Benjamin E. Carpenter is a Republican member of the Alaska Legislature representing the State's deeply Republican 29th House district. Carpenter won in the general election on November 6, 2018, took office on January 16, 2019, and his term will end on January 24, 2021.
Life
Carpenter graduated from Nikiski High School in 1993. After graduation, he joined the United States Army, serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Turkey and Kuwait with the United States Air Force. Afterward, Carpenter joined the Alaska Army National Guard, in which he was a special staff officer in the commanding general’s office. He later retired from the National Guard. Carpenter grows peonies and was president of the Alaska Peony Market Cooperative.
Career in office
In 2018, Carpenter won election against independent candidate Shawn Butler by a significant margin, winning a 68.8% majority, despite his opponent raising and spending a much larger amount of campaign funds. Carpenter is a member of the Alaska House Finance Committee. In 2019 Carpenter introduced a bill to stop the state of Alaska from reimbursing local municipalities for school bond debt, effectively reducing state funding of public schools by $139 million. In March 2020, Carpenter joined other Republicans of the Alaska House in unsuccessfully opposing Alaska House Bill 221, which would officially recognize the 229 tribes in Alaska that are already recognized at the federal level. In February 2020, during a budget vote in which fellow Republican David Eastman tried to add amendments eliminating a $5000 line item to be paid to Planned Parenthood to reimburse it for court fees for an earlier lawsuit against the state of Alaska, Carpenter stood by the award. While noting that he didn't like where the money was going, he asserted the state had lost a case in court which by law required it to make the payment. Like other Republicans in the Alaska House, Carpenter opposes abortion. On all other matters of the day, Carpenter stood with Eastman.
Carpenter believes people are "overreacting" to the coronavirus pandemic, and that this is unacceptably curtailing people's liberties. In 2020, Carpenter attracted significant criticism when he sent a mass email to all of his colleagues, comparing health screening stickers to the yellow badges that Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust. Carpenter objected to a new requirement in his workplace that required wearing a sticker to indicate one has been screened for COVID-19 in order to be permitted to enter the Capitol building, saying, "If my sticker falls off, do I get a new one or do I get public shaming too? Are the stickers available as a yellow Star of David?" The House had been in recess since March due to COVID-19 concerns, and the new protocols were part of a plan to insure safety as the House was planning to re-convene the week of May 18, 2020 to settle matters relating to a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the distribution of federal COVID-19 relief funds. Carpenter's colleague Grier Hopkins, who is Jewish, immediately wrote back to say, "Ben, this is disgusting. Keep your Holocaust jokes to yourself." Carpenter was called on to apologize by several colleagues both within and without the Republican party—though several Republican colleagues, like Sarah Vance, supported his statements. Carpenter at first refused to apologize and instead continued to justify his remarks. In a later interview he said, "Can we even say it is totally out of the realm of possibility that COVID-19 patients will be rounded up and taken somewhere?" In the same interview he claimed that Adolf Hitler was not a white supremacist, and that Hitler was just "fearful of the Jewish nation". Later he said, "If there were more people standing up for the loss of liberties prior to World War II, maybe we wouldn’t have had the Holocaust." After attracting a fresh round of criticism from these subsequent comments, Carpenter continued to justify them, sending text messages to the interviewer, saying: "The point was that it was fear that drove him. The attention of his fear was undesirables, including Jews. And the larger point is that PEOPLE FOLLOWED HIM." A few days later, Carpenter wrote an apology by way of an op-ed in Must Read Alaska, a publication funded in part by the Alaska GOP. Carpenter wrote, "My email comments have been perceived by many to be offensive. For any offense taken, I apologize because my words are my responsibility." At the time Carpenter wrote the original email, 10 Alaskans had died from COVID-19.
