Voddie's Fault Lines worse than before: fake quotations AND plagiarism

Several people have expressed shock since I uncovered that Voddie Baucham attributed false (and damning) quotations to critical race scholars, apparently to make their position look far more objectionable than any actual sources contained. I have intended to present the visual evidence in a condensed article format, focusing only on that central failure. I learned, however, while preparing for this article that the truth is even worse than I thought. Not only has Voddie attributed false quotations, but he has both done so repeatedly and it appears he plagiarized some of the material he included.

In the process of preparing this, I found material from Voddie that confirms that he definitely (emphatically and repeatedly) intended to attribute the false sections of the “quotation” to Delgado. He himself leaves no doubt about it. Finally, however, as I mentioned, I found that one of the most egregious, libelous passages itself is not even original with him. Voddie plagiarized it almost verbatim from a July 21, 2020 podcast by James A. Lindsay which was transcribed on July 24, 2020, over eight months before the release of Fault Lines.

Below I will provide this material in three sections. First, a visual rundown of Voddie’s false attributions about critical race theory (CRT) definitions in Fault Lines (let’s be blunt: these are serious, egregious lies that should and probably would in most cases ruin any general academic’s career). Second, the new evidence showing that Voddie definitely intended to present these false quotations as the words of his opponent—not his own explanations added on. Third, I’ll show the plagiarism.

The Fake Quotations in Fault Lines

In Fault Lines, Voddie is at pains to claim he is presenting CRT only in the words of its own proponents, so he cannot be accused of misrepresenting them. On page xvi, he presents a block quotation with “four key presuppositions” of CRT. The format is a block quotation, which in scholarly or journalistic non-fiction almost universally designates the quotation of another person’s words. The universal standard for any quotation is to use the quoted author’s words and only their words. Voddie indicates that he intends his block quotation as such a quotation by the beginning sentence above it (which is also standard), “According to Richard Delgado. . . .” Just for comparison to what I show further below, here is the section as it appears in the text:

The problem with this quotation, as my video lectures on the book explain, is that a good portion of this “quotation” is not Delgado’s words, but Voddie’s own additions. I mean a good portion. Here is the same passage with all of the fake parts Voddie added highlighted in red:

Everything in red is fake: made up by Voddie.

It is bad enough that he completely fabricated parts to begin with. That alone would be worthy of public censure and demotion in academia or journalism. But worse, the parts Voddie added also happen to be very twisted and condemnable ideas added to make CRT look bad. They contain highly objectionable straw men positions which no CRT proponent anywhere has ever taught.

In particular, it is a lie and distortion of CRT that it teaches “whites are incapable of righteous action on race,” and that “Storytelling/Narrative Reading is the way black forward knowledge vs. the Science/reason method of white people.” These are complete and utter falsehoods for which Voddie needs to be held accountable.

To be redundantly clear: 1) these red sections are not Richard Delgado’s words. Nowhere in the book Voddie cites do these words appear (in fact, nowhere in the book does the word “righteous” appear even once. Nowhere in any edition of the book have these words ever appeared. 2) These words or ideas appear nowhere in the entire corpus of writing of Richard Delgado or his coauthor Jean Stefancic. (I have access to legal and academic search engines. I checked all of their writings.) 3) This is nowhere near a fair appraisal of anything Delgado wrote or meant.

Some, however, have attempted to salvage Voddie’s effort here by saying that Voddie did not intend to attribute these sections to Delgado, but only added them as his own explanations. The meager evidence for this is the hodge-podge method of footnoting seen within the block quotations.

This argument could potentially have some merit for the first of the more egregious falsehoods (the “whites are incapable of righteous acts” one), but there is no such delineation of footnotes or quotation marks on the second/last one. There, the whole last paragraph within the block quotation is monolithic and given a single source footnote for the whole thing. That footnote attributes the whole paragraph to Delgado.

My conclusion is that Voddie is responsible for attributing false, twisted quotations to Delgado which makes Delgado’s position look objectionable. (After all, without all the additions from Voddie, the passages are easy to understand, explainable, and completely unobjectionable. Any would-be critic would need to put his own sinister spin on them before he could present them as objectionable.)

Nevertheless, the footnoting argument will not save Voddie on the prior instance either. His use of the material in other places makes undeniably clear that he intended to present his phrase “incapable of righteous acts” as Delgado’s own words also. He literally says so himself. We turn to this second part now.

