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Stuart K. Hayashi
Having seen yet another adulatory Instagram post about Top Gun: Maverick, I can take no more. After everything the public has learned about undue pressure of women in Hollywood, it saddens me that this is still going on.
The cruelty that Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology have inflicted upon the actress Nazanin Boniadi is unconscionable. Following Tom
Impressive: “After becoming CEE and chairperson of Alcoa in 1987, Paul O’Neill said, ‘I went to Alcoa with a burning fire … to demonstrate that it is possible for a truly great organization to be values based without any reservations.’ One ethical value that O’Neill championed was workplace safety. When it came to human dignity, […]
Imagine that some forty-odd years after your death, someone tells a terrible lie about you that many people hear and believe. Legally, it is not possible to libel the dead. But is it ethical? It’s tempting to say no, because something that shouldn’t have happened has happened, and even though you are dead, your reputation has been damaged. And if we agree that this is a wrong, does it make any difference if the victim of that wrong was a very bad person?
With those adjustments, we arrive at the case of Ed Gein, whose story is told in the third season of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Monster (previous seasons of which profiled the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the parent-killers Lyle and Erik Menendez). Murphy’s version of Gein (played by Charlie Hunnam) is an effeminate middle-aged man who lives alone in a chaotic and decaying farmhouse, where he pursues the macabre hobby of making things out of human skin harvested from corpses stolen from local graveyards. He is also a murderer who eats parts of his victims and then packages other parts for the neighbours (without telling them where the meat comes from, of course). He has a female confidante and accomplice with whom he is romantically entangled, and he’s into autoerotic asphyxiation and cross-dressing. He stalks and murders a young woman he feels has a babysitting job that was rightfully his; he murders two lost deer hunters with a chainsaw; he temporarily abducts and permanently terrifies his babysitting charges; and (worst of all in terms of cultural taboos) he has sex with multiple corpses.
The series is titled Monster: The Ed Gein Story, and the Netflix description says: “Leatherface. Buffalo Bill. Norman Bates. These iconic Hollywood killers all trace back to one terrifying real-life murderer: Ed Gein.” The real Gein certainly was a murderer. And the diffident protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho did, indeed, draw inspiration from Gein, whose appearance and manner were so completely at odds with his actions. But how faithful is Murphy to Ed Gein’s actual life story?
True-crime historian Harold Schechter, professor emeritus at Queens College, City University of New York, published an influential history of Ed Gein in 1989 titled Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, The Original Psycho. Schechter is careful to distinguish rumours circulating about Gein in the small town of Plainfield where he lived from what was finally established by police, by psychiatrists and other clinical professionals, by the testimony of Gein himself, and by the eventual trial.
Gein did not eat his victims, nor did he distribute their flesh for consumption by others. He did not have a female confidante and accomplice—the character of Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son) is fabricated from a real woman who initially declared that she had been in a romantic relationship with Gein, but quickly retracted that claim. A babysitter and a pair of deer hunters did go missing in the county, but these disappearances were never tied to Gein and he never murdered anyone with a chainsaw. In fact, no male bones or body parts were recovered from Gein’s property at all: just as Dahmer exclusively murdered men, Gein’s victims were exclusively female, whether they were dead or alive. There’s no suggestion that Gein was ever anything but a competent babysitter (although some of the neighbourhood children later felt bad, when they realised that they had seen, but not understood, some of Gein’s skin-masks and shrunken heads).
And Gein did not have sex with corpses. “Gein would go to his own grave insisting that besides masturbation, he had never had a sexual experience of any kind in his life,” Schechter tells us. He adds:
Though Eddie freely admitted to grave robbing and didn’t hesitate to supply the authorities with information—a complete list of his victims, the dates of his raids, and a detailed account of his methods—he never spoke about any sexual activity with the dead, except to deny that he had made use of the bodies in that way. Indeed, when asked whether he had ever performed sex on a corpse, he reacted indignantly—not, however, because the notion of copulating with the cadaver of a sixty-nine-year-old invalid seemed monstrous to him but rather because it seemed so unhygienic. He had avoided sexual relations with the unearthed bodies, he told authorities, because “they smelled too bad.”
