Curated by Mike Koetting September 30, 2025
I’ve been on vacation the last two weeks, so I don’t have a new post. But to fill the vacuum that would otherwise be created in the universe, I am posting this collection of relevant quotes on the above topic.
President Donald Trump says he “did the right thing” by having his team remove Erika McEntarfer, the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics that produces the monthly jobs figures, after a weak report showed hiring slowed and was much weaker in April and May than previously reported.
“I had issues with the numbers for a long time,” Trump said to reporters Friday on the White House’s South Lawn. “But today, we’re doing so well. I believe the numbers were phony.”
“She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.”
Trump later posted: “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
PBS Reporting, (August 21, 2025)
Good intelligence consists of information free of bias. If a spy does his reporting in terms of the ideology and ambitions of his superiors, his reports are useless….It has been claimed that one of the weaknesses of the espionage apparatus of totalitarian states is that spies report not what they find but what their superiors want to hear.
Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology
Joseph Stalin seemed to have been taken by surprise by Hitler’s attack, in spite of the fact that he had countless intelligence briefings and messages – even from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill – saying that the attack was going to happen….Stalin was caught off guard because he was fundamentally paranoid and distrustful of absolutely everybody.
His underlings were scared of him and as such they didn’t tend to tell him the truth. They would tailor their reports to him in such a way that he wouldn’t fly off the handle and shout at them and send them to the gulag.
Roger Moorehouse, History Hit Podcast, 2018
These stories from the communist world show once a government starts to untether itself from statistical reality, things can get very bad, very quickly. [The two stories to which he is referring concern Stalin’s acceptance of the junk science of Lysenko and his rejection of census information showing the lethal consequences of his agricultural experiments, the combination of which allowed millions to die of famine.]
George Dillard, Medium (August 5, 2025)
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
What Trump would like is a BLS that is biased in his favor. The latest proof of that is his nominee to be the next commissioner, E. J. Antoni.
Antoni is the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. He has been a relentless booster of Trump’s policies on social media. And he has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand economic statistics.
Whether that is due to willful misinterpretation or ignorance on Antoni’s part is open for debate. But the pattern is undeniable.
Dominic Pino, The Nation (August 12, 2025)
On Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics postponed the release of the annual report on consumer expenditures—a key report for understanding inflation—without explanation. The BLS has been under stress since President Donald J. Trump fired its head, Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, after the July jobs report showed far weaker hiring statistics than expected as well as a downgrade for previous months. Officials at the BLS said the new report will be “rescheduled to a later date.”
Heath Cox Richardson (Sept 21 2025)
Between Hell and High Water 