Voddie’s Definite Intent

While researching for this article, I came across a lecture Voddie gave on this very topic in January of this year at Flat Creek Baptist Church in Fayetteville, GA. In this lecture, Voddie covers all of the same definitional material on CRT which would appear only four months later in Fault Lines. It is in the same order and centers on the same four points from the same alleged “quotation” from Delgado’s book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. It is clear he was using the same material he used for the book. In this earlier lecture version, however, he explicitly attributes the same false quotations to Delgado by name.

He presents the same points with almost the same verbatim material, introducing it as expressly not his but theirs: “Again, not me—not my words—not my words. This is from the seminal work on CRT.”

Beginning at the 1:29:30 mark, Voddie attributes the same claim to Delgado: “whites are incapable of righteous actions on race.” He says,

Again, I’ll read from the seminal work on critical race theory, Delgado’s book Critical Race Theory: Racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class whites (psychically). Large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it. This means whites are incapable of righteous actions on race and only undo racism when it benefits them, when their interests converge with the interests of people of color—and yes, he used the word ‘righteous.’ White people are incapable of righteous actions on race. Everything is racist. . . . Again, not me---this is critical race theory.

The bold emphasis is mine, only to highlight the main part. From this, it is clear that the section later muddled by hodge-podge footnotes in the book was considered and explicitly intended by Voddie to have been Delgado’s actual words. He makes sure you know this. Of course, as we already know, no such words exist, not only in this book but anywhere in anything Delgado ever wrote. And the meaning is as badly distorted and wrong as that part of the quotation is fake. But now we have no doubt that Voddie intended it to be that way. He said plainly: “and yes, he used the word ‘righteous.’ White people are incapable of righteous actions on race.”

No, Voddie, “he” did not use the word “righteous,” and he did not say or ever mean that whites are “incapable” of righteous action on race. These are the type of lies unscrupulous critics tell in order to discredit a position before gullible or credulous, unsuspecting, and non-fact-checking followers.

Voddie is every bit as direct on the second egregious passage: that blacks forward knowledge through stories while white people do science. Beginning at 1:31:38, he says,

Which is the idea that knowledge is socially constructed. There is no objective knowledge, no objective truth. . . . So, Delgado writes, storytelling, narrative reading, is the way black people forward knowledge versus the science and reason method of white people. Science and reasoning is white. The scientific method is white.

First, Delgado did not say “knowledge” as a whole is socially constructed, but that “race” is. This is a point on which no one disagrees except old-school, genetic racists. Delgado’s book makes this clear.

Second, Delgado most certainly did not write “storytelling, narrative reading, is the way black people forward knowledge versus the science and reason method of white people.” Voddie says Delgado wrote that, but just like the other instance above, those words do not appear in Delgado’s book and nothing like them appears anywhere in his writing. He does emphasize that storytelling and narrative reading are important and useful for CRT purposes; but neither CRT nor its purposes have anything to do with any claim that black people know things through storytelling but white people know them through science.

Again, this twisted distortion can only be considered at best a wild, ridiculous strawman. The fact that Voddie literally puts it in the mouth of his opponent as Delgado’s own words, explicitly, on multiple occasions now, is again a false witness for which he needs to be held accountable.

But again, now we know for certain that Voddie actually intended to present these passages as Delgado’s own words.

Voddie’s Plagiarism

Finally, in doubling back and double-checking all my own work on this, I came across someone else’s blog which contains that claim about storytelling almost verbatim as Voddie presents it, but over eight months prior to Voddie’s book. The blog contains a set of notes and partial quotations from a podcast by the persistent anti-CRT critic and hero of the fundamentalist, anti-CRT crusaders, James Lindsay, whom Voddie also recommends as a resource. Let’s look at the quotations together:

Consider Voddie’s claim from his January 2021 lecture:

Delgado writes, storytelling, narrative reading, is the way black people forward knowledge versus the science and reason method of white people.

Consider how Voddie puts it in his book as a Delgado quotation:

Storytelling/Narrative Reading is the way black forward knowledge vs. the Science/reason method of white people.

Now consider how the blog, mostly quoting James Lindsay, presented it in July 2020:

Storytelling and narrative weaving and counter-stories (stories that counter the dominant narrative) is what black people forward knowledge and understand the world. Science, reason, logic, and “epistemic adequacy” (soundness and validity of arguments) are the ways that white people understand the world.

