Although it might be hard to tell from her behavior sometimes, Kellyanne Conway is a human being. And human beings make mistakes. Take her referencing “the Bowling Green massacre,” a nonexistent terrorist attack that never happened, in an interview with MSNBC. That’s a mistake, right? A deeply disingenuous, reckless mistake that serves only to deepen America’s confusion about the nature of reality, ultimately rendering us fearful and therefore vulnerable to fascism. But a mistake nonetheless.
But now, a just-published BuzzFeed News report reveals that Conway didn’t fool us once (shame on you), or twice (shame on us). She tried to sell that lie three times (fuck you, Kellyanne). Her real mistake, apparently, was saying it the third time on TV, where more people were able to see it. The first time was to Cosmopolitan magazine on January 29, where Conway mentioned the “masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre” in a phone interview with Kristen Mascia. The quote was in the context of attempting to justify Trump’s “Muslim ban” by saying that Obama did the same thing in the wake of the “Bowling Green massacre.” Here’s the quote:
He did, it’s a fact. Why did he do that? He did that for exactly the same reasons. He did that because two Iraqi nationals came to this country, joined ISIS, traveled back to the Middle East to get trained and refine their terrorism skills, and come back here, and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre of taking innocent soldiers’ lives away.
That very same day, Conway spoke to TMZ, spewing the same talking points:
TMZ didn’t catch the “mistake,” and ran its video on January 29. Mascia, however, fact-checked Conway’s claims, and was told by the FBI that “a couple of your facts seem incorrect.” She was referred to a press release that clarified that the men‚ Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, were radicalized long before they left Iraq as refugees, rendering Conway’s story that they came here, joined ISIS while living in Kentucky, and went back to Iraq for training predictably bullshit. (Both pled guilty and were convicted on terrorism charges, specifically sending guns and other assistance to al Qaeda, in 2013.)
Miascia didn’t end up using the quote in her original story, because it was bullshit. But after the ”Bowling Green Massacre” story blew up, Miascia wrote about the “mistake,” and Conway’s attempts to walk it back, in a story published earlier today. You can read all about it over at Cosmopolitan. Between this and Teen Vogue taking a stand against Trump and his cronies, it’s starting to look like the revolution won’t be televised, but it will come with perfume samples.