It is, by all measurements, one thing to knock your political opponent on a policy you disagree with. It’s another to criticize them even when you agree.
But it may be an entirely different universe of hypocrisy to misrepresent your opponent’s position and attack them using their own arguments and words—not as in throwing their words back at them and refuting their arguments, but as in actually taking their words and presenting them as your own.
Jen Kiggans, the top Republican candidate in a pivotal House race next year, recently sent out a fundraising email dinging her opponent as part of a Democratic coalition that doesn’t “put America first” and will “cower to China.”
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That email, however, would likely receive a failing grade in a classroom; it lifts key phrases from her Democratic opponent.
Kiggans, in the attempt to pillory her political rival—two-term incumbent Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA)—actually agrees with her, and appears to have stolen language directly from a Wall Street Journal op-ed Luria published four days prior to the email blast.
Mark Algee-Hewitt, director of the Stanford University Literary Lab and an expert in statistical linguistic analysis, called the email “really bizarre.” His software analysis pegged the probability that one of the phrases in question was accidental at one in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000.
“For comparison’s sake, that is less likely than you being elected president of the USA and winning the Powerball lottery in the same year,” Algee-Hewitt told The Daily Beast.
The op-ed, which ran this month, advocates for a beefed-up defense budget to meet the threat posed by China’s military build-up. Luria, whose district is home to the world’s largest naval base, took an uncommon position for a Democrat, chiding top military brass for an anemic budget request and for their contradictory statements about the seriousness of the threat posed by China.
Kiggans, a Virginia state senator, makes the same overall argument—many of them in strikingly similar language to Luria’s. She claims this stance sets her apart from elected Democrats who “don’t seem to share that perspective,” while ignoring that Luria does, in fact, share that perspective. Sometimes down to the very word.
Here are direct comparisons of the language in question:
Luria cites the growth in Chinese military power, specifically overtaking the U.S. naval fleet by 63 ships: “Meanwhile, China is building warships at an astonishing rate. In 2010 the U.S. Navy had 68 more ships than the Chinese navy. Today, it has 63 fewer, a swing of 131 ships in 10 years.”
Four days later, Kiggans appears to swap in just some slightly different phrasing: “Meanwhile, China has been steadily growing militarily… they have more ships in their fleet than the US (by more than 60).”
Luria also points out that China has “the world’s third-largest air force.” Kiggins also writes that “they have the third largest air force in the world.”
And, in the most egregious example of potential plagiarism, where the op-ed says, “China has an extensive ground-based conventional missile force,” the Kiggans fundraising email states, “they have built extensive ground-based conventional missile forces.”
That phrase is not a military term of art or commonly used expression. A closed-quote Google search for “extensive ground-based conventional missile force” only returned one hit: Luria’s op-ed.
Marty Steffen, chair of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, told The Daily Beast she was “absolutely sure there’s a cause and effect” between the two pieces of writing. But because it was unclear how widely circulated these specific facts were, she stopped short of calling it outright plagiarism.
“She lifted some words, and I’m absolutely sure there’s a cause and effect here. The email is clearly a response to the op-ed, and tries to use those talking points against her,” Steffens said.
Kathy Kiely—Steffens’ colleague at Missouri’s journalism school—said the proximity of publication seems “too close to be a coincidence,” and that Kiggans should have acknowledged she was responding to the op-ed. If it were a student submission, Kiely said, would “definitely deduct points for this if not outright flunk the paper.”
“If the imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, Kiggans is clearly flattering her opponent here,” Kiely said.
She also observed that “the only difference is a grammatical error in the email, where the email refers to China as ‘they,’ instead of the singular. Luria uses the appropriate grammar.” Kiely added that the phrase about ground-based conventional missile forces appeared to be “a direct lift.”
“That’d be a hard combination of words to string together, and I did Google that,” she said.
That phrase also leapt out to Algee-Hewitt, who conducts these sorts of language analyses at Stanford. “We have never seen phrases of this length repeat exactly except where something is being deliberately quoted,” he said, after checking the phrases against a 33 million-word database of articles on national security.
Algee-Hewitt explained the statistical theory behind his analysis that the odds of that happening were one-in-10 sextillion.
“The longer a string of words is, the rarer it is,” he said. “The distribution follows a power curve—so the odds of finding a repeating two-word combination (what we call a bigram) are exponentially less than finding a repeating single word; the odds of finding three words is exponentially less again, etc, etc.”
That probability increases, he said, when phrases contain common “function words,” such as “the,” “a,” “and,” “or,” etc. But he pointed out that “extensive ground-based conventional missile force” didn’t contain any function words.
“None of the words are particularly common, even in military or national security writing, so the odds of finding any one word is already pretty small,” he said, adding that it was statistically more likely to randomly string together Shakepeare’s famous “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” than “extensive ground-based conventional missile force.”
Algee-Hewitt said it would be “practically impossible” that both authors would have independently written that phrase—especially four days apart.
For other phrases—“world’s third-largest air force” and the clip about the size of China’s fleet—the analysis was a little more difficult. The Air Force phrase would be “slightly more common” in the national security context, the expert said, but still found its independent occurrence “quite unlikely.”
Those phrases, he claimed, were “very suggestive that someone is lifting language,” or that they perhaps independently derived the verbiage from the same source. “But it’s not something that I’d hang my hat on,” he said.
“If the fundraising email is not lifting the language from the WSJ op-ed, then the only real possibility is that they are both quoting from some other source that I don’t have access to and can’t find online,” he concluded.
Kiggans’ campaign spokesperson Bryan Piligra did not answer The Daily Beast’s repeated questions about the coinciding verbiage and whether the candidate wrote the email herself. He instead provided a statement highlighting Kiggans’ foreign policy credentials.
"As a Navy veteran, Jen Kiggans knows the threat of the Chinese Communist Party to the United States both economically and militarily. Not only does Jen hold a degree in International Relations with a concentration in East Asia from Boston University, but she also taught English in Japan so is extremely aware of the threat the CCP poses to the region and the world,” the statement said. “She didn’t start taking China seriously because Elaine Luria suddenly decided to pen an oped.”
Both women are Navy veterans.
Kiggans, a nurse practitioner elected to the state Senate in 2019, served as a helicopter pilot from 1994 to 2003, and her email highlights that experience. She announced her candidacy in April, joining a wave of Republican veterans recruited to challenge vulnerable Democrats in an effort to regain control of the House in 2022.
Luria herself retired from the Navy after 20 years, having attained the rank of Commander charged with a combat unit of 400 sailors. Her six deployments carried her to the Western Pacific, where she would have experienced first-hand the expansion of Chinese power.
Luria is also a veteran in another sense.
In 2018, she unseated Navy SEAL veteran and former Rep. Scott Taylor, then fended him off again in 2020, winning by nearly six points.
All experts contacted for this article agreed that Kiggans should have acknowledged her email was a response to the op-ed.
“It should have been cast as a response to her column,” Kiely said. “It looks cheap and cheaty to plagiarize without giving credit.”
“As for calling it capital-P plagiarism, I don’t know,” Steffens said. “It’s a cut-and-paste world.”
