WHATEVER PAGE ONE TURNS to in the Democratic playbook, one is reminded that Democrats regard politics as war by other means. In war, there are no rules, and Democrats have shown over and over that they are prepared to conduct that war with all the ruthlessness they can muster. In the 2016 election, their candidate was the first woman to be nominated for president by a national party—a fact they made one of the two pillars of their campaign. The other pillar was a campaign to demonize her Republican opponent as an insulter and abuser of women. They framed it as another sordid chapter in Republicans’ perennial “war on women.” Democrats were not fazed by the fact that their candidate’s husband was an actual woman-abuser, not a rhetorical one like Trump, and that he had been accused of rape and was impeached and stripped of his law license for lying to a grand jury about a sexual act he had demanded a state employee perform when he was Arkansas’s governor. At the time, because he was a Democrat, feminists like Gloria Steinem gave him a pass, claiming, “It’s only sex.” When the Republican House impeached Clinton for his abuses, Democrats—to a man and woman—rallied to support him.
The Democrats’ indictment of Republicans for conducting a war on women is quite familiar. At the Democratic convention in 2012, Reuters reported that “two dozen Democratic women from the U.S. House of Representatives brought the charge that Republicans are waging a ‘war on women,’ to the Party’s convention stage on Tuesday with sharp denunciations of Republicans on healthcare, equal pay and domestic violence.” The congresswomen were led by then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.1 Sixteen years earlier, New York governor Mario Cuomo warned delegates to the 1996 Democratic convention that “the Republicans are the real threat. They are the real threat to our women.”2 The same ludicrous charge has resurfaced every presidential election year since.
In 2016, the political issue around which Democrats organized their assault on Republicans’ character and moral decency was the alleged gender-wage gap (also a familiar charge). Under this alleged gap, Democrats claim that women are paid 24 cents less on the dollar than men for the same work and the same skills, merely because they are women. Democrats have even created an “Equal Pay Day” to dramatize the gap. In a speech on “Equal Pay Day” during her primary campaign, Clinton called for more transparency laws to ensure that women get equal pay and linked the issue to Democrats’ push for a hike in the minimum wage because women are disproportionately represented in minimum-wage jobs. “We need to elevate this issue,” she said as she pointed to the fact that multimillionaire male athletes make more than their female counterparts.3 What she failed to mention is that because of their performances, male athletes generally draw far larger paying audiences to their events. In other words, they earned their bonus thanks to their individual talents rather than their group identity as males. Demanding equality of results for belonging to a politically favored gender is the antithesis of what America has hitherto been about. But this is what the Democrats’ agenda calls for.
According to Clinton and the Democrats, women across America are being paid only 76 cents on the dollar compared to men.4 This is demonstrably false, and Democrats know it, but they persist in citing it anyway. In fact, the government already requires employers to provide equal pay for equal work and has done so for the last 60 years—since the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963.5 If it were true that women are paid 24 cents less on the dollar than men merely because they are women, employers would fire their male employees, hire women, and increase their profits 24 percent—an astronomical gain by normal business standards. It doesn’t happen because it isn’t true. It’s just another case of Democrats being practiced liars with statistics and not being willing to correct their falsehoods when confronted with the truth. And they are not fearful of being exposed because of their lock on a supine media network. So their gullible supporters remain wedded to the falsehood that the clamor for “equal pay for equal work” advances their agenda and hastens the progressive future. Meanwhile, Republicans are generally too tongue-tied to call them out on it—to confront them as the liars they are.
Why aren’t Republicans angry enough to shout this from the rooftops? Why don’t they complain about the Democrats’ war on men? Accusing men of stealing wages from women is an indictment of an entire gender. It’s sexist. Why don’t Republicans say so? Why don’t they attack the hypocrisy of Democrats like Clinton for running their own gender-wage gap against women? After all, if you are willing to break the law, as the Clintons so clearly are, why should the Equal Pay Act stop you? Among the documents released with the WikiLeaks hacks was a 2015 e-mail by Clinton Foundation staffer Karuna Seshasai, who subsequently went to work for the Clinton presidential campaign. Seshasai’s e-mail revealed the existence of a huge wage gap between men and women working for the Clinton Foundation—far more than 24 cents on the dollar: “Avg salary of the highest paid men is $294,157.50, while the avg salary of the highest paid women is $181,576.66 ($112K difference),” she wrote. “Median salary of the highest paid men is $346,106, while the median salary of the highest paid women is $185,386 ($190K difference).”6 Why haven’t Republicans called for an investigation of the Clinton Foundation for violating the provisions of the 1963 Equal Pay Act?
Republicans should be excoriating the Democrats for the number of women their policies have forced out of the labor force during the last eight years, or the number of women their policies have thrown into poverty, or the increased number of women on food stamps and on welfare, or the thousands of women who have been raped by illegal aliens because of the Democrats’ failure to secure America’s borders. Talk about the abuse of women!
The strategy is to put Democrats on the defensive by taking away their moral high ground. The strategy is to focus on the groups—races, genders, ethnicities, and classes—that suffer under their policies and rule. The goal is to expose their hypocrisy in posing as champions of the voiceless, the powerless, and oppressed.