Kellyanne Conway, as a resident of Bowling Green, I’m pretty sure I’d remember a massacre if there was one

The only massacre I ever witnessed was our university’s football team crushing our opponents on the gridiron – Go Hilltoppers!

Just a reminder, Conway is the woman who coined the phrase ‘alternative facts’ (Getty)

​Some moments haunt you for the rest of your life. The memories keep you awake at night, remembering the atrocities you somehow survived. The Battle of Hogwarts. The Red Wedding. The Bowling Green massacre. I’ve somehow managed to live through all three of these horrific – and utterly fictitious – events.

Last night, in an interview with American broadcaster Chris Matthews, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway invented the latter of these fantastic events to justify the President’s travel ban. “Two Iraqis came here, they were radicalised, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre,” she reminded Matthews, complaining that “most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered”.

It didn’t get covered because it never happened. I would know better than most; I was living in Bowing Green – a quaint city of about 60,000 nestled in the hills of southcentral Kentucky – when Conway’s made-up massacre was meant to have taken place. I moved to Bowling Green in 2004 to attend Western Kentucky University, and in the seven wonderful years I lived there, the only massacre I ever witnessed was our university’s football team crushing our opponents on the gridiron – Go Hilltoppers!

What Conway was likely referring to was the 2011 arrest of two Iraqi refugees in Bowling Green, one of whom had fingerprints found on a roadside bomb in Iraq. The two men weren’t arrested for planning a terrorist attack in Bowling Green; what they were charged with was funnelling money back to Iraqi insurgents. As Vox pointed out last night, this led to a slowdown in refugee resettlement from Iraq, which the Trump administration routinely and falsely points to as Obama’s “ban” on refugees in support of their own ban.

The fact that Conway would invent a story to justify the administration’s policy is not surprising. This is, after all, the woman who coined the term “alternative facts”. But the sheer audacity of inventing an entire terrorist attack to gaslight the country into supporting a nefarious and counterproductive ‘“Muslim ban” is beyond the pale.

Surviving the Bowling Green massacre wasn’t enough for me, though. I decided I needed to dodge bullets on a daily basis, so I moved to Chicago – which, if you listen to the Trump team, is basically Aleppo with better pizza. Trump has threatened to “send in the feds” to police Chicago’s neighbourhoods, which, while having seen a troubling spike in homicides last year, still isn’t the most dangerous city in Illinois (that’d be Rockford), let alone America.

The problems that Chicago does have – and I’m certainly not arguing we don’t have our fair share – are the result of rampant segregation and poverty, the closure of public mental health clinics on the predominantly Black and Latino south and west sides, and a deep distrust of police bred by abuses and systemic racism rampant in the Chicago Police Department. Even our own police chief says that if Trump really wants to help, he should provide “better financial help for these impoverished neighbourhoods”.

I won’t allow Trump and his team to slander my cities in order to destroy everything we hold dear. As the anti-terror slogan goes, “if you see something, say something”. And what I’m seeing is an administration so divorced from reality that they are gas lighting an entire nation and dressing up authoritarianism as law and order.

Skylar Baker-Jordan is a journalist and essayist based in Chicago. He is currently pursuing a visa to emigrate to the UK