Christian apologist and historian Wes Huff has unpublished his website amid the fallout from accusations that he plagiarized other people’s work between 2016 and 2019.
Huff is the Central Canada Director for Apologetics Canada and has “participated in numerous public dialogues, debates, and interfaith events on issues of faith, belief, and religion across North America,” according to his online bio.
Earlier this week, he was accused of plagiarism by Dan McClellan, who pointed to papers that were posted to Academia.edu in 2016.
Huff, who is presently dealing with a medical emergency involving his young daughter, is understandably not able to address the situation fully. However, he did release a brief video in which he admitted some blame while also providing context for his actions, saying in part:
“Let me be totally upfront in this scenario. If you want to cancel Wes Huff from 2016 or maybe even 2017 and 2018, I do too. I was not a good writer. I was not a good academic. I was just trying to find my legs as to where I fit in in the whole world of scholarship.
Let me be totally upfront and take responsibility for that, for what I think is bad. This paper, in fact, all of the papers I put on Academia.edu almost a decade ago are bad. Their use of citation and attribution is problematic. They’re not well written. They’re all pretty bad.”
While some people were satisfied, others were not, saying his framing of their objections was inadequate. Huff then unlisted the video and later deleted it, though we have archived a copy of it here.
Since then, more people have brought forward accusations, pointing to content on his website that appears to be unattributed and plagued by the same issues as his Academia papers. As a result, all the content was removed from his site, with only links to his socials remaining before ultimately going offline.
His Facebook page was also deleted.
As for why his site was excised, it looks like some of the content was taken from other webpages. X user Scheming Hog @hyperhog110834 points out, for example:
“I found out that in at least one of those infographics (which he stamped his name on) he verbatim copied and pasted paragraphs from an institute and a citation from a travel blog. No quotation marks or anything. Not sure if this is also plagiarism…This is my guess for as to why he purged everything. Since even his infographics are potentially incriminating. He watermarked it and didn’t put the paragraphs in ” ” and passed it off as if he wrote that on his own.”
Looking at this graphic, we see the text lifted verbatim from CJOS.
We also see the Shema quote from a travel blog, quoting Israeli Professor David Ussishkin.
Or take for example another infographic. Chris Eames @Chris_K_Eames writes on X
This is notable when an archived link of his own website cautions against doing the same thing he has reportedly done:
That said, it’s important to give the benefit of the doubt and not jump to the worst conclusion. While the graphic bears his watermark, that doesn’t mean he personally designed and created it. Another company or person could have made it for him, and Huff, after learning it wasn’t original, took the website down to better evaluate and audit its content.
For the moment, we will pray for recovery for his daughter in this difficult time, and wait for him to address it further.
