President Donald Trump on Friday fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, hours after the agency reported that job growth in the U.S. had slowed to a near-halt.
In a Truth Social post that also directed even more fire at Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Trump accused BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer of being a political appointee who was manipulating jobs data.
“I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s [Harris’] chances of Victory,” Trump wrote.
“We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,” he added.
Depends on timing. We’re in a small window between them showing their intent, and a first-for-humanity inability to organize against them. Once ORNL gets their nuke-powered AI up and running, and fed all the Palantir data and the decades of mass surveillance data the NSA has but hasn’t been able to use at scale, the regime will be able to have a constantly-updated list of the people most likely to instigate an uprising, and can just MLK them or blackmail them before their movement gets off the ground. All that will remain are easily-dealt-with and easily-discredited lone wolves.
Goddamn man. Depressing. This is exactly what I expected though, and nearly lost my mind over 20 years ago.
I was so excited about technology, and then it occurred to me that it would definitely have been used by Hitler 1.0 if he’d had it, and it definitely will be used by Hitler 2.0 when the time comes.
The next big authoritarian movement will not need neighbors informing on each other. People have unwittingly prepared a dossier on themselves and handed it to the Stasi.
Man, oh man.
What Hitler 1.0 actually had available to him was adequate to maintain complete control over Germany despite the German people going through much worse than what we’ve experienced (so far, at least). Germany had clearly lost WWII, her cities had been bombed into complete rubble (so much so that there really wasn’t anything left to bomb), and the Allied armies were rapidly closing in on all sides. And yet Hitler and his cronies didn’t lose their grip on power, not until the Russians were literally overhead and Hitler put a bullet in his brain. The German people never rose up and overthrew fascism on their own.