Republican claims Hitler not a white supremacist after comparing coronavirus measures to Nazi rule

The uproar began when an Alaskan representative emailed all 39 of his statehouse colleagues to compare health screening stickers to the badges that singled out Jews during the Holocaust.

“If my sticker falls off, do I get a new one or do I get public shaming too?” Ben Carpenter, a Republican, wrote on Friday, sharing his dismay at a new requirement for legislators returning to the Alaska Capitol amid the coronavirus pandemic. “Are the stickers available as a yellow Star of David?”

The backlash was swift: “Ben, this is disgusting,” one Jewish representative wrote back in emails first posted by the Alaska Landmine. “I don't think a tag that we're cleared to enter the building is akin to being shipped to a concentration camp,” responded another. The leader of the state House's Republican delegation said Mr Carpenter should apologise.

But Mr Carpenter dug in.

“Can you or I - can we even say it is totally out of the realm of possibility that Covid-19 patients will be rounded up and taken somewhere?” he said later in an interview with the Anchorage Daily News, arguing that officials are overreacting to the coronavirus with limits on people's liberty. “People want to say Hitler was a white supremacist. No. He was fearful of the Jewish nation, and that drove him into some unfathomable atrocities.”

That provoked a new round of denunciations from colleagues, one of whom said he has seen similar arguments making the rounds online. The comments echo comparisons made by some protesters opposed to stay-at-home orders who argue that strict public health measures are akin to slavery and genocidal dictatorships - governors have been likened to Nazis - in rhetoric that many view as inappropriate in a national debate about measures to curb the coronavirus.

Antisemitic symbols and Confederate flags have also popped up at protests, causing offence and getting entangled in resistance to lockdowns.

“If people want to have a dialogue about how this is infringing on our Constitution, I'm happy to have that conversation,” said Democrat Grier Hopkins, the Jewish representative who wrote the email calling Mr Carpenter's initial message “disgusting”.

“But I hope he understands that this is not the Holocaust, and how that massacred 6 million Jews, and how genocide is not health mandates,” he told The Washington Post on Saturday.

Democratic colleague Andy Josephson told the Anchorage Daily News: “I don't know there's a whole lot more to say. I just think it's pretty unfortunate.”

Mr Carpenter, who did not immediately respond to request for comment on Saturday, told the newspaper he didn't intend to “rile somebody' and has ”no ill will towards the Jewish nation and the Jewish people in our country.“

Another representative on the mass email chain sympathised with Mr Carpenter's view, later telling the Anchorage Daily News she wanted to “stay away from either condoning or condemning anything he said about [the Holocaust]”. She said she agreed with his take on the virus response.

“We should all be concerned about the implications of being labelled as 'non compliant' or wearing a badge of 'compliance',” the representative, Sarah Vance, a Republican, wrote in an email after Mr Hopkins had written his rebuke.

Protesters and politicians around the country have raised questions about the value of continued coronavirus restrictions, though polling shows a majority of Americans are concerned about lifting stay-at-home orders too early. Shutdowns have devastated the economy, put millions out of work and placed sweeping new limits on Americans' daily lives.

The requirement that sparked Mr Carpenter's email, though, was quite limited in scope: a rule that state legislators wear stickers indicating they've passed a health test when they head back to Juneau, the state capital, on Monday.

“We want to take necessary precautions because we have some of the most rural communities in the entire country, and they were decimated by the 1918 flu pandemic because people brought the disease back,” Mr Hopkins said. " 'It is enough? Will it help to keep us all safe?' [are] some of the bigger questions I've heard.”

Like most states, Alaska has been moving to reopen: Mike Dunleavy, the Republican governor, let restaurants, retail stores and hair and nail salons start operating late last month, though with new social distancing requirements, such as capacity limits that many businesses find burdensome.

But Mr Carpenter still said he sees coronavirus measures as a slippery slope, claiming the danger is past. He argues that with 10 Alaskans dead from the coronavirus, the fear of the pandemic is a bigger threat than the disease - a view shared by some national leaders including Donald Trump, who has tweeted: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”

“We have a way of life that is being threatened right now because we have shut down our economy,” Mr Carpenter told the Anchorage Daily News.

He continued to defend his statements in text messages to the newspaper after its story with his Hitler comments published, 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.”

Asked about the assessment of Hitler, Mr Hopkins evoked the 2017 neo-Nazi rally where people chanted “Jews will not replace us.” Attendees have described themselves as “white nationalists” who want a “homeland for white people”.

“If those people were not white supremacists,” he said in an interview, “well, I guess I don't know what a white supremacist looks like”.

The Washington Post