President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics operated a since-deleted Twitter account that featured sexually degrading attacks on Kamala Harris, derogatory remarks about homosexual individuals, conspiracy theories, and crude insults aimed toward critics of President Donald Trump.
E.J. Antoni, a 37-year-old economist for the conservative suppose tank the Heritage Foundation, posted the feedback from roughly 2017 by 2020 underneath a sequence of usernames and show names. NCS verified that every one of Antoni’s posts got here from the identical Twitter account and that the posts from the nameless aliases shared strikingly related biographical particulars as Antoni.
An outspoken critic of the nonpartisan BLS, which calculates US job progress and unemployment figures, Antoni is a stout Trump loyalist. NBC News reported and NCS confirmed that he was a “bystander” on the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. There is not any proof he entered the Capitol.
His appointment comes after Trump fired the Biden-appointed BLS commissioner and accused the company with out proof of corruption after a report confirmed job progress in May and June was weaker than beforehand estimated.
Antoni has positioned himself as a watchdog for presidency accountability in media appearances and Heritage Foundation weblog posts. But his personal digital path reveals a sample of incendiary rhetoric that veered continuously into conspiracy theories and misogyny.
In 2019, the since-deleted account referred to as “ErwinJohnAntoni” modified its username to “phdofbombsaway.” The account posted not less than 5 sexually suggestive tweets implying that then Sen. Kamala Harris had superior her profession by sexual favors.
Shortly after Harris ended her 2020 presidential marketing campaign, Antoni wrote, “You can’t run a race on your knees,” in response to a tweet of a doctored marketing campaign poster that depicted a sexually specific picture of Harris.
Antoni additionally referred to Christine Blasey Ford, the lady who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, as “Miss Piggy.” In February 2020, he retweeted a put up titled “Advice For Women: How To Land a Great Guy,” which instructed ladies to “be in shape,” “grow your hair long,” “be sweet,” “learn to cook,” and “don’t be annoying.” The put up concluded: “Angry feminists and simps will try to sabotage you in the comments. Don’t listen to them. Listen to me.”
Wired first reported the existence of the account, detailing Antoni’s posts participating with conspiracy theories on the 2020 election and Covid-19, and referencing weapons utilized by Nazi Germany in World War II. After that story was revealed, Antoni’s cousin, a right-wing podcaster, defended Antoni in a social media put up, saying the household was proud their grandfather had fought for the US in World War II.
In a press release, the White House defended Antoni and didn’t deal with whether or not he nonetheless holds beliefs he espoused on the account.
“President Trump has nominated Dr. EJ Antoni to fix the issues at the BLS and restore trust in the jobs reports. Dr. Antoni has the experience and credentials needed to restore solution-oriented leadership at the BLS — solutions that will prioritize increasing survey response rates and modernizing data collection methods to improve the BLS’s accuracy,” stated Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson.
Trump’s resolution on August 1 to hearth BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer drew criticism from economists who warned that politicizing the federal government’s employment knowledge dangers eroding belief and disrupting markets. The BLS is essential to the best way governments, companies and on a regular basis individuals view the economic system.
Unlike McEntarfer, who had a long time of expertise working in authorities, Antoni has none. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from Northern Illinois University in 2020 and took positions on the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Heritage Foundation, the place he now works as an economist. The Heritage Foundation is the architect of Project 2025, which envisioned a blueprint for Trump’s second time period.
Among its suggestions was a suggestion to consolidate BLS with the Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Bureau to make it “a more manageable, focused, and efficient statistical agency.”
Antoni’s tutorial work can also be sparse, inflicting concern from prominent economists. Last 12 months, he co-published a report that purported “the American economy has actually been in recession since 2022,” which economists across the political spectrum have criticized.
In previous appearances on cable media, Antoni echoed Trump’s dissatisfaction with labor statistics and with the Federal Reserve. In one appearance from earlier this year, Antoni accused the central financial institution of “election interference” for reducing charges shut to the 2024 presidential election, a declare Trump has additionally made.
Antoni, who shouldn’t be at present main the bureau, faces a troublesome Senate affirmation course of. His nomination should first go by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, which counts average Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins as members.
A spokesperson for HELP committee Chairman Bill Cassidy informed NCS the committee plans to maintain a listening to for Antoni pending accomplished paperwork.
A listening to for Antoni could be uncommon, because the committee doesn’t sometimes maintain hearings for the place. But it wouldn’t be unprecedented. The final time this occurred was throughout Trump’s first time period for one more Heritage Foundation economist, William Beach.
