FLASHBACK: Hollywood Buys Russian Collusion Hoax Hook, Line and Sinker

Social media can be a train wreck, but one enduring meme is both fun and formidable.

It's any variation of, "This didn't age well."

That sentiment led some Twitter users to recirculate a video this week from the progressive group NowThis News circa 2019. The clip, featuring a gaggle of recognizable stars, skewered President Donald Trump for allegedly colluding with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.

Rosie Perez. Martin Sheen. Stephen King. Rob Reiner. Christine Lahti. Robert De Niro. Laurence Fishburne. They all used their clout to push a narrative the media supported since Trump first entered the White House.

Russia elected Trump, not the American people.

The clip came after the Mueller Report's release. That document, purportedly compiled by former FBI head Robert Mueller, couldn't find any smoking-gun revelations to buttress the conspiracy claims. In modern parlance it proved the mother of all Nothingburgers.

(Mueller's subsequent 2019 testimony on the subject suggested the bureaucrat's age had caught up with him, further dampening hope on the Left that Trump would be led out of the Oval Office in handcuffs.)

Don't tell that to the assembled stars. They insisted in the video that the smoking gun was in there, except we hadn't read the full report yet.

Trust us, if a smoking gun lurked inside said Report, the mainstream media would have made it the lead story on every newscast nationwide for days, if not weeks. We'd see it so much the details would become more familiar than our first and last names to us.

Instead, nothing of the sort existed. Clear-eyed Americans, at least those who followed smart, alternative news sources, suspected that then. In recent years we've learned much more about the media and the FBI's combined malfeasance regarding the Trump/Russia allegations.

The entire collusion narrative slowly but surely collapsed. Even the Columbia Journalism Review, an august outlet in some consumers' eyes, ran a damning, four-part account of how both journalists and the government colluded to push a nonexistent narrative meant to bring down Trump.

The Press Versus the President.

Now, finally, the truth can be told, and the media's image has taken a horrible hit.


Before the 2016 election, most Americans trusted the traditional media and the trend was positive, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer ... Today, the US media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

And yet there's been no accountability across the board. Journalists who earned Pulitzer Prizes for their collusion stories still have those prestigious awards, unwilling to do the right thing and hand them back. (Trump filed suit against the Pulitzer board late last year for defamation tied to the erroneous reporting.)

CJR ran into sizable roadblocks trying to speak to reporters who covered the collusion hoax. Most wouldn't go on the record about the misinformation they shared.

The same holds true for Hollywood, Inc.

The aforementioned stars haven't been asked to amend their statements or apologize for misleading the nation. No "misinformation" task force has questioned their motives or reasoning in the ensuing years. The stars keep on working, with zero fear that a potential employer will re-watch that video and think twice about hiring them.

No accountability.

Other celebrities did more than appear in a single, misleading video. Late night humorists spent month after month pounding Trump for the alleged Russian ties.

Again, no apologies or after-the-fact-checking.

Some liberals still cling to the so-called ties between Trump and Russia. They even blamed the Ukrainian invasion on said ties, a farcical statement on its face.

The truth is out there, and Hollywood would prefer to keep its eyes shut rather than see it.

Written by
Christian Toto is an award-winning film critic, journalist and founder of HollywoodInToto.com, the Right Take on Entertainment. He’s the author of “Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul” and a lifelong Yankees fan. Toto lives in Denver, Colorado with his wife, two sons and too many chickens. Follow Christian on Twitter at https://twitter.com/HollywoodInToto