Editors at Issues and Insights deliver a warning about leaders of the incoming presidential administration.

Sen. Kamala Harris has fallen into the same frying pan Joe Biden found himself in 1987 when he stole a speech from a member of the British Parliament. But Harris’ appropriation of someone else’s story is indicative of more than a deep character flaw. It’s confirmation these people have nothing to offer but old, tired ideas, some of them taken from history’s worst people.

In a story published in October, the Democratic California senator recounted an incident from her childhood, in which she was “being wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller” and at “some point” fell out. Her fall went unnoticed by “the adults” who were “caught up in the rapture of protest,” and “just kept on marching.” When she was eventually found, her mother, says Harris, asked her what she wanted and what she needed.

“And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’”

Compare that tale to the words of Martin Luther King Jr. from a 1965 interview:

“I never will forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother. ‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom.’” …

… The similarities are unmistakable.

Biden has been stealing other people’s work since before he became a public figure. He infamously had to withdraw from the 1988 presidential race after it became clear that during a debate in 1987 he had lifted passages from a speech made by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. Biden also ran into trouble during law school for plagiarizing from an article from the Fordham Law Review. …

… Because they are without inspiration, Biden and his team, in which Harris is an ambitious though empty lieutenant, fall back on ideas from Karl Marx, Margaret Sanger, the Marxist Black Lives Matter leadership, and an assortment of statist and collectivist thinkers who have produced only misery for others.