The Daily Beast Tries To Sink The Bismarck

New Trump BLS nominee tagged for his taste in battleships

“Previously a reporter at the Daily Mail,” Sarah Ewall-Wice “covered the White House, Capitol Hill, and was on the road with the Kamala Harris campaign,” reads her bio at The Daily Beast. “She also worked at CBS News, where she covered politics through the lens of economics and was an embed in the 2020 campaign.”

Now, I am not saying that Ewall-Wice is bad at her job. On the contrary, her job at the world’s greatest shitlib website is propagandistic coverage of everything Trump, Republican, or capitalist, so well done on Ms. Ewall-Wice for noticing that E.J. Antony has a large image of “Adolf Hitler’s favorite battleship” on his office wall. Oh noes, a “Nazi battleship”!

Never mind the broken statistical reporting of Erika McEntarfer, who was fired for incompetence at the beginning of August. Ewall-Wice is right. We should absolutely focus on Mr. Antony’s battleship preferences as he prepares to become the new head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In fact I want questions about this subject in his committee hearing, please.

Moments after the Daily Beast article was published, social media accounts were touting versions of the Bismarck with a Nazi flag suspended in the rigging. These are obvious photochop or AI fakes. Shitlibs spent all of 2024 screeching about Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation and Nazi white supremacy omniphobic bigots and it failed to resonate with voters. Why not do the same seven-alarm act all over again, but with twice the self-parody?

This is the original image that has been repurposed on the wall of Mr. Antony’s office at the Heritage Foundation. Note that, whereas most ship art proudly shows flags streaming in the air, indeed often dramatically so, this one does not have any flags at all. Instead, the artist has portrayed the ship in the paint scheme it wore at the time of commission in 1940.

Ewall-Wice notes that Bismarck was “launched in 1939”, but as usual with battleships, this one was still incomplete at launch. A reporter with a modicum of naval history background would know that the date of commission matters more than the date a ship first floated on water. A political hack, on the other hand, thinks that 1939 is a better year to reference because it is the beginning of the Second World War, and Nazis are bad, m’kay?

Devilishly difficult to duplicate, that paint scheme is the favorite of model kit builders, largely because the ship itself is never a very challenging build. But it is not the paint scheme “he” wore in the Battle of the Denmark Strait during 1941. (Germans refer to this particular ship with male pronouns because its captain, Ernst Lindemann, wanted it that way.) Bismarck instead sailed to his doom without the big swastikas fore and aft, per the 1940 paint scheme.

Bismarck model kits are probably the most popular in the world. The art on Mr. Antony’s wall in fact comes from what is likely the world’s most popular Bismarck kit. To be sure, Germans had a unique national aesthetic of naval architecture, just like every nation that built capital ships. Put a Bismarck side by side with, say, a König class battleship of the First World War German navy, and the evolutionary roots in the earlier design are visible. There was nothing at all specifically “Nazi” about the battleship Bismarck itself, though there is definitely something German.

Which brings us to the critique of the Bismarck as under-engineered, undergunned, and ultimately unsuccessful. German industry had lost the art of building large naval guns during the interwar period, so 15-inch guns were the biggest guns available, but other navies already had 16-inch guns on battleships. Indeed, the US sailed battleships with nine 16-inch guns. Four months after the Bismarck was commissioned, the Japanese navy commissioned the Yamato with nine 18-inch guns.

Main armament was light, but German architects also did not mount nearly enough antiaircraft guns on the Bismarck, and this proved his undoing when a ponderous British seaplane scored a torpedo hit on the rudder without taking any fire. Unable to steer, the ship was doomed to interception and destruction by HMS King George V (ten 14-inch guns) and HMS Rodney (nine 16-inch guns). All the navies of World War II quite underestimated the number of AA guns that would festoon the decks of their battleships by the end of the war.

In fact, battleships saw far more action as antiaircraft platforms than battleship-hunters during the war, especially in the Pacific. There are only a handful of real battleship-on-battleship engagements to speak of in WW2. Famously, the war ended with aircraft carriers as the masters of the seas and battleships as hugely-expensive support vessels for the carriers. No battleships were started after 1945. Today, no navy in the world has battleships in their fleet.

