We live in an age of information. With such vast banks of knowledge at the fingertips of the general public, the accountability held to public figures has greatly increased as we are able to fact-check in live time from our living rooms. Despite this, many have gone the way of "alternative facts;" including the progenitor of the term, though certainly not the practice thereof, Kellyanne Conway.

Formerly Trump's campaign manager and now serving as Counselor to the President, Conway has become infamous for not only creating and perpetuating falsehoods but also for her propensity for misdirection. Especially now, as she has faced severe backlash in the wake of her Bowling Green comments, Conway is playing staunch defense against interviewers asking her to explain that and other inaccuracies put forward by herself and by the Trump administration.

In fact, if one closely examines the way Conway responds to difficult questions, to criticism, and to evidence against her, one might notice that the approach she takes very closely is nearly identical to a tactic that exists within magic shows: Sleight of hand. This may sound laughable but the comparison, while imperfect, is not unfounded. In Sleight of hand the basic principle is to use unrelated distractions to misdirect an audience's attention from what is really happening. In interviews, this is exactly what Kellyanne Conway does.

For example in an interview with CNN correspondent Jake Tapper, when Conway was asked to explain Trump's fraudulent claims that murder rates in the US are at a record high, despite hard evidence of that being a false statistic, Conway ignored the question and instead launched into unrelated anecdotes of her involvement with aiding veterans. This kind of pivoting away from difficult questions is something Conway does frequently--making it near-impossible for interviewers to siphon out any clear or related answers.

Kellyanne Conway's ironclad tenacity against admitting fault is both bizarre and troubling. How is it possible to advance as a society and a nation under an administration that is indifferent toward what is true and verifiable? Facts do not have political bias. There are certain issues, human, scientific, and environmental, which cannot afford to be handled in a way that treats objective truth as malleable.