Click Here to Donate to the Families of the Imaginary Victims of the Non-Existent Bowling Green Massacre
(It’s really a donation to the ACLU).
Top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway on Thursday defended the president’s controversial immigration ban, citing two Iraqi refugees who carried out the Bowling Green Massacre. There’s just one problem: there’s no such thing as the Bowling Green Massacre.
Top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway on Thursday defended the president’s controversial immigration ban, citing two Iraqi refugees who carried out the Bowling Green Massacre. There’s just one problem: there’s no such thing as the Bowling Green Massacre.
“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, were radicalized and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre. It didn’t get covered,” Conway told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.
(Sidenote: President Obama never, in fact, banned the Iraqi refugee program — it was temporarily slowed to respond to a specific threat but never halted).
Conway admitted the mistake on Twitter, saying “honest mistakes abound.” She also clarified the story she meant to cite — that two Iraqi men in Bowling Green, Kentucky were arrested in 2013 for conspiring with al Qaeda and attempting to plot a terror attack.
But the fact that the massacre never happened didn’t stop some denizens of the Internet from rallying to help its victims. Overnight, BowlingGreenMassacreFund.com cropped up on the internet:
The satirical website is full of vague remembrance platitudes like, “We all still carry the vivid memories of what horrors occurred at Bowling Green, but some still relive those moments everyday as they work to rebuild a community torn apart.”
It also has a “Donate Now” button to help the imaginary victims — that automatically redirects to the American Civil Liberties Union website. An ACLU spokesperson told Foreign Policy it had nothing to do with the website and had not been in touch with it’s creators. (Though it’s still unclear who created the website; the domain is registered anonymously.)
On Jan. 30, the ACLU announced it received six times its annual donations in one weekend alone — $24 million — after President Donald Trump signed a controversial executive order banning travelers from certain Middle Eastern countries from entering the United States, citing terrorism concerns.
Though the city of Bowling Green, Kentucky remains unharmed, the ACLU is still accepting donations.
Photo credit: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images; Image Credit: BowlingGreenMassacreFund.com
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @RobbieGramer
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