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Actor Woody Harrelson criticized COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccines during his opening monologue on this weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live, only for Elon Musk to jump on Twitter and suggest he was right.
In his monologue, Harrelson, 61, compared pharmaceutical companies to drug cartels and joked that they hatched a plot to buy off the media and politicians and then force the world to stay home unless everyone will take their drugs.
The monologue was met with mixed reactions, with some saying it failed, others finding it funny, while some condemned Harrelson’s words as anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
Debates over the monologue escalated when billionaire Elon Musk, 51, joined the fray on Twitter, praising Harrelson for taking a “grounded” stance, calling the media “propaganda” and suggesting the actor was in the wrong. TRUE.
Saturday night was the fifth time Harrelson had hosted SNL. He last appeared on the show in November 2019, months before the pandemic broke out.
Woody Harrelson hosted Saturday Night Live for the fifth time on Saturday Night
After describing himself as red and blue, and therefore purple, and calling himself an “anarchist, Marxist, ethical hedonist, discriminatory empath, epistemological deconstructionist Texan,” Harrelson shared a story about smoking weed in Central Park and read “the craziest script”. for a movie release.
“So the movie is like that,” he said. ‘The biggest drug cartels in the world come together and buy all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked up in their houses.’
“And people can only get out if they take the cartel drugs and keep taking them over and over again.”
“I threw the script in the trash,” he joked. ‘I mean, who would believe that crazy idea? Forced to use drugs? I do it voluntarily all day.
After the show, numerous outlets wrote that Harrelson had ‘spread’ and ‘thrown’ ‘anti-vaccine conspiracies’ during his monologue.
Some took to Twitter to point out the irony of the media following exactly the kind of message Harrelson was joking about, then Musk chimed in to agree.
‘So based. Good job @nbcsnl!’ he wrote in response to a clip of Harrelson’s pandemic prank.
Then, in response to a roundup of headlines denouncing Harrelson’s part, Musk wrote: “Maybe they don’t realize their propaganda is wrong?”
Finally, in another post comparing other headlines, Musk commented on an emoji of a dart landing on a bull’s-eye.
The rules around COVID vaccines, and the vaccines themselves, have quickly become politicized during the pandemic.
Although President Trump was responsible for their rapid development and pushed them forward, many conservatives chafed at mandates that effectively forced some people to get them.
Tens of millions of public sector workers, including police officers, teachers and nurses, have been ordered to be punished or lose their jobs.
US military personnel were also affected by similar edicts, prompting a small exodus among troops who refused the mRNA injections developed to combat severe COVID infection.
Liberal states also imposed vaccination rules that required people to show proof of a vaccination before they could dine in a restaurant, visit a theater or have a drink in a bar.
This sparked more anger among conservatives and libertarians. Vaccination mandates have now been largely eliminated, although people entering the United States from abroad are still required to show proof of vaccination.
Further muddying the issue are arguments about how the COVID vaccines were originally sold.
Some scientists claimed that injecting yourself could prevent you from getting COVID or a serious infection. That claim has since been retracted, though the vaccines are still believed to have saved millions of lives as the pandemic ravaged the US.