Alaska Politician Tricks Himself Into Arguing There’s A Taxpayer Benefit To The Murder Of Children

Welcome to Alaska Update, an occasional series in which the Defector Alaska News Team, Maitreyi Anantharaman and Chris Thompson, try to explain to you just what the hell is going on in Alaska.

There are many lovely people in Alaska. But it must be acknowledged that Alaska is also the land of freaks. Freaks congregate there in large numbers. One such freak is David Eastman, the District 10 representative to Alaska's House of Representatives. It speaks to the weirdness of Alaska's many freakin' weirdos that a person as crazed and repugnant as Eastman, who doesn't even have the excuse of being from Alaska, could be elected and then re-elected to public office. Monday, during what should've been a completely normal committee meeting, Eastman did what he does best: He made a spectacular fool of himself, and in so doing earned just the second congressional censure in the history of the state of Alaska.

Representatives of the Alaska Children’s Trust were on hand Monday for a scheduled meeting of the Alaska House Judiciary Committee, of which Eastman is a member. During an exchange about child abuse with Children's Trust president and CEO Trevor Storrs, Eastman very unexpectedly proposed that fatal child abuse—that is, a child being murdered by an adult—could present "a benefit to society, because there aren't needs for government services and whatnot over the whole course of that child's life." Asked by a stunned Storrs to clarify his remarks, Eastman explained that "it gets argued periodically that it's actually a cost savings, because that child is not gonna need any of those government services that they might otherwise be entitled to receive and need based on growing up in this kind of environment." Storrs, fumbling for the right words, eventually said he was not sure how to respond to Eastman's monstrous-seeming calculations, but assured him that it is indeed a net negative when a child is murdered.

As clarified for Defector Thursday by Jeff Landfield of The Alaska Landmine, Eastman got himself into this mind-boggling situation in a deeply misguided attempt at owning the libs. Eastman is a staunch anti-abortion activist, and if you squint very hard, tilt your head just so, and pour a quarter cup of boiling corrosive acid into your ear so that it travels along your auditory nerve and encounters sensitive brain tissue, you can juuust anticipate where he thinks he's going with this. It has been pointed out that states that move to eliminate abortions are not prepared in the slightest to provide the necessary support and resources for women who are forced to take unwanted pregnancies to term; Eastman thinks he is turning this line of logic around and exposing its monstrosity by applying cold economics to the subject of fatal child abuse. Because he is a grandstanding goober, Eastman supposed that this Sick Own would make for a productive and persuasive use of the government's time; because he is a moron, Eastman could not carry it off without being captured by multiple recording devices stating for the record that it is good when children are murdered.

For his efforts, Eastman was censured by his colleagues Wednesday, in a motion that would've passed unanimously were it not for Eastman's own dissenting vote. Eastman has made such a clown of himself during his time in Alaska's legislature that he has been barred from joining the majority caucus, made up of members of his own party. He checks all the boxes of far-right lunacy in the post-Trump era: He's a registered member of the Oath Keepers, and was on-hand for the Jan. 6 rally and riots in D.C.; he traveled to Arizona in 2021 to take a tour of the sham "audit" of Maricopa County election results; he takes special pride in opposing any formal governmental acknowledgement of race; and he uses his social media accounts to share antivax misinformation and paranoid crime-wave sensationalism. He was slapped with an ethics violation in 2018 for breaching confidentiality rules, and in 2020 was temporarily stripped of all committee assignments by the leadership of his own party.

It is extremely rare for an Alaska lawmaker to be censured. It happened for the very first time in the state's history in 2017, when a Republican lawmaker told Alaska Public Media and the Associated Press that "some people" in relatively far-flung parts of Alaska were happy to become pregnant because they could then exploit state resources to take a government funded trip to Anchorage, or even Seattle. That lawmaker: David Eastman. "You have individuals who are in villages and are glad to be pregnant, so that they can have an abortion," explained Eastman, aloud. "Because there’s a free trip to Anchorage involved." Eastman made these comments after successfully attaching an amendment to a state child abuse and sexual assault awareness bill, adding a line describing abortion as "the ultimate form of child abuse."

Eastman insisted Wednesday that it is "outrageous" to suggest that he is in any way supportive of the murdering of children, approximately 48 hours after saying aloud the words, "In the case where child abuse is fatal, obviously it's not good for the child, but it's actually a benefit to society," in that exact order. It is whatever ungodly hour in the frozen hellhole that is America's 49th state—who can even imagine the crazy shit they'll get up to when daylight returns.