To replace the competent Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner he fired last week, Trump has nominated E.J. Antoni, a man pretending to be an economist about as convincingly as Liberace pretended to be straight. If hackery could be detected with a device similar to a Geiger counter, the machine would explode as soon as you get within 100 miles of Antoni, as Antoni appears to be living a life in which he humiliates himself with Abe Simpson-like frequency.
Liberals are furious. But that only increases Antoni’s odds of confirmation, because liberal tears are to the modern right what blood is to a vampire. But, to help Republicans understand how this appointment is being received by non-MAGA folks, I’d like to imagine what it would be like if Antoni wasn’t a right-wing hack, but rather a left-wing hack. The far right and far left have a lot in common, and many of Antoni’s right-wing MAGA loon antics have a lefty burnout equivalent. Below, I’d like to introduce Bizarro World E.J. Antoni, Senior Praxis Coordinator at The Workers’ Think Tank and Needle Exchange, nominee for the Bureau of Labor Statistics by President Rashida Tlaib.
Real world E.J. Antoni: Was in in the mob at the Capitol on January 6, though he didn’t breech any barriers, was not dressed like a buffalo, and the White House called him a “bystander”.
Bizarro world E.J. Antoni: Was in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle in the summer of 2020, but only because he dipped in to buy a pack of Starburst, dropped a contact lens, and ended up searching for it for three weeks. He did not appear to sell any heroin to minors or throw molotov cocktails at police as the zone descended into lawlessness, so he’s kind of like someone who went to a party at Diddy’s house expecting Chex Mix and Cranium, only to discover — whoops! — it was actually a drug-fueled fuckstravaganza.