Lindsay’s literal quotation is even closer to Voddie’s later usage of the same words and ideas:

Storytelling and narrative weaving are literally, explicitly given (under the fourth pillar of critical race theory) as the way that black people forward knowledge and understand the world. And science and reason are the ways that white people understand the world. . . .

It is clear, then, that Voddie lifted this passage from Lindsay’s original work (or maybe the blog version of it), without citation. This is textbook plagiarism and is of course a cardinal sin for academics and those engaging in any even moderately serious level of nonfiction writing, let alone intellectual discourse.

To be clear for those not knowing: lifting the original words or ideas of another writer is plagiarism. The words need not be exactly verbatim across the board—although we can see here that they almost are anyway.

I have only taken time to investigate these few passages; but given what I have seen only here and in my dealings with the general tenor of much of the rest of the book (again, see the vids), this instance of plagiarism makes me suspicious that there are probably more.

Conclusion

It is clear to me that Voddie attributed fake quotations to Richard Delgado, that he intended to present the fake material as quotations of Delgado (not his own words), and that he engaged in plagiarism in the process. Now the question is, what will be done about it?

Some people expressed anger and frustration at me for pointing these things out to begin with. Now that there is even more bad news, I suppose that may increase. But why shoot the messenger here? Why not focus attention and effort on the actual infraction and the guy who committed it?

Many, many online reacted to my first revelation of Voddie’s fake quotations solely by calling me woke, liberal, and Marxist—not dealing with any of the substance of which I wrote. I was, for example, silently blocked (without notice or notification) from one of the largest Reformed (adult-beverage-themed) groups on Facebook because its leader deemed me too dangerous to let stick around. When someone posted my vids in there, I have been informed the comment section was about 100-to-1 name-calling over any substance.

I wonder what these devout Christians, staunch Reformed folk, think their 99% mindless, knee-jerk reaction says to the world in terms of a witness for Christ in the intellectual realm. And about the moral failures of the great, favored leaders in their midst?

Some expressed anger that I would “pick on” Voddie, who after all is just trying hard to do his best as a faithful pastor. Or, some said, why hold a pastor up to academic citation standards? Folks, seriously.

Voddie Baucham is the Dean of Faculty and Dean of Theology at a Christian University for crying out loud! Whatever pastoring he may do, his is an academic position through-and-through. A dean is supposed to be a top or senior academic, a teacher of teachers, an academic’s academic. This very credential is written on his bio for the book in which he put these fake quotations and plagiarism. He must own it.

I realize that by calling this out on these terms, I am also putting the academic reputation and integrity of his post and thus his academic employer, African Christian University, on the spot. True, they now have to take cognizance that their senior academic and biggest-named faculty is responsible for fraudulent quotations and plagiarism. If they remain silent, people may wonder why. They will also know that the academic standards of the institution are as low as those of their plagiarizing Dean.

I also realize that by revealing these things, I implicate Voddie’s publisher, Salem Books, which is a division of the conservative book-publishing standard, Regnery. I realize that it is incumbent upon any publishing house with a reputation to weed out plagiarism (usually pulling plagiarized works from publication), as well as potential libel and fraud—fundamental falsehood at the very least. I understand that this means Salem/Regnery should examine Voddie’s book in these areas, and take action, and that if enough people, or the right people, brought it to their attention, they probably would.

Yes, I also realize that by revealing these matters that I also implicate Voddie’s friends and compatriots in the broader anti-Social Justice crusade against “CRT,” etc. This probably stretches to all the broader support group like Tom Ascol, John MacArthur, James White, Michael O’Fallon, and many more. I realize that presenting undeniable evidence of lies and plagiarism on Voddie’s part means they should now all be obligated to speak up, or at least counsel him privately to confess and repent. I don’t expect a single one of them to do anything. I expect silence.

But you, dear reader, you can see the evidence for yourself. You can draw your own conclusions from the evidence, which should be easy for you to do. It should afterward also be easy to determine what conclusions to draw from the baseless, without-substance name-calling against this author (and others), as well as about the many silences that will probably follow among Voddie’s friends and institution. That should all be easy.

More difficult will be the moral decision you personally have to make about what to do with that knowledge.