White House counselor and serial liar Kellyanne Conway had a hell of a weekend, frantically walking back her comments about the "Bowling Green massacre," a terrorist attack on American soil that might have helped to justify President Trump's Muslim ban... except for the tiny detail that no such incident ever occurred. Although the Internet had great fun at Conway's expense, the line of argument she deployed in her statement was legitimately alarming. Here's how she put it:

There was very little coverage‍—‌I bet it's brand new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country and were radicalized‍—‌and then they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre. I mean, most people don't know that, because it didn't get covered.

Conway now claims that she meant to refer to the "Bowling Green terrorists," two men arrested in Kentucky in 2011 for providing material support to Iraqi militants—meaning the incident she cited still did not involve attacks on U.S. soil, but whatever. Because all serial liars have one another's backs, President Trump doubled down on Conway's comments in a speech delivered on Monday, making the breathtaking assertion that terrorist attacks have become so commonplace all over the world that the media isn't even reporting them anymore.

Radical Islamic terrorists are determined to strike our homeland as they did on 9/11, as they did from Boston to Orlando to San Bernadino, and all across Europe. You’ve seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening. It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.

First of all, the idea that the media is reluctant to talk about these attacks should strike anyone who regularly watches cable news as absurd, since Fox News loves nothing more than throwing up a hysterical, all-caps terror-related chyron and shouting about it for what feels like eight uninterrupted hours. More troubling, though, is the source from which President Trump appears to be copying his homework. As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post astutely points out, the loudest drum-banger for the idea that the media "covers up" terror attacks is InfoWars, the tinfoil-hat-adorned Angelfire-looking site helmed by Alex Jones, the Loose Change producer who thinks the government was behind Sandy Hook.

President Trump's tendency to parrot his media outlets of choice is well-documented, and this isn't the first time he has fawned over Jones in particular. But the reason this talking point is so dangerous is because it purports to tidily account for the gaping holes in the lies the President tells in support of his agenda. The falsehood that the media doesn't report terrorist events is literally impossible for most Americans, whose source of information on terrorist attacks is the media, to verify. So when Trump argues that America needs to ban Muslims or reject refugees or do God knows what else, and cites vague "terrorist attacks" as justification, he can dismiss the lack of corresponding evidence as attributable to reporting, not to reality.

The press' role in a democracy is to report the facts so that the public can form their own opinions about their leaders' actions. And if Trump's assertion that the press is withholding this information is pretty scary, his willingness to fill in those gaps with the dystopian fever dreams of Alex Jones is off-the-charts terrifying.

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