By BOB BIRD
The voters in the conservative Kenai Peninsula will have a clear choice for the state senate, and it is Ben Carpenter, currently a 2-term representative.
Voters in this district know me well, and they also know the role I played in giving a radio platform to the current holder of this senate seat, Jesse Bjorkman.
Bjorkman came into Nikiski High School and Alaska just as I was in the gradual stage of retirement, stretched out between 2012 to 2015. I was impressed with his attitude, conservative politics and his religious faith. After I retired, I invited him to speak on an afternoon radio show, regarding his excellent outdoor learning class, teaching kids how to properly gut and salvage a moose. He had the right disposition for limited government, as it appeared at the time, and I was green-lighted by the station management to ask him on as a permanent side-kick and very capable substitute on my days off.
Ben Carpenter was a student of mine in 1992-93, years into the “Great Books Method” I was using to teach students American government. Instead of using a textbook, long about 1986 I decided to use the actual documents of the Declaration and state and federal constitutions, go through them word-for-word, and explain it all to the students, the political philosophies behind limited government, and the context of American history. It also included the “original intent” and “strict construction” interpretation, whose finger prints are all over the document.
Ben was the star student in a class that was taught at the collegiate level: we had all of Nikiski’s seniors in one class, and the daily 55 minute lectures were given in Nikiski’s auditorium. The class was lively, with two very intelligent yet unapologetic Marxist students, who complimented me on allowing them to have their say, even as I refuted Marxist dogma. Ben was unquestionably impatient with them, and he got his licks in, too. It rated as one of the best classes in a line-up of 50 years of teaching. Upon graduation, I wrote a letter of recommendation for Ben to go into OCS training.
Bjorkman began to puzzle and worry me when certain issues came across our desk in the Monday-Friday two-hour radio program:
- He made every excuse for the late Rep. Gary Knopp’s holdout and refusal to caucus with his own Republican Party. The essence of Bjorkman’s excuses for Knopp was the need to grease the skids for his constituents, over political principles. Bjorkman has proven that he was as good as his word, when he caucused with the Democrats.
- He looked upon the Permanent Fund dividend as rightfully belonging to the state, not the citizens. He brought in a former Democratic lawmaker, who denied that part of the reasoning for the public support of the PFD, was that it was viewed as a compensation for the federal government’s refusal to grant Alaska being on “equal footing” with the lower 48 states. This continues to be a major complaint since statehood.
- He vigorously defended ranked-choice voting, kept saying how simple it was to understand, and wrote a column in the local newspaper describing its alleged virtues. He invited Scott Kendall on the program, but nothing Kendall said clarified RCV in my mind, but certainly did for Jesse.
Bjorkman has now, thankfully, retracted his love for ranked-choice voting, initiated by his own constituents calling him out. However, all this bespeaks reams about his naïve judgment and trusting nature, and how he will glom onto controversial liberal opinions if they match his own.
- In our school district, teachers have long been forced to contribute to the NEA, which I left way back in 1984 because of its radical pro-homosexual, pro-abortion policies. The NEA now includes every bizarre social issue imaginable and refuses to defend women’s sports.
I always have given Bjorkman’s NEA membership a pass, for if you have to pay the dues, why not get inside the NEA and change it? He was warned by a fellow teacher who once tried the same thing, that it would not work, but youthful inexperience rarely takes advice.
I never saw Bjorkman fighting to change NEA’s social-issues policies, either as a teacher within the NEA who made numerous trips to Juneau, or as a borough assemblyman or state legislator. If he did try, it obviously went nowhere. The NEA leads the charge in the cultural madhouse that America has become. Jesse Bjorkman is their man.
I maintain that it is immoral for a Christian, pro-life and pro-gun teacher to belong to the NEA. Bjorkman needs to be asked if he used the “Hudson packet” protocols that conscientious objectors were required to fill out annually, in order to keep their dues out of NEA political activism. It was a tiresome annual chore for me personally, and I grew disgusted with it.
- It was Covid that finally drove Bjorkman and I apart. He was not influenced by the numerous programs where I got alternative opinions on the air, warning about the vax’s dangers and the lies that were being spread by Big Pharma regarding ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Naturally, my efforts were a mere pop-gun voice against the mainstream media carpet bombings. Then, Jesse publicly announced that he took the vaccines in order to “Get Covid behind us.”
As a personal decision, that’s OK. But using the platform as an elective officer of the borough shows that he was setting an example.
Then, he even defended masking, even after its absurdities were flushed out.
It appears that the same “trusted” federal and state medical bureaucrats are where Bjorkman has decided to hang his hat and political future on. If their advice is wrong, as it usually is, he can cover himself by saying, “Well, that is what the experts were saying at the time.”
Uh-huh.
Then he suggested, on the air, that Anne Zink ought to sue me for writing a column, calling Zink out when she waxed eloquent over her famous grandfather’s policies. That was the last straw for me.
From NPR/Alaska:
Her maternal grandfather, Al Bartlett, was a University of Colorado Boulder physics professor and a nationally recognized speaker on exponential growth and humans’ inability to comprehend it — a lesson not lost on Zink as she navigates the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think about him all the time,” she said, “particularly in this world of trying to understand exponential growth, and trying to keep our state from getting into a place of exponential growth.”
What is “exponential growth”? Simply put, it disdains human progress in food production and medicine, as its disciples believe that it will lead to an eventual global population catastrophe.
Using Anne Zink’s own words were apparently libelous for Bjorkman. I waited two weeks for my temperature to go down, then told him that we were no longer a good fit as co-broadcasters. I knew that simple justice to Bjorkman required that I split the program equitably with him. This we did, until as a candidate for office he was soon to no longer host a program.
What is right with Jesse Bjorkman? He will be a reliable prolife and progun vote, although I have never seen him carry water on the prolife side. Like most “prolife” Republicans, he gave in to the Democratic binding caucus about abortion funding in the budget.
No amount of constitutional explanations, especially on the state level, registered with him. But mind you, he has a lot of company, starting with Gov. Dunleavy and most of the other elected officials on both sides of the aisle.
He also does his homework thoroughly in regards to parsing through the tissues of legislation. However, that does not mean that he discerns its implications properly, as was shown with RCV.
If you want to see this miserable status quo in our beloved state change, Bjorkman will not be the one to fix it. He will take the shopworn path of safety and go with the flow. This was obvious when he caucused with Democrats and fake “independents”. That party has turned into an engine of evil at worst, or utterly bereft of common sense, at best. The left has done its work well: no Republican wants to be “Eastmanized”, suffering endless lawfare from the likes of Scott Kawasaki, who himself cheerfully ignores the ethics laws, while he controls the Ethics Committee.
Ben Carpenter understands constitutional principles. He demonstrated integrity during the losing fight for the con-con. If he cannot implement constitutional principles right away, he will do so when the puzzle fits more perfectly.
Almost every conservative agrees that impeachment of Alaska’s judiciary is long overdue. Tote up the issues: 1) Abortion — which over the years the judiciary has used to overthrow the power of the purse from the legislature and the governor’s line-item veto; 2) The courts green-lighted RCV’s obvious illegality in 2020, which used multiple topics, instead of the required single-issue; 3) Grand juries, where the courts have stolen it from the people; 4) Massive mail-in ballots.
It goes on and on.
In our state, impeachment begins in the Senate. Let’s see what Ben Carpenter can do.
Bob Bird is former chair of the Alaskan Independence Party and the host of a talk show on KSRM radio, Kenai.