Wasn’t Gein’s true story bad and interesting enough to captivate a Netflix audience? After all, plundering gravesites and wearing the skin of the dead was surely more unusual and immoral than Lyle and Erik Menendez’s murder of their own parents. And if the true story was bad and interesting enough, why embellish it with debunked rumours and outright lies?
All Men Behaving Badly
Just six months after it was released by Netflix, Anna Kendrick’s feminist film about a real serial killer already looks like an ideological relic.
Charlotte Allen
The most obvious answer is that Netflix wanted the series to be more sensational, more taboo, and more outrageous. There is not a lot of necrophilia content on Netflix, and Murphy seems to realise that he has to keep pace with the horror films that Gein’s crimes inspired if he is to satisfy the slasher audience Netflix evidently wants to attract. So, the series is not just about Ed Gein, it is also a commentary about the impact Gein’s story has had on the horror genre. The scene in which Gein murders the deer hunters with a chainsaw while dressed as his dead mother is best understood as a reference to both The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (which featured a skin-mask wearing serial killer murdering and dismembering young people with a chainsaw) and Psycho (in which the antagonist murders travellers while dressed as his dead mother), and not to events that actually occurred (although Gein did make skin garments, there is no evidence he ever killed anyone while wearing them).
Do these distortions matter? Works of fiction “based on a true story” enjoy considerable storytelling latitude, although it would defy convention to tell an entirely false story and claim it is true—The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was marketed this way even though it bears almost no relation to the story of Ed Gein that allegedly inspired it. Netflix recently got itself into trouble by opening the series Baby Reindeer with the even bolder claim “this is a true story”—and is now fighting a lawsuit from the real-life counterpart of the show’s antagonist. Monster: The Ed Gein Story didn’t make that claim, but it still uses its protagonist’s real name.
Which takes us back to our opening question about the ethics of defaming the dead. It’s not plausible to insist that the dead have no interests. We make wills because we care about how our property is distributed after we are gone; we tell our next of kin whether we want to be buried or cremated because we care about what happens to our bodies after we lose consciousness permanently. Some of us honour the wishes of long-dead grandparents or even-longer-dead ancestors and would consider it disrespectful to do otherwise. So while it might appear logical to deny that Murphy’s series has wronged Gein himself, merely pointing out that he is dead is not sufficient to establish that he has no interests at all.
Could a retaliatory impulse explain reluctance to see any issue with Murphy’s third season? According to Schechter, many residents of Plainfield were bitter about Gein being sent to a psychiatric institution (where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic) rather than to jail. Ten years later, he did finally stand trial for one of the murders and was found guilty, but because it had been decided that he was unable to understand the difference between right and wrong, he was simply returned to the psychiatric institution. Perhaps those learning about Gein’s crimes today feel a similar bitterness, and so they think being lied about in this specific way compensates in some small way for a historical injustice.
Or perhaps it would be better to argue that if something has gone wrong in the case of Monster: The Ed Gein Story, it is the audience being lied to that matters not Gein being lied about. The truth matters for its own sake, and when using real people’s names and dramatising real people’s lives, storytellers have an obligation to do so accurately. When a story is told incorrectly, its subject is not wronged (unless they are alive to suffer reputational damage), but its audience may be, by being misinformed, and thereby absorbing false beliefs. How many of the tens of millions of people who have watched the show since its release (Netflix reported 12.2 million in its first week) then asked ChatGPT how much of it was true? Not many, I would imagine.
Does it matter whether people have false beliefs about a four-decades dead murderer? There are far more consequential matters about which we might develop false beliefs, and it’s hard to see how these particular false beliefs could hurt anyone. In the end, the issue might be nothing more than a matter of principle—that “based on a true story” should mean what it says. And stories not based on truth should not market themselves as such.
As the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) transitioned from internet meme to real-life government reform effort, the agency claimed it would achieve many far-reaching, seemingly improbable goals.
It was going to slash $2 trillion in federal spending, eliminate burdensome and unconstitutional regulations, upgrade the federal government's "tech stack," evict the woke deep state, and, time permitting, balance the budget.
