All the President's Bozos

Some quick news:

(1) Secret show will be late today. Sorry; can’t be helped.

(2) We’re coming to Minneapolis on February 19 for a Bulwark live event. You can get tickets here. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll come out.

(3) Independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested this morning by federal agents on charges of . . . well, it’s not exactly clear. Here’s the attorney general’s explanation:

At my direction, early this morning federal agents arrested Don Lemon, Trahern Jeen Crews, Georgia Fort, and Jamael Lydell Lundy, in connection with the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

This was an “attack” in the same way Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “domestic terrorists.”

We’ll talk more about these arrests on the Secret, but they’re a BFD; a flashing, neon red-line being crossed. And to understand what’s going on you need to see the lengths to which Trump and Bondi went to arrest these journalists.

A federal magistrate judge initially rejected the government’s criminal complaint. The government appealed this decision and was rejected at the appellate level, too. And career prosecutors in both Minnesota and California refused to be involved in the prosecution.

But the regime did it anyway. Why? To prove they could.

Not sure how many red lines there are left, but I suppose we’ll find out. Soon.

Bonus: As you read down below about the news orgs pivoting to embrace Trump because they say they want to “restore trust” and “be fair” and “stand for free speech,” ask yourself what these people are saying about the arrests of opposition journalists.

If you’d like to support honest and truly independent media, we’d love to have you.

Now on to the main event.

1. It’s Not About the Money

Today I’m doing to tell you four stories that seem disconnected. They’re tales about a box-office bomb, a crazy lawsuit, a failing newspaper, and an evening news show. But they’re really all the same story: How incentives warp society under an illiberal regime. The trick is that most of the characters in this story are trying to pretend that they’re the noble ones fighting back against some nebulous, oppressive power. And the only character being honest is the villain at the center of everything.

Melania. Last year Jeff Bezos’s Amazon studios paid $40 million to Melania Trump¹ for the rights to make a documentary about her. They were bidding against themselves. At the auction, Disney offered the first lady about $14 million. Bezos chose to overpay by 186 percent.

Then Bezos chose to spend another $35 million on marketing—this on top of whatever production costs were incurred to actually shoot the film, which was probably north of $5 million. So this is—at least—an $80 million project. Meaning that in order for it to have any chance at breaking even for Bezos, it would have to open to roughly $28 million this weekend when it lands in theaters.

Spoiler: ...