Russian media is waging war on silky-voiced siren Morgan Freeman in response to a short video of the actor calling out the country for meddling in the 2016 presidential election, the Washington Post reports.Freeman filmed the two-minute video for director Rob Reiner's nonprofit, the Committee to Investigate Russia, in an attempt to rally Americans to question the Kremlin's alleged role in influencing Trump's win. In the video, Freeman says Putin is a "former KGB spy" who has "set his sights" on America, and calls on Trump to condemn Russia's alleged interference in the election."We have been attacked," Freeman says in the video, which dropped last Monday. "We are at war."The "war" Freeman refers to is between the American people and Putin or whatever, but the video has landed Freeman in the midst of a different war entirely—one that's much more personal.Following the video's release last Monday, Russia clapped back hard on the 80-year-old actor.Russian media has called Freeman an "American propaganda mouthpiece" with a "Messianic complex" that he picked up playing God in that Jim Carrey movie. According to BBC, one Rossiya 24 host said that Freeman is losing it because of "overwork and marijuana use," since the 80-year-old actor has been known to extoll his love of weed. And as if the country wasn't flaming old Scrap Iron enough already, an army of Twitter trolls launched the hashtag "#StopMorganLie" to bash the actor.
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But while the Twitter reactions are aimed at Morgan Freeman—or Lieman, zing!—the majority of them focus suspiciously on the idea that America isn't actually the democracy Freeman says it is. NATO analyst Rolf Fredheim told Radio Free Europe all that Freeman bashing looked a little bit like a Kremlin-backed campaign."It does look very highly coordinated," NATO analyst Rolf Fredheim said to RFE. "It's more than just a teenager in the basement. It could be many teenagers in many basements—but it could also be something more sophisticated than that… the St. Petersburg troll factories, for instance. It could be an example of some kind of Russian troll-farm output."Morgan Freeman has built a career facing down giant comets and serial killers with goofy MOs and hordes of Lego toys, but now he might have to reckon with some Russian troll farms, too. Hopefully he can find some weed to eat, smoke, or snort to get him through.