Peaceful Fairbanks protest draws large crowd on half-mile stretch of Airport Way

I tried counting the number of people who gathered along Airport Way in Fairbanks Saturday morning to protest the Trump regime, but I kept running into people I knew and lost track.

A young man with a head for math walked the route and said he did his best to concentrate on the sea of humanity. He put the turnout at 1,600. Others said it may have been far higher.

It’s hard to estimate crowds. But this was a big showing of opposition to Trump.

Someone like former Trump spokesman Sean Spicer might have called it the largest Fairbanks protest in history. Period.

I’m told there was a two-person counter demonstration at the corner of Geist Road and University Avenue. There were some pickup trucks with Trump flags and anti-Biden flags that drove past the Airport Way demonstration, along with the all-too-soon Barbara Haney reelection campaign, but the Trump train ran out of gas pretty quickly.

Just so everyone is clear, no one was getting paid to be there, in case Suzanne Downing, the voice of the Alaska Republican party, chooses to spread that lie again.

In March Downing lied that 200 paid protesters had been flown to Fairbanks. Borough Assembly candidate Haney repeated that lie and said it would be “hilarious” if the paid protesters were staying at Pike’s, owned by Republican Jay Ramras.

"Walked like a tour group, behaved like a tour group, nobody recognized them—even among the regular lefties. Totally astroturf—paid for by the 50501 fund. Protest tourism seems to be a new industry. We will see if there was an uptick in bed tax revenue," Haney wrote in March on X under a pseudonym, Steamboat Landing, that has since been discontinued.

There were no paid protesters.

Downing has been lying in recent days by claiming Trump protests are not genuine expressions of opinion by people who live in Alaska, but the work of “groups” controlled by radical billionaires, like George Soros. I didn’t see any billionaires Saturday during the two-hour protest.

Downing, who promotes herself as a “force for good,” also made up claims that violence was a possibility at the protests in Alaska.

“Riots planned nationwide on Flag Day,” she lied on Friday, adding that there were “no indications of planned violence” in Alaska.

Her website is owned by, among others, the Faulkners, owners of Land’s End Resort in Homer.