Kellyanne Conway has been losing her hold as a television talking head and was even sidelined by the White House for being consistently “off message.” She is, however, still very on message for the Conservative Political Action Conference.
In an interview with Mercedes Schlapp on Thursday, starting at about minute four in the video above, she shared her thoughts on why she doesn’t fit in with the feminist movement, while still appropriating any vaguely feminist concepts that suited her personal narrative.
“It’s difficult for me to call myself a feminist in the classic sense because it seems to be very anti-male and very pro-abortion in this context,” Conway says, “And I’m neither anti-male or pro-abortion.”
“There’s an individual feminism if you will, that you make your own choices,” Conway continues, “I look at myself as a product of my choices not a victim of my circumstances. That to me is what conservative ‘feminism,’ if you will, is all about.”
She air quotes around the word “feminism,” so that much is honest—a rarity, as there’s nothing Conway likes doing more than bending reality to suit her personal narrative in ways that are very dangerous to other people. If she’s willing to make up terrorist attacks to support unconstitutional Muslim bans, she’s obviously willing to warp the definition of feminist ideology to assert her superiority over it.
There is one woman Conway admires: her own mom. Conway’s mother apparently had little education or money, but raised Conway with “drive and moxie” rather than help from anyone else, she says, and references the false bootstraps narrative Republicans love to trot out. She then segues into some comments on the Women’s March that seem entirely unrelated.
“It turns out that a lot of women just have a problem with women in power,” said Conway. “This whole ‘sisterhood’ this whole ‘let’s go march for women’s rights,’ 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.”
Here Conway is not referring to sisterhood but to herself, apparently bucking against the backlash against her fawning devotion to Trump and his policies, as well as her widely mocked inauguration outfit and her emergence as a popular meme. Schlapp assures Conway that she supports her, from the nesting material on her head to the evil brain beneath, as does everyone in the roaring crowd.