Well, at least Elon Musk liked Woody Harrelson's Saturday Night Live monologue

Depending who you ask, having Elon Musk in your corner is either a great blessing or a major red flag. When it comes to anti-vaccination conspiracy theories, Musk’s support probably says more about him than the person spouting it. (Though how many more puerile, contrarian opinions Tesla’s CEO has to spout before the “genius” label gets dropped is anyone’s guess.) In the case of Woody Harrelson’s Saturday Night Live monologue and Musk’s subsequent stamp of approval, let’s just say there are no winners here.

Harrelson’s controversial joke had to do with the “craziest script” he ever read (which he did while stoned, natch). “So, the movie goes like this. The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes, and people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over,” he said. “I threw the script away. I mean, who was going to believe that crazy idea? Being forced to do drugs? I do that voluntarily all day.”

It’s a stoner joke, sure, but one perilously entwined with a popular COVID-19 anti-vaccination conspiracy. And Harrelson is no stranger to those: early in the pandemic, he posted and deleted from his Instagram a conspiracy theory connecting COVID-19 to 5G. As recently as May of 2022, he told Vanity Fair he feels masking protocols on set are “absurd” because he “doesn’t believe in the germ theory” and hasn’t gotten coronavirus (or any other illness in the last seven years) because he’s “internally clean.”

Suffice it to say, his monologue faced lots of online criticism when it circulated Twitter on Sunday, but he did receive support from Twitter’s overlord. “Good one,” Musk commented on a video of the monologue, before retweeting it to his own page with the praise, “So based. Nice work @nbcsnl!” He further encouraged other conspiracy theorists who pointed fingers at The Media over headlines about Harrelson’s comments. “Maybe they don’t realize that their propaganda is wrong?” Musk tweeted about the outlets.

Neither the media nor pharmaceutical companies (or “drug cartels,” per Harrleson’s dig) are above criticism, but there’s a world of a difference between valid criticism and pure fantasy, like “For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians,” which is another of Musk’s tweets from Sunday. Scarlett Johansson may have been the one to induct Harrelson into the Five Timers Club, but Musk was the one waiting with open arms to welcome him into the controversial hosts category.