Rolling Stone roasted for take on Woody Harrelson’s SNL skit attacking government Covid cabal

Remember way back in the Old-Timey days when Rolling Stone magazine was the rock-‘n’-roll voice of America’s counterculture?

Well, if the magazine’s take on Woody Harrelson’s “Saturday Night Live” monologue is any indication, those days are apparently long gone, and folks on Twitter are not at all happy about it.

As BizPac Review reported, the pot-smoking Harrelson, who is known for his edgy takes on social issues, took the SNL stage for the fifth time over the weekend and took a swing at Big Pharma, mainstream media, and the government’s handling of COVID-19.

Three years ago, he told the audience, he read “the craziest script.”

“Okay, 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,” the 61-year-old “Natural Born Killers” star said. “And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over.”

In the end, Harrelson joked, he passed on the script, because “I mean, who was going to believe that crazy idea? Being forced to do drugs? I do that voluntarily all day.”

Rolling Stone was not amused.

“Woody Harrelson spreads Covid conspiracy theories during SNL monologue,” the magazine cried on Twitter.

In the article, author Marlow Stern cautioned readers that Harrelson “has a history of strange anti-science remarks during the Covid pandemic.”

Wrote Stern:

Woody Harrelson has always harbored some, well, strange views.

The Oscar-nominated actor, who first won over audiences on Cheers, is a 9/11 truther who’s shared a number of conspiracy theories during the Covid pandemic. In April 2020, Harrelson posted a gonzo article tying the supposed “negative effects of 5G” to the spread of Covid, saying he found it “very interesting.” In a May 2022 interview with Vanity Fair, Harrelson said of mask-wearing during the pandemic, “As one who doesn’t believe in the germ theory, I find it rather absurd.”

And so, during his rambling SNL monologue Saturday night, an apparently under the influence Harrelson continued along these lines. After a winding story about smoking weed — shouting-out his pot shop in West Hollywood, The Woods, and claiming his manager, Jeremy, transported weed from the LA shop to New York for him — Harrelson went into a spiel about the pandemic.

 

Online, the once-respected editors at Rolling Stone were promptly labeled “morons.”

“No lies detected in monologue,” stated Five Times August, “you guys are just morons.”

“Doesn’t the fact that you morons immediately took it this way actually rather strong evidence that what he’s saying is NOT a ‘bizarre’ ‘conspiracy theory’?” asked conservative commentator John Ziegler. “After all, if it was then you would have not connected it to the COVID vaccines so easily!”

“You’re proving that you are not only relentless propagandists, but that you are uncompromising morons as well,” noted Viva Frei. “Even assuming Woody was talking about Covid and the jabs, the punchline of his joke is that he takes the drugs voluntarily!”

“Morons,” the popular YouTuber wrote. “Propagandist morons.”


And when it comes to disinformation and conspiracies, the magazine really has no right to be throwing stones:

And let’s not forget the time they put Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on their cover.


There is no doubt, Twitter users declared, that Rolling Stone has lost its way.

“Rolling Stone’s editorial policy that actors and musicians, the most creative deviants in our culture, must also follow liberal media polite progressive dogma, certainly is an editorial choice,” noted podcaster Stephen Miller. “Maybe remaking Rolling Stone into Daily Beast is a bad idea.”

 

Melissa Fine

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