13 Facts About Ben Carpenter

Ben Carpenter grows peonies and was president of the Alaska Peony Market Cooperative.

Ben Carpenter is a member of the Alaska House Finance Committee.

In 2022 Representative Ben Carpenter staunchly opposed and voted against SB131 that was to provide additional cancer protections to firefighters in Alaska.

In 2019 Ben 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, Ben 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, Ben Carpenter stood by the award.

In late 2020 and early 2021, Ben Carpenter joined many of his fellow Republicans in their attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election.

Ben Carpenter frequently cast doubts on the legitimacy of the election, and posted on his public Facebook page his belief that the election had been corrupt.

Ben Carpenter later posted in support of the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, making favorable comparisons between the men and women who had stormed the US Capitol and America's decision to join World War II, saying:.

Ben Carpenter stated that he believed people were "overreacting" to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that this was unacceptably curtailing people's liberties.

In 2020, Ben 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.

At the time Ben Carpenter wrote the original email, 10 Alaskans had died from COVID-19.

In September and October 2020, Ben Carpenter recanted his initial resistance to these public health measures, saying that they had been the "correct response".