Last night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow pointed out the similarities between Rand Paul’s talk in Virginia about Gattaca and that futuristic film's Wikipedia entry.
A revision history of the Gattaca Wikipedia page showed Paul had to have copied the speech since no changes were made after Paul's speech.
BuzzFeed decided to look into if Rand Paul had copied from Wikipedia before. A search of Paul's speeches on his website turned up one quick glaring example copied almost word-for-word from Wikipedia.
A June 12, 2013 speech on immigration discussed the movie Stand and Deliver. Here's is the text of Pau's speech:
And here is the Wikipedia article on the film with red lines over the text that appears verbatim in Paul's speech:
Paul's office did not return a request for comment from BuzzFeed about the initial charges of plagiarism from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow or BuzzFeed's own search.
Update: On Thursday, Paul's office emailed this comment: "In the course of a 25 minute speech, Senator Paul described the plot of a movie attributed it to the primary sources – the movie – in no way insinuating they were his own thoughts or ideas. If the text had been submitted for academic publication, of course it would have been footnoted. Only in Washington is something this trivial a source for liberal media angst."