Populist leader alleged to have ‘copied word for word’ a monologue by TV show’s fictional president Jed Bartlet

Populist leader alleged to have ‘copied word for word’ a monologue by TV show’s fictional president Jed Bartlet

Argentina’s rightwing populist president, Javier Milei, has been accused of plagiarising a chunk of his recent speech to the United Nations general assembly from the political drama The West Wing.

“It seems like fiction, but it isn’t,” the left-leaning Buenos Aires newspaper Página 12 reported on Friday, claiming Milei had “copied, word for word, a monologue” by the television show’s fictional president, Josiah “Jed” Bartlet.

Suspicions over Milei’s address surfaced this week when the political columnist Carlos Pagni flagged the “extraordinary” similarities between part of the president’s speech and words uttered by Martin Sheen’s Bartlet 21 years earlier. “Didn’t anyone else notice?” Pagni wrote in the newspaper La Nación, before transcribing the words of both men.

  • crystalmerchant@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    2 months ago

    The likeness between the two speeches raised Argentinian eyebrows and was attributed by one newspaper to the West Wing obsession of Milei’s chief strategist, Santiago Caputo. “Fanatical about the screenwriter [and creator of the series] Aaron Sorkin, Caputo has watched the whole of The West Wing between seven and nine times,” La Nación reported this year.

    So… 8 times?