Chris Hedges Accused of Plagiarism in Obvious Smear Campaign

The New Republic is a corporate Democrat pimping mouthpiece from which some of the most cowardly and dishonest smear campaigns are launched into the national media cesspool on behalf of the corrupt establishment. It was earlier this year that the magazine/website did a brutal hatchet job on former government contractor turned heroic NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald. The epic sliming – which also threw in Wikileaks leader Julian Assange for good measure – was penned by Sean Wilentz, a pal of Bill and Hillary Clinton and logged in at over 6,000 words, throwing the kitchen sink at the two in an effort to kill the messenger. The magazine also promoted last year’s Rand Paul plagiarism smear campaign and in targeting their latest victim, the same charge is leveled at Pulitzer Prize winning former New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges, a fierce critic of the warfare state and the menace of mutated vulture capitalism.

While Hedges’ writings are anathema to many, particularly those who still naively believe in the fantasy of “free markets” and the wishful thinking that capitalism is anything other than a pact with death and destruction, he has emerged as a leading figure of the push back. His relentless pillorying of a system rigged and rotten as well as the feckless liberal elite that failed to stand for anything at the time when it mattered most have earned him a good many enemies, especially on the so-called left. He is thoroughly loathed by liberals of a certain type, especially after his book “Death of the Liberal Class” was released and his book on the Christian Right“American Fascists” made the already hateful lemmings of chicken fried, weaponized American Christianity furious. Hedges has been a relentless critic of the gargantuan fraud that is Barack Obama and his criticism of Queen Hillary the inevitable will likely be just as blistering. Mr. Hedges ran afoul of the Obama regime when he sued him over the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the suit made it to the Supreme Court where it the fascists in the nation’s highest judiciary covered the administration’s ass by refusing to even hear the case. Like Snowden, Greenwald, Chris Hedges is one of the good guys so the massive article accusing him of plagiarism smells like it is a preemptive strike to discredit him well in advance of the 2016 election season.

The huge hit piece entitled “The Troubling Case of Chris Hedges” delivers a broadside to the writer with selected snippets of his work that could technically be called plagiarism on some level but more likely are just sloppy sourcing, editing and a lack of due diligence on Hedges’ part. As a longtime reader of his work my opinion is that he relies very much on literature as well as the accounts of others when making his points but in doing so provides proper credit. He is overly reliant on this at times and this has been seized upon in the TNR piece (Ernest Hemingway) although the piece itself is rife with its own array of inconsistencies and was turned down by two potential publishers -Salon and The American Prospect – before finding a home at TNR.

That the hit piece was written by Christopher Ketcham – who has done some fine work in the past – particularly when writing on the surveillance state as in “The Last Roundup” and “Trojan Horse” - is disappointing in that he isn’t a guy who I would have expected to prostitute himself out to a politically motivated chop shop like The New Republic but hey, everyone has to keep the bills paid. It also may be a bit personal as Ketcham’s wife is one of the writers that Hedges has been accused of plagiarizing. His complicity in this shitty endeavor will in the long run taint him more than Hedges – at least to those who matter. It is also likely a bit personal in that Ketcham accuses Hedges of plagiarizing the work of his own wife Petra Bartosiewicz.

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