A grassroots parental rights group was denied a vendor booth at Alaska's oldest state fair after a local activist invoked a controversial "hate group" label from the Southern Poverty Law Center — a designation that critics argue reflects a decades-long pattern of the left-leaning watchdog using extremism branding to shut down mainstream conservative organizations.
The Moms for Liberty chapter in Fairbanks applied for a single-day booth at the Tanana Valley State Fair to promote its parental rights mission. On April 27, the chapter received a rejection letter from the fair's board with no formal stated reason. The chapter chair, Gail McBride, had attended the fair board's April 15 meeting to introduce the organization and push back on what she described as local misinformation. Following her remarks, a former fair employee named David Leslie addressed the board to object to the group's presence. The fair's executive director, Scott Vance, later cited unspecified concerns about the chapter's conduct at board meetings and interactions with staff as his basis for rejection, invoking the organization's broad discretionary authority to reject any vendor application for any reason.
"It was pretty interesting. The community needs to know it's another one of these attempts to cancel conservatives by screaming loudly." — Gail McBride, Moms for Liberty Fairbanks chapter chair
Moms for Liberty was founded in 2021 and has grown into one of the most prominent national parental rights organizations in the country, with chapters in all 50 states. The group is known for challenging age-inappropriate library books and school curricula, advocating for parental notification policies, and opposing gender ideology in K-12 classrooms. The Southern Poverty Law Center added it to its "hate group" list in 2023 — a designation that drew immediate and wide criticism from conservative legal organizations and civil liberties advocates who argued the SPLC had stretched its extremism classification so broadly as to make it meaningless, labeling mainstream conservative advocacy groups alongside actual hate organizations to stigmatize and marginalize them.
Vance's public statement quoted the fair's mission of providing "a welcoming, family-oriented environment" and reserved the right to reject vendors whose presence might create disruption. The irony of invoking a family-friendly mission to exclude a family-oriented parental rights group — while citing an SPLC designation that has itself been widely discredited as a political rather than objective tool — was not lost on conservative observers. Moms for Liberty national co-founder Tiffany Justice told media outlets the rejection is part of a broader pattern of conservatives being systematically excluded from public forums under the pretext of maintaining inclusive spaces.
The Southern Poverty Law Center's "hate group" and "extremist" designations have been the subject of significant controversy and legal challenge in recent years. Multiple mainstream conservative organizations have sued the SPLC over designations they argue are false and defamatory. In 2019, the SPLC paid $3.375 million and issued a formal apology to Islamic reformer Maajid Nawaz after improperly labeling him an extremist. Critics across the political spectrum have argued the SPLC's designations increasingly reflect ideological opposition rather than genuine assessment of extremism.
A parental rights group asking for a single-day table at a state fair is not a threat to anyone. Calling it a hate group because a left-wing watchdog organization with its own documented credibility problems decided to label it one is not a neutral act of event management — it is political exclusion dressed up in bureaucratic language. The Tanana Valley State Fair claims to welcome all. What it demonstrated in April is that some viewpoints are more welcome than others, and that a weaponized hate group designation is now sufficient to bar a mainstream conservative organization from the same public spaces their neighbors enjoy.