Lisa Cook's new plagiarism scandal was entirely predictable
I woke up yesterday to a Google Alert that Sheryl Sandberg's niece, Maya, was calling me racist in the Harvard Crimson.
From the quality of the logic and writing in this article, suffice it to say that it's evident she got into Harvard because she is Sheryl Sandberg's niece.
Maya’s argument is, ‘‘Chris Rufo & his allies (i.e. Karlstack) are leading a plagiarism witch hunt and creating the false impression that Black women disproportionately plagiarize.’’
This morning, hilariously undermining Maya’s narrative, I woke up to the news that another black woman had been popped for plagiarism.
The news comes courtesy of an exclusive City Journal and Daily Wire investigation which ‘‘reveals additional facts that cast new doubt on Cook’s seriousness as a scholar’’.
I am not going to walk through each new instance of plagiarism. If you are interested in this scandal, go read that story directly, it is very descriptive. Give them some clicks, it’s an interesting piece of reporting:
This article was co-authored by Chris Rufo and Luke Rosiak.
It includes a Karlstack shoutout:
Cook also seems to have consistently inflated her own credentials. In 2022, investigative journalist Christopher Brunet pointed out that, despite billing herself as a macroeconomist, Cook had never published a peer-reviewed macroeconomics article and had misrepresented her publication history in her CV, claiming that she had published an article in the journal American Economic Review. In truth, the article was published in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, a less prestigious, non-peer-reviewed magazine.
This is why I am so interested in today’s story.
Lisa Cook and I go waaaaay back.
Longtime Karstack subscribers will be familiar with this saga, but the vast majority of my subscribers are brand new, so it is worth briefly recapping,
I wrote about Lisa Cook in my first ever Substack article all the way back in 2021 — in fact, this was the first thing I had ever written in my life, in any format — “The Federal Reserve Goes Woke”:
I conclude in that article that this scandal was entirely predictable:
“She is a fraud and an intellectual lightweight, yet no one is brave enough to point it out … I will end with pragmatic advice — directed at US Senators: please do not elect Lisa Cook to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The future of civilization may depend on it. Should she be nominated and passed, the damage that she will do will last for decades; she will use her promotion to push for more change and a downgrading of standards, and she will do it with a smile on her face as she pats herself on the back. She has dangerously insane ideas (e.g. requiring racial quotas for boards of publicly traded companies) and fascistic sympathies — you can be sure that she will fight for expanded powers for the government to tell large corporations who to hire, who to fire, what to make, what to buy, what to invest, how much to charge. Just as most Berkeley PhDs do, she thinks she knows what is best for you, and she will do everything in her power to compel businesses’ political support.”
— Chris Brunet, June 2021
I then was hired at the Daily Caller, at which point Lisa Cook was nominated to the Fed Board of Governor’s, so I did some digging into her resume…..:
Which led to a Tucker segment:
Two months later, I did some more digging, uncovering her tenure packet
Disclaimer: I am about to recycle a few paragraphs from this old Tenure Packet article.
When I got my hands on her tenure packet I found that her own econ department voted against tenuring her, and her case had to be overruled by the Dean on the basis of diversity.
So…. she is not good enough for the Michigan State economics department — a mediocre department in terms of ranking — but she is somehow good enough for the Fed Board?
My investigation into her tenure packet generated another Tucker segment.
I was invited on Tucker’s show several times as a guest, but sadly I declined as I was afraid of public speaking live in front of 4 million people.
Following that article, Cook’s only respectable publication (which was already thoroughly debunked and shown not to replicate by economist Michael Wiebe) was further found to have more glaring fatal flaws by some internet sleuths:
And further covered by the inimitable Steve Sailer.
He again eviscerates her fraudulent paper in a series of detailed articles:
It is also worthwhile reading this EJMR thread :
And especially this thread from her anonymous colleague:
The dagger in the heart of this paper was then University of Chicago macroeconomist Harald Uhlig who buries it beyond any shadow of a doubt in a blog post.
Uhlig then published an op-ed in the WSJ explaining why Cook is a partisan hack:
Why is her debunked paper so important? Because her boosters pretend that her qualifications are better than they are. This includes her fields of expertise, the quality of her research, the nature of her policy experience, and her employment trajectory as a professor (such as describing her visiting position at Harvard as having been an Assistant Professor at Harvard).
She is portrayed by Democrats as some sort of macroeconomic genius. But the reality she is a midwit with a penchant for lying and scheming. Oh, and she isn’t even a macroeconomist.
After this all went down, The New Yorker put out a hitpiece against me, indicating that I was over the target.
I was proud of my reporting at the time, because I single-handedly caused the US Senate to debate her credentials for several weeks, holding up her nomination.
Cook was almost denied as a result, but squeaked through.
I like to imagine that I gave the Republican Senate Banking Committee enough political capital via the Lisa Cook fight that they leveraged into getting Sarah Raskin denied.
The Left wanted 2 seats on the Fed, but instead, they only got 1.
That’s real impact! Karlstack driving debates in the US Senate.
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work:
Anyways, that’s the Lisa Cook saga.
We now have the latest chapter.
In addition to being a liar, hack, lightweight, and DEI activist, she is also a plagiarist.
Great work Chris. When the corporate media goes after you, it’s a telltale sign you’re right on the facts. I think it’s really a badge these days.
I'd bet anything that the dems have been feverishly looking for plagiarism in white men (and only white men) ever since this topic hit mainstream.
If they had found anything so far, it would have pushed Trump off the news cycle while the deep state media propagandized it to death.
It will be interesting to see what they ultimately discover.