You don’t usually find smiling faces at a vigil.
But that’s what happened in Bowling Green, Ky. on Friday night, as people gathered there to commemorate a massacre that never actually happened.
The history of the “Bowling Green Massacre” stretches back to Thursday night, when Kellyanne Conway, an aide to U.S. President Donald Trump, justified the travel ban on refugees and citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries by mentioning a mass killing that, she said, took place in 2011.
“I bet there was very little coverage, 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 between the Bowling Green massacre,” she said.
“Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered.”
On Friday, Conway tweeted that she misspoke, and was actually talking about an ABC News story about two al-Qaeda terrorists were living in Bowling Green, Ky. as refugees.
But that didn’t stop Americans from holding a series of cheeky vigils to memorialize the massacre that wasn’t.
People gathered at Fountain Square Park in Bowling Green, Ky. on Friday night.
They lit candles and held signs with slogans such as, “Bowling Green Massacre #NeverRemember” and “RIP Truth.”
A vigil also took place in New York’s Bowling Green, a city park, the New York Daily News reported.
“We are all Bowling Green, never remember never forget,” people at the vigil said.
Meanwhile, someone has set up a website for the “Bowling Green Massacre Victims Fund.” Donations to the fund are going to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which mounted a class action lawsuit to challenge Trump’s travel ban last week, CNBC reported.
That lawsuit resulted in a federal judge placing an emergency stay on deportations of people who had landed in the U.S.
A federal judge in Seattle granted a temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s travel ban on Friday.