Just off the top of your head, what would you think the term "alternative facts" means? If you said, "lies" or "things that are not facts," you are correct!
Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer gave a press conference in which he yelled that it was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, a lie. Since then, Twitter has been destroying him over these blatant false claims. Today, Kellyanne Conway is claiming that was Spicer did was not lie, NBC reports. In fact, he presented what Conway is calling "alternative facts." I've never heard of this term before, but maybe that's just a hip new slang word all the fascists are using?
To me, what that word means is "lies," because if something is a fact, then it is accepted as true, and if something is not a fact, it is unable to be proven. For example, an opinion like "SNL is a bigly bad show, horribly overrated, yet I keep watching it every week," is an opinion; it can not be proven true or false. But the statement "1.8 million is a bigger number than 160,000," is a fact. (That's the difference between the crowd number at Obama's inauguration in 2009 and Trump's on Friday, as determined by crowd experts who spoke with the New York Times.)
"I don't think you can prove those numbers one way or another. There's no way to quantify crowd numbers," Conway went on to say. Conway is correct in that there is no way to pin down the exact number of attendees at inauguration events; however, there are methods for estimating crowd size that allow experts to create a ballpark number that is typically accepted. This MSNBC article which was published in 2009 leading up to Obama's first inauguration explains how experts draw grids and use density to make estimations. But the point here isn't that crowd estimation is difficult but possible using a scientific method. The point is that Kellyanne Conway said the phrase "alternative facts" without a hint of sarcasm and that's insane.
See it for yourself below. She almost can't handle that she says it.