When it launched, both DOGE supporters and critics seemed to believe the agency was striving for the wholesale dismantling of the federal government. As the dust settles one year later, we can get a more accurate sense of how much DOGE has done to shrink and streamline the federal government.
Its cost-cutting efforts have been unsuccessful, but it did accomplish quite a bit toward shrinking the federal government's workforce. The Trump administration's deregulatory drive has been moderately successful, although it's debatable how much credit DOGE should receive for that.
Federal Employment
DOGE's biggest success on its own terms has been its reduction in federal employees.
When the second Trump administration came into office in January 2024, there were some 2.4 million civilian federal employees. That's about 1.5 percent of all employed civilian workers.
In its August 2025 jobs report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found 97,000 fewer federal workers by the end of that month. That figure does not include the 154,000 workers who accepted DOGE's "fork in the road" offer to voluntarily leave their federal jobs in exchange for being paid through the end of September 2025.
The precise impact of these deferred resignations on federal employment is difficult to parse, as the October government shutdown has delayed the release of BLS jobs reports that would count the federal workers lost through deferred resignations.
The Partnership for Public Service estimates that as of late September 2025, 201,000 people had left federal employment during the second Trump administration through deferred resignations, early retirements, reductions in force, and the layoffs of probationary employees. This measure isn't a complete snapshot of the fall in federal employment, as it does not include new hires—like all those extra Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents—or people retiring on schedule.
The Trump administration estimated that number would reach 300,000 by the end of 2025. If that larger figure stands, the Trump administration will have managed to cut the federal workforce by some 12 percent.
Federal Regulation
A core component of DOGE's original mission, as outlined in a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, was to unilaterally cut federal red tape.
The actual deregulation we've seen under the Trump administration has come from more traditional routes: individual agencies issuing deregulatory rules and actions.
Early in his term, the president instructed agencies to impose total regulatory costs that were "significantly less than zero" and to eliminate 10 rules for every one rule adopted. According to a parsing of the latest Unified Agenda by the Economic Policy Innovation Center, the administration is closer to a 5–1 ratio of deregulatory actions to regulatory actions.
It has taken 778 active deregulatory actions, compared to 161 active regulatory actions. Significant deregulatory actions (those with an estimated economic effect of $100 million or more) number 71, compared to 31 significant regulatory actions. That's less than the Trump administration's goal, but significantly more deregulation than the Biden administration managed, since it added $1.8 trillion in new regulatory costs.
Federal Spending
DOGE's impact on federal spending is murkier, largely due to its inability to accurately and transparently account for its own claimed savings.
The agency's website says that it has saved taxpayers $214 billion by canceling contracts, grants, and leases. Unfortunately, DOGE's "wall of receipts" tallying these savings is riddled with errors and accounting gimmicks.
For instance, the agency will count as a savings the entire value of a contract it canceled, even if much of the obligated money has already been spent.
Another DOGE savings gimmick is to lower the maximum amount the government could potentially spend on a contract, even though those funds had not been spent and likely never would have been spent. This practice, it's been pointed out, is comparable to taking out a credit card with a $20,000 limit, canceling the card, and then claiming you've saved $20,000.
A Politico investigation into DOGE's claimed savings found that of the $145 billion it claimed to have saved via canceled contracts through the end of June 2025, only $1.4 billion—less than 1 percent—were real, verifiable cash savings.
DOGE did help identify and pause spending that would become the $8.9 billion rescission package passed by Congress in July. For context, that rescission package amounts to less than a percent of the federal discretionary budget. Federal spending in FY 2025 is an ominous $6.66 trillion, compared to $6.29 trillion in FY 2024. The deficit stands at $1.8 trillion.
The post Almost a Year After It Launched, DOGE's Legacy Is Mixed appeared first on Reason.com.
THE LEFT WOULD DO THIS HERE IF IT COULD:
South Africa now has more anti-White laws than Apartheid had anti-Black laws.
