Category Archives: The Everyman Chronicles

The ‘Melania’ Box Office Hoax


partly The Melania Box Office Numbers Don’t Add Up

Let’s talk about the easiest hoax to pull off in Hollywood: inflating your box office numbers.

I spent more than a decade as a box office reporter for USA Today, and here’s what most people don’t know about those weekend tallies you see splashed across trade publications. Studios report their own numbers. They call up Variety, Deadline, the tracking services, and they say, “we made X million dollars.”

Nobody from Comscore or Exhibitor Relations is standing in theater lobbies with a clicker counting asses in seats. The studios estimate their grosses, usually on the generous side, and everyone prints it.

By the time actual receipts get counted weeks later, the number has usually dropped, but by then nobody gives a shit because we’ve moved on to the next weekend.

So when Melania claims a $7 million opening for a documentary, my bullshit detector starts screaming. Documentary is a polite word for what this thing is, but let’s go with it.

The average movie ticket costs about $16. To hit $7 million, you’d need roughly 437,500 tickets sold. For a Melania Trump documentary. In a single weekend.

Here’s another way to look at it. If you’re a billionaire who wants to manufacture a $7 million box office, you need to spend $7 million buying tickets. That’s it. That’s the whole investment.

For someone in Trump’s circle, $7 million is couch-cushion money. Elon Musk spends more than that on a Tuesday. You buy 437,500 tickets, spread them across the country, hit theaters in red districts, make sure your people are checking in on social media, and suddenly you’ve manufactured a cultural moment. It’s not that fucking hard.

Trump’s circle has spent years screaming about hoaxes while perpetrating their own. The election was stolen. Hunter Biden’s laptop proved everything. The deep state is out to get us.

They’ve conditioned their base to believe that any institutional verification is suspect, any mainstream reporting is lies, any criticism is persecution. So why wouldn’t they game the one system that’s easiest to game?

Amazon dropped $75 million on this thing between acquisition and marketing. There is every incentive to make it look like a success. The studio reports the number it wants reported. The tracking services publish it. The trades run with it. By the time anyone might audit the actual receipts, the narrative is already locked in. Melania was a hit.

I’m not saying the numbers aren’t real. But they are literally bought. The question is who dropped the dough. It would be cheap, easy, and perfectly in character to buy out theaters to pump the numbers. Let’s say Hoax Adjacent.

The box office reporting system runs on trust, and this administration has earned none. For people who see conspiracy in everything except their own behavior, spending $7 million to buy 437,500 tickets, own the libs, and claim victory over the media would be the most obvious move imaginable.

Because the people shouting loudest about hoaxes us seem to be the ones running them.

I Don’t Speak Legalese, But Judge Was Pissed

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http://childpsychiatryassociates.com/treatment-team/linda-miller/linda_miller-600 OPINION AND ORDER OF THE COURT

Before the Court is the petition of asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son for protection of the Great Writ¹ of habeas corpus. They seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law. The government has responded.

The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children. This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and order them deported, but do so by proper legal procedures.

¹ Ex parte Bollman, 8 U.S. (4 Cranch) 75 (1807); Sir William W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769); see also Magna Carta, art. 39.

Apparent also is the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence. Thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation. Among others were:

  1. “He has sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People.”
  2. “He has excited domestic Insurrection among us.”
  3. “For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us.”
  4. “He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our Legislatures.”

“We the people” are hearing echoes of that history.

And then there is that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and persons or things to be seized.

U.S. CONST. amend. IV.

Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.

Accordingly, the Court finds that the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration’s detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R. The Great Writ and release from detention are GRANTED pursuant to the attached Judgment.

Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.

—2—

Ultimately, Petitioners may, because of the arcane United States immigration system, return to their home country, involuntarily or by self-deportation. But that result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.

Philadelphia, September 17, 1787:

“Well, Dr. Franklin, what do we have?”

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike,

IT IS SO ORDERED.

SIGNED this 31st day of January, 2026.

FRED BIERY

UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE

Pretty Typical, Actually


The Justice Department opened a civil rights probe into Alex Pretti’s killing Friday, three weeks after refusing to investigate Renee Good’s death under nearly identical circumstances.

Both were 37. Both were U.S. citizens. Both were shot by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis this month. Both were recording officers on their phones when killed.

The difference? Pretti was a white male Veterans Affairs nurse. Good was a woman in a same-sex relationship.

The disparity tells a story I recognized as a crime reporter: certain victims get federal investigations and presidential concern. Others get blamed, even in death. I learned early that I wasn’t getting on the front page unless a white victim was involved.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the Pretti probe will examine everything leading up to the shooting.

For Good, his office did worse. Justice Department officials ordered prosecutors to stop drafting a civil rights investigation and instead probe Good herself for assaulting the officer who killed her. A federal judge refused the warrant request.

At least six Civil Rights Division prosecutors resigned. So did Minnesota’s acting U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson, who built his reputation prosecuting major fraud cases. More resignations followed as agents were ordered to investigate Good’s widow for alleged ties to activist groups.

That message was clear: Good deserved what happened.

I spent decades covering homicides. Editor interest spiked when victims were white. A missing white woman meant daily follow-ups and front-page placement. A Black teenager shot in the same neighborhood might rate three paragraphs on B6.

The pattern holds at the federal level now. Iimmigration enforcement has admitted to 16 shootings since July 2025, declaring each justified before investigations finished.

The actual toll is worse. At least 30 shootings by immigration agents since January 20, 2025 resulted in eight deaths. Five victims were U.S. citizens. The Wall Street Journal identified 13 instances of officers firing at or into civilian vehicles, a practice most police departments banned years ago.

ICE disclosed six custody deaths already in 2026. Last year saw 31, the highest since 2004. These exclude people who die fleeing agents or those released from custody hours before death to avoid official counts.

Pretti’s status as a registered gun owner seems to have purchased credibility with federal officials. They claimed he brandished his handgun and charged officers.

Video showed otherwise. The gun remained in his waistband while he recorded on his phone. Officers tackled him. One agent removed the weapon. Another shot him in the back.

Good faced the same posthumous smearing. Officials said she tried to run over an ICE agent. Video showed her wheels turned away when the agent opened fire.

The gun ownership detail troubles me. Does carrying legally make someone’s death more worthy of investigation? Does it make their life more valuable?

The implication is ugly. Pretti mattered because he had the trappings of respectable citizenship. Good apparently did not.

Federal agents reportedly invoked Good’s death as a warning. One who pepper sprayed a legal observer reportedly said protesters needed to stop or end up like “that lesbian bitch.”

Her death was a threat. His triggered an investigation.

I get the calculation. Pretti had credentials, legal gun ownership, and demographics that made him harder to dismiss.

Good had neither shield.

But that calculation is the problem.

Both were Americans killed exercising constitutional rights. Both deserve the same scrutiny, the same pursuit of truth, the same accountability.

The fact that only one is getting it tells us whose lives we value and whose deaths we’re willing to excuse.