The mix of her words and the words of Wikipedia...that seems very unlikely to have happened accidentally. Again: it's possible (e.g. she might have copied from Wikipedia, forgotten, then come back over the passage in the interminable, mind-numbing process of repeated editing, and partially "revised" them.) But it doesn't seem likely.

   Anyway, this has all turned into just another left v right slapfight, with each side using bad arguments inconsistently and ad hoc to attack the other side's heroine/avatar or defend their own.

   Finally: though it's no defense of Oxman, going after her to punish her husband for outing Gay's plagiarism is the height of scumbaggery. It is, of course, just a new innovation of cancel culture. Ackman helped oust Gay from Harvard's presidency, so three scumbag reporters went after him personally by seeking to destroy his wife's reputation and career. These are truly horrible people. Cancel culture, like so many other aspects of political correctness / Woketarianism, attracts vicious and horrible people, and fans the flames of horribleness both in the already-horrible and the not-already-horrible. 

   Now, apparently his wife is genuinely guilty--and, so, should pay the price. But that doesn't mitigate the disgusting awfulness of going after her to get at him. Oxman's guilt and the left's repulsive horribleness are two different issues.

   One might try to respond by arguing that going after Gay for plagiarism is roughly the same sort of thing. People were angry about her views on putatively antisemitic speech, so they tried to find some other angle of attack, and found her plagiarism. I do think there's a similarity of structure in these arguments, but Gay's scholarship is still about Gay, and about her professional conduct. But things get a bit unclear to me at this point, so I'm not too sure about this. 

   Even if that argument is onto something, Ackman, Rufo et al. can fall back on a sauce for the goose defense: you lefties do cancel culture all the time. You made these "rules," and you can stop this at any time by just stopping. But until you do stop, we're going to play by your rules. But that defense is suboptimal from their rhetorical perspective, because, while it's a defense of their actions, it's not a defense of Oxman. 

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I'm not at all sure that's right, but no time to puzzle it out now.