‘It undermines credibility’: Former BLS chief slams Trump for firing his successor over jobs report
Antoni’s Twitter account was created in 2015, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. He initially seems to have used his full identify – ErwinJohnAntoni – because the username and Erwin J. Antoni III because the show identify. The account’s profile image featured Trump in revolutionary garb gripping an enormous gun, an American flag at his again, a bald eagle perched on his reverse arm, and flames rising behind him.
Under two separate show names, Antoni continuously referred to himself as an “economist” on the account. In March 2020 through the Covid-19 pandemic, the account tweeted twice that he was an economist.
By May 2020, after Antoni was awarded his Ph.D., he had reverted the show identify to Dr. Erwin J. Antoni III whereas conserving the deal with phdofbombsaway. A conservative think tank tagged Antoni on the account in 2020, which helped NCS hint the account to him.
That summer season, after he modified his show to Dr. Erwin J. Antoni III, he tweeted four separate times that he was an economist.
The account additionally used the phrase “You called down the thunder, now reap the whirlwind,” throughout each show names 20 occasions. On his skilled account, “RealEJAntoni,” Antoni used the phrase “reap the whirlwind” not less than thrice.
Antoni’s posts throughout this time typically mirrored Trump’s rhetoric. In January 2018, Antoni criticized a possible authorities shutdown as a method to “derail” the economic system. “#SchumerShutdown is the Dems’ pathetic attempt to derail the Trump Train economy. It won’t work – get on board or get run over,” he wrote.
When Arizona Sen. John McCain handed away in August 2018, Antoni tweeted under his real name, “I like a senator who doesn’t die” — echoing Trump’s notorious line from 2015 insulting McCain for being captured through the Vietnam War.
Sometime in mid-2019, when Antoni was a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Northern Illinois University, the account’s username modified to “phdofbombsaway” with the show identify “Dr. Curtis LeMay.” The profile image also changed to what seems to be to be a nuclear explosion. The username and show identify seem to be a reference to “Bombs Away LeMay,” a reference to the Cold War common and his controversial stance selling the use of nuclear weapons. LeMay ran alongside segregationist George Wallace on his 1968 presidential ticket for the far-right American Independent Party.
In different posts, Antoni continuously focused progressive congresswomen within the so-called “Squad.” He known as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “whack job” and “space cadet.” In November 2019, he known as her an “antisemite” after she led an effort to strive to drive Trump White House staffer Stephen Miller to resign after leaked emails confirmed Miller shared articles from a White nationalist web site earlier than he labored on the White House. In March 2020, Antoni tweeted about Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Trump critic, saying “No one wants to have sex with that catfish.” When Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted in assist of “LGBTQIA+” points, Antoni invoked a debunked conspiracy concept that Omar was married to her brother. “Does the I stand for incest? With your brother?” he wrote.
He additionally repeatedly tweeted that liberal economist Paul Krugman was a pedophile, a smear for which there isn’t any proof – and one he additionally hurled at former President Joe Biden and former FBI director James Comey.
In February 2020, Antoni declared: “Feminism is that belief by which women are liberated from false slavery to men in order to become true slaves to corporations.” And in another put up, responding to a put up to #TellMeALie, he wrote “attractive feminists exist.”
And in March 2020, he dismissed LGBTQ individuals’s existence, writing: “There is only one sexual orientation — everything else is a disorientation.”
Some of his different provocative posts had been sexually graphic anti-gay taunts at NCS anchors Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper, each of whom are homosexual.
Antoni also promoted the debunked conspiracy concept that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich — who was murdered in 2016 in what police described as a botched theft — was truly the supply of leaked DNC emails through the 2016 presidential marketing campaign, moderately than Russian hackers.
He engaged with an account that promoted the far-right QAnon conspiracy concept in hashtags, in a tweet attacking Sen. Adam Schiff, who was then a House consultant. And he continuously tweeted on the far-right account “Catturd2,” recognized for spreading conspiracy theories.
Antoni, utilizing his given identify, additionally used the account to promote hardline socially conservative views.
In September 2020, he argued against abortion even in instances of rape, writing: “If the original principle was that abortion is wrong because it kills an innocent human life, then the manner of conception does not change that fact. In this line of thinking, abortion after rape would be punishing an innocent child for someone else’s crime.”
As phdofbombsaway in 2019, he as soon as posted that abortion was “child sacrifice.”
Antoni deserted his Twitter account after Trump was banned from the platform following the January 6 assault on the US Capitol. He migrated over to the now-defunct web site Parler utilizing the phdofbombsaway username.
In one of the few archived posts from the account, he posted a meme of a Twitter avatar-like hen sporting an Adolf Hitler mustache and Nazi armband, writing “I believe censorship is bad, 1984-level bad.”
NCS’s Max Rego contributed to this story.