President Obama included neither of his or the Left’s favorite statistics about women during his State of the Union address Tuesday night. He did not claim that 1 in 5 women will be raped during their college years, and while he made a passing reference to women earning less than men, he made no mention of the 23-cent wage gap.
For years, Obama and Democrats have continually claimed that women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. The president even included the number in his 2014 and 2013 State of the Union addresses (he made only a passing reference to equal pay in his 2012 address).
But aside from a tweet Tuesday night, the White House hasn’t pushed this numerical myth lately. And even that tweet didn’t directly make the typical claim about 77 cents.
References to the 77-cent number began to disappear from official White House propaganda last April, when Obama suffered a rather brutal pushback from mainstream media outlets. Then-White House spokesman Jay Carney faced awkward press conference questions, and Obama even got a few Pinocchios from the Washington Post’s fact-checker.
The last time the White House’s official Twitter account pushed the wage gap was in early November 2014 – in the days leading up to the midterm elections. As you may recall, Democrats performed poorly in the elections, despite their continued use of “war on women” rhetoric. That was before the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report showing that the wage gap was almost entirely due to personal choices women make — and didn’t even factor in education and career choices or age.
As for the one in five statistic on campus sexual assault, President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and many other Democrats perpetuated this myth throughout 2014. The last White House tweet on the subject came on Nov. 13, 2014, and before that there were multiple tweets claiming it was a “fact” that so many women were sexually assaulted in college around mid-September at the launch of the “It’s on us” campaign.
Perhaps Obama has finally noticed that the number simply is not accurate, but here’s another theory: Obama has proposed a new plan to make community college free as a way to boost the number of students who can obtain higher education. He has also been trying for years to reduce student loan debt and make college more affordable. But how can he tempt students and parents with free education while at the same time telling them there’s a 20 percent chance they’ll be raped while obtaining that education?
I hope Obama no longer believes colleges and universities are rape factories and that is why he has dropped the statistic — otherwise he’s knowingly putting millions of young people in danger.
