Bowling Green massacre
a fictitious incident of terrorism mentioned by U.S. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway in interviews with Cosmopolitan and TMZ on January 29, 2017
The Bowling Green massacre is a fictitious incident of Islamic terrorism mentioned by Kellyanne Conway, then–counselor to President Donald Trump, in interviews with Cosmopolitan and TMZ on January 29, 2017, and in an interview on the MSNBC news program Hardball with Chris Matthews on February 2, 2017. Conway cited it as justification for a travel and immigration ban from seven Muslim-majority countries enacted by United States president Trump. However, no such massacre occurred.
The day after the interview, Conway said she misspoke and had been referring to the 2011 arrest of two Iraqi refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on charges including "attempting to provide material support to terrorists and to al-Qaeda in Iraq". She said she had mentioned the incident because it led President Barack Obama to tighten immigration procedures for Iraqi citizens.
The false statement went viral and became the top trending topic on Twitter, with many tweets parodying it. A website was set up anonymously for the purpose of collecting donations for supposed victims. Facebook users used the site's safety check feature to act as if the event were real. Mock vigils were held in Kentucky and New York in commemoration. It provoked widespread press reaction, with many relating it to Conway's earlier use of the phrase "alternative facts" to describe false statements by White House press secretary Sean Spicer in the wake of Trump's inauguration.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Bowling Green massacre” as a fictitious incident of terrorism mentioned by U.S. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway in interviews with Cosmopolitan and TMZ on January 29, 2017. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as a fictitious incident of terrorism mentioned by U.S. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway in interviews with Cosmopolitan and TMZ on January 29, 2017. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28652506. Authority coordinates are 36.982, -86.444. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2017 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bowling Green massacre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.