Kellyanne Conway, White House counselor to President Donald Trump, joined the Conservative Political Action Conference this morning for a little onstage chat. CPAC is an annual event that has briefly joined the national conversation for its invitation to (and subsequent revocation of) Milo Yiannopoulos—the former Breitbart News editor who rode an attention-seeking missile powered by hate against Muslims, immigrants, transgender people, and women’s rights into the public eye—as a speaker. While on stage (and on C-SPAN), Conway shared some frank thoughts about how she feels about women. Or more precisely, how she feels that women feel about her. “It turns out there are a lot of women who just have a problem with women in power,” Conway said, going on to refer to the modern feminist movement as “anti-male.” (An aside: can we, once and for all, put the notion that being pro-women makes you "anti-men" to bed?) “You know, this whole sisterhood, this whole ‘let’s go march for women’s rights,’ and just constantly talking about what women look like or what they wear or making fun of their choices or presuming that they’re not as powerful as the men around. This presumptive negativity about women in power is very unfortunate.”

It is unfortunate. It’s also, as Ms. Conway might say, an “alternative fact”— at least the way that she's framed it. Let’s remember, for a minute, exactly who is famous for rating women based on their appearances, who calls age 35 “checkout time,” who told Howard Stern that a “woman who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10,” whose supporters dismissed his descriptions of grabbing women as “locker-room talk,” who mocked former fellow Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s appearance like this: “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?” (Not to mention, while we’re talking about what women wear, it wasn’t so long ago that Conway took aim at women for . . . wearing yoga pants.) Now let's compare the speeches made at the Women's March on Washington. Let's talk about who wants to bring America forward, and who wants to roll it back.

So why is a woman who is, without a doubt, in very close proximity to power, a woman who has called herself “the face of Donald Trump’s movement,” and who purports herself to be in support of women—who cowrote a book in 2005 called What Women Really Want, for Pete’s sake—attempting to frame those who are out there calling for equal rights as if they are in the throes of some vicious, envy-driven catfight? America, to its detriment, has yet to join an increasing number of countries in the world in electing a woman to its highest office. But Ms. Conway might do well to remember that her candidate rose to the presidency buffeted by some of those same baser instincts, by a minority of voters who may soon tire of taking all these potshots. She may want to be careful who she’s criticizing. The call, Ms. Conway, is coming from inside the (White) House.