“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.

And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs, and keep taking them, over and over.

I threw the script away.

I mean, who is gonna believe that crazy idea?”

–Woody Harrelson, this week’s SNL monologue

Go right ahead and believe whatever you want about lab leaks or wet markets, about Fauci the Saint or Anthony the Criminal, about the Covidian cult on the right hand or the evil redstate antivaxxer hicks on the other.

This was fucking brilliant.

The whole monologue was six and a half minutes, and it’s worth watching it all for some subtle bits of setup that he did–not so much for the jokey jokes he tried to soften it with after–but god. Damn.

In less than sixty words right here at the end, he told the actual and literal truth, and people have been flipping the hell out about it ever since. Go look at the coverage. No matter what side people are on, no matter if they’re laughing or mad, they all get it wrong. This was only a statement about The Vaccine at all if you want it to be, and if you prefer to think of it as some hellspawn anti-pharma rant, or if you want to be hooting and backslapping the Woodman for bein’ a chad–it all depends on what you already believed.

Taken at face value, it’s nothing but a very short story about a movie script that never existed.

It just so happens that in real life, the world’s biggest drug cartels did buy up all the media and all the politicians, and that the rest of the story happened more or less just like he implies.

Soooo many times I’ve tried, to draw an analogy and change the story to make a point: ‘see darlings, it would be like if Russia engineered a coup in Mexico … it would be like if Johnny Reb holed up in the Virgin Islands, see’?

I’m a hopeless amateur.

He didn’t have to change a single word, or a single concept.

I am in awe.

(And by the way: anyone who wants to be willfully dense enough to categorize these 60 words as mal- or dis- or mis-information has surely got to realize the implications of that position. To be logically consistent, you would have to categorize every single bit of anything remotely fictional the same way. Every comedy bit ever performed; pretty much the same. .

It’s all made-up lies, ennit?

Protip: So is your news feed, and every politician’s speech you ever heard, sunshine.

So was the propaganda masquerading as facts that they spoon-fed you every other day in your education factories.

So is every blog you ever read including the one you’re reading right now.

Censorship is stupid and wagging your finger disapprovingly at anything you might think is contrary to our Shared Democratic Consensus Trance is no way to live a life.)