This is deeply wrong: the goal should be no race-based laws! https://t.co/l4CxdM1wnO
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 12, 2025
UPDATE:
I first heard the names Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes when I was a high-school sophomore. My teacher announced, as if it were a fact as firm as any law of thermodynamics, that the Great Depression was caused by laissez-faire policies advocated by Smith, and that salvation came from the more scientifically sound ideas of Keynes—ideas expertly put into practice by Franklin Roosevelt.
“Depressions are a thing of the past,” my teacher proclaimed. “Keynes taught us how to prevent them.”
“Cool!” I recall thinking with as much relief as a 15-year-old can muster about such matters.
Seven years later, I graduated from college with a degree in economics. By then I’d learned that my high-school history teacher’s history was bunk. The Great Depression wasn’t a failure of capitalism or of the ideas of Adam Smith. Instead, it was caused chiefly by the Federal Reserve foolishly allowing the money supply to shrink by more than a third. Further, this economic downturn was prolonged by Herbert Hoover’s and FDR’s unprecedented economic interventions. (I learned only years afterward that Keynes wisely opposed most of these interventions.)
Yet I had the good fortune early in college to stumble into an economics course taught by an inspired and inspiring professor. Otherwise I’d likely to this day believe that the free-market ideas of Adam Smith are mistaken, and that active government intervention is necessary to keep economies steady and growing. And any candidate for political office who said otherwise would have had no chance of gaining my vote.
Obviously, our beliefs about the past exercise an immense influence on the way we interpret today’s economic events and policies. Former US Senator Phil Gramm—himself an accomplished professional economist—and I wrote our new book The Triumph of Economic Freedom with the express purpose of challenging what we regard as the seven most dangerous myths about American economic history.
Our challenge to these myths mostly takes the form of confronting them with straightforward historical facts. The myths that we take on aren’t the products of subtle differences in interpretations of facts known and accepted by all. Instead, these myths spring from a shocking ignorance of basic, clear-cut empirical realities.
Consider what we call “the Genesis myth,” which is that the Industrial Revolution that began in Great Britain in the 18th century enriched factory owners by impoverishing industrial workers. Although economic historians disagree about exactly when real wages for ordinary workers began to rise, few doubt that by the 1840s those wages were on their way permanently upward, and not a small amount of evidence supports the proposition that these wage increases began several decades earlier. As unattractive as those early 19th-century factory jobs would be to us today, they were quite attractive to the workers in Britain who sought them out.
Likewise with America’s own Industrial Revolution, the “Gilded Age.” American schoolchildren are taught that the final third of the 19th century witnessed John D. Rockefeller and other “robber barons” jacking up prices to extortionate levels, poisoning consumers with unsanitary food, suppressing wages down to pauper rates and driving their workers like slaves.
Yet despite still being a staple feature of American textbooks and in the popular media, this tale is false. This era witnessed remarkable economic growth in the US—growth that was shared by ordinary Americans. Although the US population nearly doubled between 1865 and 1900, real per-capita GDP surged upward by 83% and the real annual earnings of all nonfarm workers rose by 62%. The rise in the average real hourly wage of manufacturing workers was especially impressive, jumping—as found by the economist Lawrence Officer—by 158% between 1865 and 1905.
At the dawn of the 20th century, ordinary Americans had more and better food, housing, clothing and leisure than their parents did three decades earlier.
No myth, however, looms as large and ominously today as that which insists that America’s industrial economy and middle class have been “hollowed out” over the past half-century by globalisation. We Americans are told incessantly that starting in the mid-1970s, US industry began to be shipped abroad as trade became freer—a figurative defenestration of the US economy that only accelerated with the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and China’s 2001 entry into the WTO.
And yet all the evidence contradicts this claim. US industrial output is today at an all-time high, as is US industrial capacity. Ditto for real wages (including those of production and nonsupervisory workers) and for the real net worth of the average American household.
In our book, Senator Gramm and I bring forthright facts to bear on these and other popular claims about American history, both long-past and recent. These facts, we believe, expose these claims as false. And exposing false claims is an important step in diminishing the chances that destructive policies will be pursued.
The Triumph of Economic Freedom is published by Rowman & Littlefield.
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