Project 2025 architect and Nazi-battleship lover E.J. Antoni spent the last decade posting offensive remarks on Twitter and Parler before Donald Trump nominated him to be the new head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
CNN analyzed a decade’s worth of Antoni’s posts from a series of since-deleted usernames. The posts included extremist views, baseless conspiracy theories, and sexist attacks, including “at least five” derogatory jokes implying Kamala Harris had slept around to advance her career.
For example, shortly after Harris dropped out of the running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Antoni, 37, tweeted, “You can’t run a race on your knees” in response to an edited, sexually explicit Harris campaign poster.
Antoni first posted under the handle “ErwinJohnAntoni” before changing to “phdofbombsaway” in 2019. Following Trump’s ban from Twitter after the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, where Antoni claims to have been a “bystander,” he took his posts to the conservative posting haven Parler.
In other posts, Antoni pushed a debunked conspiracy that Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar was in an incestuous relationship with her brother, suggested liberal economist Paul Krugman, former President Joe Biden, and former FBI director James Comey were all pedophiles, and mocked the death of late Republican Sen. John McCain.
CNN’s report on Antoni comes the same day a disastrous jobs report showed American unemployment had reached 4.3 percent, the highest number since April 2021. It is the first jobs report since since Trump fired the previous head of the BLS, Biden-appointee Erika McEntarfer, on unfounded claims that McEntarfer had manipulated July’s bad numbers for political reasons.
When pressed by CNN for comment on Antoni’s tweets, White House representative Taylor Rogers dodged the question, saying, “President Trump has nominated Dr. EJ Antoni to fix the issues at the BLS and restore trust in the jobs reports.”
At the time of Antoni’s nomination, Trump stated on Truth Social that he believes he will “ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE.” One way Antoni envisions doing this is by eliminating monthly jobs reports.
In August, Antoni told Fox Business, “the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data.”
Antoni’s exposed posting history is yet another controversy for the BLS nominee. In addition to his presence at Jan. 6, Antoni boasted about Adolf Hitler’s favorite battleship during a 2023 podcast where he appeared in front of a massive portrait for the Bismarck.
“The Bismarck, yep, in all his glory,” Antoni said. “It is at the bottom of the sea, along with the Hood, that it sank just days before.”
The “Hood“ is the British naval ship HMS Hood, which the Bismarck sank in May 1941, killing all but three of its 1,418 crew.
Antoni also has no government experience, and economists from across the political spectrum have argued against his nomination.
Speaking to The Washington Post, The American Enterprise Institute’s Stan Veuger called Antoni as “utterly unqualified and as partisan as it gets.”