The reason is simple economics. Battleships were the most complex human constructions in history. The battleship race had been the most expensive arms race in human history, and now it was over, for the entire class had become obsolete. Today, a cruiser carries one-tenth of the crew and has missiles with far greater range than 16-inch guns. Was the Bismarck even worth building? Or does she represent a sunk cost fallacy, pun intended?

Unsurprisingly, Erwin John Antony is conservative and a critic of climate change regulations. He is a big fan of Donald Trump’s deregulatory regime and advocated for a halt in BLS labor statistics production until reporting issues are fixed. He “sometimes jokes on social media that the ‘L’ in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ acronym is silent,” according to a Wall Street Journal profile.

According to a commencement program from Northern Illinois University, Antoni earned a master’s and Ph.D. in economics from that school in 2018 and 2020, respectively, and a bachelor of arts degree from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. Antoni’s LinkedIn profile says he attended Lansdale Catholic High School outside Philadelphia from 2002 to 2006.

Mr. Antony’s qualifications are perfect for the Trump administration.

He doesn’t appear to have published any formal academic research since his dissertation, according to queries of National Bureau of Economic Research working papers and Google Scholar. Much of his commentary on the Heritage website praises Trump’s policies and economic record. He frequently posts on X and appears on conservative podcasts such as former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” where he criticized the economy under President Joe Biden and lauds Trump’s economy.

Worst of all, according to his critics, Mr. Antony doesn’t take part in the academic circle-jerk. “Publications by Erika McEntarfer — the BLS commissioner who was ousted by Trump on Aug. 1, midway through her term, after a weak jobs report — have been cited 1,327 times,” Ms. Ewall-Wice writes. Surely middle America will rise up in revolt when they hear that Donald Trump has appointed someone who isn’t an egghead to an important economic governance position.

“EJ is a history buff, as many Americans are, and has an appreciation for the significance of maritime history — his office is full of a variety of artifacts and artwork featuring US battleships and other famous vessels, including the USS New Jersey and the USS Misouri [sic], that have been used throughout major wars,” the White House responds in the Daily Beast article.

My question, which Ms. Ewall-Wice is too busy propagandizing to ask, is whether Mr. Antony has ever built a Bismarck kit, or a New Jersey, or a Missouri. A modeler and afficianado of battleships is exactly the sort of economist America needs right now, when there are serious questions about the future of American shipbuilding and the US Navy has produced a series of ‘breakthroughs’ that turned out to be boondoggles, like the Zumwalt class and the Littoral Combat Ship.

Good questions for Mr. Antony might be: What does the history of the Bismarck teach us about the centralized command economy of the Nazi state and the impact of nationalized industry on resource allocation?

Or: What lessons does the interwar loss of German capital ship construction industry hold for policymakers today who allow this vital defense-related sector to languish and wither?

Or even: What attracts you to the Bismarck? Is it the sea story, the sudden loss of the HMS Hood and her crew, the drama of the chase by the Polish destroyer Piorun and the Royal Navy, the incredible damage Bismarck endured before her sinking, the tragic loss of his crew in the water, or the possibly-apocryphal rescue of the ship’s cat?

And my favorite: Are you a model ship hobbyist? Do you have a secret basement model shop full of 1/700 and 1/350-scale builds? Do you even airbush, bro? What’s your favorite way of applying decals? How is your brush hand? What about decking? Rigging?

Not: Does your Bismarck have a flag, and if so, what kind of flag? But: Does your Bismarck’s flag have aluminum foil in the fold to lend it shape?

Not being an economist, I have no questions for Mr. Antony about Social Security or labor market data collection and analysis. But Ms. Sarah Ewall-Wice and The Daily Beast do not really want to ask those questions, either. They are instead ‘just asking questions’ about the Bismarck as an ideological proxy, which is a grievous error, since there are many different reasons to admire the ship and its story.

Not only does this attack line come off as trite and inauthentic and strained, it smears every model kits builder and naval enthusiast and military history fan who admires the Bismarck for purely non-ideological reasons. It is exactly the sort of cancel culture war nonsense that repels normies. Indeed, it would not shock me if Mr. Antony chose that specific background to trigger exactly this sort of deranged shitlib response, so that his views, however extreme, seem normal in relation to those of his attackers. If so, the trick has worked to perfection.