Two different reports claim Trump’s new labor statistics guru ran a social media account that routinely posted bigoted content.
President Trump recently fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, accusing her of having “rigged” job reports. In her place, Trump has selected E.J. Antoni, a former Heritage Foundation economist who was photographed at the January 6th debacle (but who claims he was just a “bystander” to the chaos) and who, according to reports from CNN and Wired, formerly ran a Twitter account that posted all sorts of gnarly stuff.
Earlier this month, Wired reported that a since-deleted Twitter account with the same name as Antoni (it went by “Dr. Erwin J. Antoni III”) had posted a flurry of tweets that displayed a “seeming obsession with promoting election denial conspiracy theories while talking about violent threats to those who stood in Trump’s way.” Wired also noted that the account posted “violent religious rhetoric” and, before the Capitol riot, “shared content from The Donald, a virulently pro-Trump message board that was used to organize the events of Jan 6, 2021.” The account is characterized as having been “infused with a deeply hardline Catholic worldview, [and] at times displayed misogyny and a knowledge of Nazi military techniques.”
Surveillance footage has definitively confirmed that Antoni was at the January 6th riots. The White House previously defended Antoni’s presence, claiming he was “a bystander to the events of January 6th, observing and then leaving the Capitol area.” The White House also previously noted: “EJ was in town for meetings, and it is wrong and defamatory to suggest EJ engaged in anything inappropriate or illegal.
