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Dear Citizen Collusion Truther—You Own This, Too

Hey, what’s up . . . wait, where are you going?

Why the dark glasses? Did you dye your hair? What’s with all the deleted tweets and Facebook posts lately?

Oh, I get it. Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t find any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Ruskies to throw the 2016 election, you want to move on. Act like it never happened. Or at least pretend that you weren’t part of the whole damn hoax from the start.

But . . . not so fast.

It wasn’t just the entire American media infrastructure—every broadcast network, cable news outlet, opinion page, political website, blue-checked social media account, washed-up D.C. pundit, unhinged MSNBC host, irrelevant Bush hanger-on, complicit Obama lackey, and Clinton bitter clinger who fell for the Trump-Russia collusion fairy tale. It wasn’t just every Democratic lawmaker and candidate—and a good chunk of the establishment Republican elite—who peddled a bogus story for two years. It wasn’t just every Hollywood actress, producer, legend, fluffer, has-been and late night host who caterwauled for months about Trump’s treachery.

You did it, too, my fellow citizen.

For two years, you helped do the dirty work of the vanquished Hillary Clinton campaign and the sore-loser Democratic Party. You reposted memes on your Facebook and Instagram pages that depicted Donald Trump as a Putin puppet, even suggesting tongue-in-cheek (in a way that you’d call homophobic if the other side did it) that Trump was Putin’s gay lover. You warned your neighbors that Trump’s son was a traitor. You insisted to your co-workers that, yes, Trump’s campaign team was populated by Russian agents and that the president’s attorney general, his secretary of state, his education secretary, his national security advisor, his son-in-law—among others—were Kremlin plants in the new administration.

You actually believed that Carter Page was a spy. You actually believed that the FBI opened up an investigation into the Trump campaign because a drunken George Papadopoulos said he had Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. You actually believed that Trump urinated on a Russian prostitute at a Moscow hotel. You actually believed that a teeny tiny batch of Facebook memes and Twitter posts allegedly controlled by Moscow masterminds somehow convinced voters in Michigan and Wisconsin to vote for Donald Trump.

You believed that Michael Cohen went to Prague. You believed that Russia hacked the DNC email system and fed those emails to Wikileaks. You believed that Roger Stone orchestrated the release of those emails. You believed that Sam Nunberg and Jerome Corsi and Konstantin Kilimnik had the goods on Trump.

You tuned into Joe Scarborough each morning and Rachel Maddow each night, desperate to gratify your collusion urges with their passionate rants about Trump and Putin. Ditto for Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper and Chris Cuomo. The pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post read like collusion porn every morning, teasing you and titillating you with erotic tales about secret phone calls and mysterious interpreters and raven-haired Russian lawyers.

You swooned over Adam Schiff. You suddenly believed every word of faux conservatives such as Bill Kristol and David Frum and Max Boot; people you had held in contempt prior to the 2016 election. You retweeted every post by the Krassenstein brothers, Kathy Griffin, and Alyssa Milano.

You bought prayer candles with Robert Mueller’s face etched across the glass and instead of sending Christmas cards last year, you sent everyone a weird video of washed-up celebrities singing “We Wish You a Mueller Christmas.” You signed every petition to “Protect Robert Mueller!” and reposted every commercial that warned Congress to “Save the Special Counsel!” You worried that Russian bot accounts were trying to mess with Mueller.

You bought James Comey’s book. You bought Andrew McCabe’s book. You donated to Peter Strzok’s GoFundMe page. You urged Sally Yates to run for office. You believed that Christopher Steele was just a former British spy whose dossier was totally legit. You were bummed Rod Rosenstein didn’t wear a wire while talking to the sitting president of the United States. You were equally bummed that Paul Manafort isn’t going to die in prison.

You were the baritone in the Trump-Russia collusion quartet, harmonizing along with the news media, the Democrats and the NeverTrump Republicans: “The walls are closing in!” “Trump’s days are numbered!” “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when!” “His cabinet is turning on him, ready to invoke the 25th Amendment!” “He’s brooding and angry and lashing out at staff as Mueller gets closer to finding out the truth!” “Trump won’t survive the week/month/year/term!”

Details and evidence were of no concern to you. You believed all of the following things for no reason other than that you wanted to. Trump told the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails before the election. (He didn’t.) Donald Trump Jr. colluded with Russia when he met in June 2016 for 20 minutes with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower. (The meeting was a setup between Russian lobbyists working with Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS which produced the dossier, and Trump’s campaign team. No “dirt” on Hillary Clinton was passed along.)

Mike Flynn promised the Russian ambassador that Trump would drop sanctions against Russia. (No such promise was made.) President Trump told James Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. (The only evidence that Trump suggested such a thing is Comey’s own memo; Trump was unaware of the investigation into his campaign at the time.)

And so on.

But the most compelling evidence that you refused to accept was right before your very eyes the entire time. In nearly two years, Mueller did not charge one person with so-called “collusion.” Not one associate tied to the Trump campaign was indicted or convicted of any crime related to the election.

I know you still have hope that the full Mueller report will contain some far-fetched nugget of collusion evidence to vindicate your gullibility/ignorance/foolishness. You’ve already moved the goalposts to an imaginary crime of obstruction of justice even though there was no underlying crime to obstruct.

History will not be kind to the Trump-Russia collusion truthers in Congress, the expert class, Hollywood, and the media. But history also shouldn’t forget the role that you, Citizen Collusion Truther, played in this. No matter how many tweets and Facebook posts you delete, it cannot erase your complicit stupidity in this scandal.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

Photo credit: drbimages/Getty Images

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