Thus spake Sabatini
The Daily Beast’s review of the paper found that Sabatini lifted an astonishing amount of content verbatim from other sources. Worse, Sabatini—who double majored in history and philosophy before being admitted to law school, also at the University of Florida—frequently pulls his passages from Wikipedia, and presents them without the required quotation marks or any clear attribution whatsoever.
In some instances where Sabatini does reference a secondary source—which he had plagiarized—the references themselves frequently appear to be incorrect and often, according to an expert, entirely made up.
In fact, the very first sentence is plagiarized.
“The twentieth century has seen countless appropriations of the ideas of the philosopher Freidrich [sic] Nietzsche for cultural and political ends, yet nowhere have these attempts been more frequent or important than in Germany,” Sabatini wrote at the outset of his thesis. (The honors student misspells “Friedrich” as “Freidrich” throughout the paper.)
A near-verbatim version of that same sentence first appeared 20 years earlier. “The twentieth century has seen countless attempts to appropriate the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche for diverse cultural and political ends, but nowhere have these efforts been more sustained and of greater consequence than in Germany,” according to an abstract for an academic book from the University of California Press titled, “The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990” (Aschheim, 1992).
MAGA Cum Laude
In another example pulled at random, Sabatini lifts from another old Wikipedia entry about Nietzsche’s conflicted torchbearer, Martin Heidegger. That passage—which has been widely cited across the internet—comprises a stretch of totally uncited writing so long that it’s almost courageous. It’s so extensive, in fact, that it would be unwieldy to reprint in full. Here are the first few sentences, however.
Sabatini: “Two important and recurring themes of Heidegger’s writings that have been influential in the period are poetry and technology. Heidegger sees poetry and technology as two contrasting ways of ‘revealing.’ Poetry reveals Being in the way in which, if it is genuine, it ‘commences’ something new. Technology, on the other hand, when it gets going, inaugurates the world of the dichotomous subject and object, which modern philosophy commencing with Descartes also reveals.”
Wikipedia: “Two recurring themes of Heidegger's later writings are poetry and technology. Heidegger sees poetry and technology as two contrasting ways of ‘revealing.’ Poetry reveals being in the way in which, if it is genuine poetry, it commences something new. Technology, on the other hand, when it gets going, inaugurates the world of the dichotomous subject and object, which modern philosophy commencing with Descartes also reveals.”
Sabatini continues this for another 70 words, across three sentences. (One exception: For one quoted phrase, Wikipedia includes an in-line citation; the thesis does not cite the source.)
Friedrich Cheatzsche
Mark Algee-Hewitt, director of graduate studies and associate professor of digital humanities in the Stanford University English department, said it was “a fascinating text from a plagiarism standpoint.”
“The more that I look into it, the stranger it seems to get,” Algee-Hewitt told The Daily Beast.
After a statistical and stylometric analysis, including automated database searches, Algee-Hewitt concluded that Sabatini had committed “egregious” acts of verbatim plagiarism. He also made a point to note that “the frequent misspellings in Sabatini’s text make matching these harder than it should.” As for the paper’s altered phrases, he said, the odds those occurred by chance are “one in quadrillions, if not more.”
But the expert found something even more stunning: Sabatini also appears to have lied about his sources.
“Many of the references to his secondary sources seem largely fabricated, right down to the page numbers,” he said.
Without honors
As for academic consequences, Algee-Hewitt said that the most charitable interpretation of “overenthusiastic paraphrase” could only apply to “a few of these instances.” Even then, he said, the thesis would “still earn an F in most classrooms,” though he was quick to add that “there are even more instances where sentences, and paragraphs, are taken from unacknowledged, mostly online, sources and inserted directly into the text.”
Sabatini didn’t return a request for comment.
It bears emphasizing that, had Sabatini been caught, it would have changed the course of his entire life. Most college students would not only have received an F for their capstone work; they would likely be thrown out of school. Sabatini would not have graduated—let alone with honors—and would not have been accepted into law school. He would not have become a lawyer, would not have become a Claremont Institute honoree, and would not have been able to parlay his legal work into a career in right-wing loudmouth politics. He would have doubtlessly led an entirely different existence.
As it stands, however, Sabatini is taking his second whack at federal office. After losing to Rep. Cory Mills in the 2022 GOP congressional primary, Sabatini has raised more than $200,000 to fuel his 2024 “America First” primary bid in another district—this time against incumbent Rep. Daniel Webster (R-FL).
There are simply too many of these plagiarized passages to cover in full. A small sampling demonstrates the sheer audacity of Sabatini’s con, which is covered in the full version of this report accessible on The Daily Beast’s website.
Primary sources
Asked about UF’s plagiarism and citation policies, University of Florida vice president of strategic communications and marketing Steve Orlando said that he could not answer for the guidance Sabatini received 11 years ago, but provided a link to the school’s current guidelines. He also noted that “citation standards vary from department to department and even from adviser to adviser.”
(Sabatini’s adviser, Peter Bergmann, died in 2017. When he signed off on Sabatini’s thesis, he was 70.)
Asked whether the university plans to review Sabatini’s thesis, Orlando replied, “I can’t speak to that because of student confidentiality.”
Of course, as Algee-Hewitt of Stanford pointed out, it doesn’t take an honors degree to see that Sabatini appears to have violated the fundamental rules of citation, which most students in the United States learn by the time they enter high school.
Secondary sources
Still, in the interest of showing our work, here is what the University of Florida has previously said on the matter.
A spot-check of UF undergraduate honors theses from the same year, 2012, reveals consistent use of quoted phrases and unambiguous attributions—including one that also discusses Nietzsche and Heidegger. A sample Chicago style paper available on the UF library’s reference page also demonstrates quotation marks for phrases pulled directly from sources. A presentation PDF titled “How to Avoid Plagiarism” provides fulsome background that covers Sabatini’s various infringements, and even includes a quote from former UF professor James Twitchell, who resigned in 2009 after admitting he had “cheated by using pieces of descriptions written by others.”
“It’s my responsibility to make sure that the words and ideas are my own and, if not, that they are properly credited,” Twitchell said at the time, adding, “I have used the words of others and not properly attributed them.”
A few months before Twitchell stepped down, the university publicly acknowledged that plagiarism was “such a growing trend among UF students” in the digital era that the school was taking new steps to crack down, the Gainesville Sun reported at the time.
That 2008 report also noted that the university’s Student Honor Code “defines plagiarism as quoting oral or written materials without proper attribution and submitting an assignment which in whole or in part is identical or substantially identical to a document not authored by the student.”
That report was published in the first weeks of Sabatini’s freshman year.
Read the full story here.
