Alaska Republicans invent lie that 200 Fairbanks protesters were imported actors

Fairbanks Assembly member Barbara Haney is helping spread a fantasy from the Alaska Republican Party that a protest in Fairbanks Saturday consisted of protesters from Outside, imported at enormous expense to walk from City Hall to Golden Heart Plaza.

“‘They looked like a tour group. They dressed like a tour group,’ said one source who described them as NPCs (non-playing characters),” the Alaska Republican blowhole blog claimed.

“These protesters are starting to look like imports,” Suzanne Downing said of the Fairbanks gathering that she knew nothing about.

“Locals said that many of the protesters looked like they were not locals,” said Downing.

I don’t know if Downing was just parroting Elon Musk—who is making these claims about events Outside—regurgitating stupid lies fed to her or just making it up.

(Last fall Downing told the world that Hitler visited the U.S. and spoke at Madison Square Garden, a visit and speech that no one else has ever heard of.)

Neither the blowhole or any party members repeating this nonsense about paid actors bothered to engage in any critical thinking. The people at this protest were not imported for the day or the weekend. They were young and old people who oppose what is happening to the nation.

It would have cost about $1,000 per person to import protesters, so this would have been a $200,000 event, counting travel and putting people up at hotels.

And it was strange how the organizers secretly managed to clothe every “non-playing character” protester in the mix-and-match grabbag that passes for outdoor wear in Fairbanks on a sunny March day.

Haney got involved in the spread of this BS by claiming on Facebook that the protesters “came in like a tour group and behaved like a tour group.” She said the Fairbanks event was “hosted by 50501,” the national anti-Trump political group, a term that distorts the reality of this being a home-grown enterprise.

But Haney and her supporters preferred the paid actor lie.

“With the limited amount of restaurants we have I’m sure we could even find out where they ate, where they stayed,” one of her Facebook friends said.

“It would be hilarious if they were staying at Pike’s,” said Haney, referring to the hotel owned by Republican Jay Ramras, site of a Friday protest that was also not the work of paid Outside actors.

To think, as Haney does, that there are not widespread fears in Fairbanks about the actions of the Musk/Trump regime or that people here are not capable of engaging in these events shows that she doesn’t understand the community.

Eric Muehling, a longtime, photographer and photojournalist, shot this video with his drone.

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