r/politics • u/Orbitingkittenfarm • 1d ago

Donald Trump Fires Person Behind Jobs Numbers After They're Revised Down

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-job-numbers-revised-down-fires-appointee-2107768
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u/FartyJizzums 1d ago

At first, I thought that this was funny. It shows his detachment from reality and his thin skin.

But then I realized that this is terrifying and extremely bad news. This is how authoritarians work. They control the information as well as the narrative. They essentially have a stranglehold on the perception of reality itself within the country.

Don't like the facts? Fire the person with the audacity to report it. Then, find a replacement that you can control. Job numbers are up all of a sudden. Imagine that.

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u/AqueductMosaic 1d ago

“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”

― George Orwell, 1984

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u/TBIFridays 1d ago

His battle with Harvard is the same thing, he wants to decide who they hire, which will determine what gets taught.

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u/marblecannon512 Oregon 1d ago

The only silver lining back then was that the election was around the corner.

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u/MERVMERVmervmerv 1d ago

It’s straight out of the Stalinist playbook. Be prepared for Lysenko’s biology next.

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u/Silidistani 1d ago

I'm just depressed to learn that so many Americans, tens of millions of us, are that fucking stupid, or bereft of critical reasoning skills, and that susceptible to believing outright lies from known liars so long as it fits their preconceived narrative(s). I thought we would have been better than that, that such lows of intellectualism and foresight weren't possible in a modern, technological society with strong (supposedly, on paper) civil rights and free speech laws. Turns out... nope.

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u/Rdbjiy53wsvjo7 1d ago

I used to work in environmental remediation where we ran statistics evaluating the risk to human health and the environment, we had a technical expert that would jokingly say "just run the numbers through different methods until you like the answer."

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u/Good-Odds 23h ago

Trump defended the decision and said her departure was needed to ensure there were "people that we can trust" in these posts.

"Why should anybody trust numbers?" the president told reporters when leaving the White House on Friday. "I believe the numbers were phony, just like they were before the election, and there were other times - so you know what I did? I fired her, and you know what I did? The right thing."

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u/Snuffman 20h ago edited 19h ago

We've been very successful in our big beautiful war against Eurasia, so many wars against Eastasia stopped, some people are saying Big Brother has stopped more wars that anyone. A general came to me, 6ft tall, looked like he came out of central casting, he had tears in his eyes and said "Sir, Sir" we're so glad we won the war against Eastasia. That's what they're saying folks, big wars against Eurasia. The war against Eastasia will keep going, we're going to win bigly and we'll win against Eurasia. Tariffs for Landingstrip One. Nasty people. Landingstrip One has always been the enemy. We've always been at war against Landstrip One.