Can we have even a chance of electing honest politicians when saddled with a dishonest media? This question could come to mind in light of a recent controversy surrounding GOP Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters.
Video obtained by NBC news, footage that has since gone viral, shows Masters explaining his opposition to the ill-conceived Equal Rights Amendment and fielding a question about a left-wing talking point that just won’t die: The male-female wage gap.
“Women are not paid less in America than men,” Masters said during a February 4 candidate forum in Scottsdale. “It’s a left-wing narrative, this gender pay gap. When you control for the occupations, when you control for people taking time out to, you know, birth children, things are actually pretty equal. And men do the most dangerous jobs.”
The candidate then pointed out, as an example, that men are the vast majority of police officers. “Men are the ones who are doing risky, you know, fishing — crab in Alaska,” he continued. “And sometimes those jobs pay more…. So I think we got to push back on the fake left-wing narrative that women don’t have equal rights in this country” (video below).
The reaction to Masters’s comments illustrates why even Republican politicians generally avoid criticizing pay-gap propaganda. For instance, in a snarky opinion column, writer Laurie Roberts calls the 35-year-old Masters “a political neophyte.” While this should be a badge of honor — it often references someone from beyond the establishment — Roberts would it appears prefer a “seasoned politician” paying lip service to lies. “Apparently, we women would do just fine if only we all went to Alaska and fished for crab,” she sarcastically wrote in her subhead.
In reality, though, Masters cited Alaska crab fishing for good reason: It’s perhaps far and away America’s most dangerous job.
The 2000 film The Perfect Storm (set in Massachusetts) provided a glimpse into the perils fishermen face. But crabbing “is particularly hazardous, because harvesting of most crab species in Alaska generally takes place during the winter months, with short daylight hours and often in rough weather conditions,” writes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“Each year in Alaskan waters, an average of 34 fishing vessels and 24 lives are lost in the commercial fishing industry, which equates to an occupational fatality rate of 140/100,000 workers/year, 20 times the national average,” the CDC also informs.
This makes Alaska crabbing more dangerous than even logging, which CNBC listed in 2019 as the most perilous broad-category profession (97.6 deaths per 100,000 workers yearly).
Perhaps Roberts would like to explain to the wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters who lost husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers at sea how the dangers their men faced are just a big joke.
Are you still laughing, Laurie?
Yet as Masters stated, it’s not just crabbing. Consider that the 10 high-risk professions CNBC listed are all, almost exclusively, male domains. Men constitute 92 percent of workplace deaths precisely because they perform the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs, roles women eschew. Will Roberts editorialize against this gross intersex disparity?
The good news is that even the mainstream media are, slowly, a day late and 84 cents on a man’s dollar short, acknowledging reality. For example, Roberts admits that some of the gap “is, no doubt, attributable to differences in education, occupation and the demands of motherhood” (truths The New American has reported on for years). Business Insider writes that regarding “Master’s assertions, researchers concede that various factors and outliers can affect the size of the gap.”
But then both Roberts and Insider proceed to cite 2016 Glassdoor research showing that while the “unadjusted” gap is 24.1 percent, when comparing “workers with similar age, education and years of experience” and “with the same job title, employer and location, the U.S. gender pay gap is [still] about 5.4 percent.” They both consider this an intolerable injustice, too.
But Glassdoor’s analysis omits significant factors. For example, as Professor Mark J. Perry and Andrew G. Biggs reported in The Wall Street Journal in 2014 based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, “Men were almost twice as likely as women to work more than 40 hours a week, and women almost twice as likely to work only 35 to 39 hours per week” — despite both groups being classified as “full-time” employees.
Men don’t generally work harder for their health, either, take note, but out of necessity: They’re more likely to be their families’ sole or primary breadwinners and must bring home the bacon.
This gets at an almost universally ignored point: If working women (disproportionately single) are arbitrarily given higher pay in social engineering’s name — despite being no more productive than before — it follows that this will come out of their male peers’ “end.” This hurts the women, the wives and daughters, who depend on these men; it does violence to the traditional family, forcing women out of the home to compensate for their now financially handicapped husbands and relegating children to day-care centers.
A few more points to ponder:
- Business Insider suggests that women earn less money because of subtle discrimination, the supposed societal conditioning that militates against their pursuit of more lucrative fields (e.g., STEM). Research refutes this proposition, however, finding that when women have the luxury and wealth to choose career path, they gravitate toward traditionally feminine endeavors.
- Young women in virtually all major cities have long been out-earning their male peers, sometimes by a wide margin.
- According to this source, female college STEM grads have long been offered higher starting pay than their male peers in order “to forestall a costly discrimination lawsuit.”
- Asian-descent Americans out-earn whites. Does this mean the latter suffer unjust discrimination?
- If employers really could pay women less and enjoy the same productivity, why wouldn’t they secure an all-female workforce and thus increase their profits?
All this said, Blake Masters may find the Truth no defense when the mass-media megaphone, playing on envy and resentment, demonizes it as a lie. And this is one reason why liars heavily populate politics. The electorate is much like a computer: It’s garbage in, garbage out — and rubbish in office.
