By now you may have heard about the opening monologue that actor Woody Harrelson delivered on Saturday Night Live this past weekend.

Given the hysteria surrounding it, I assumed it had to be a full-throated attack on Big Pharma.

So I watched it, and 95 percent of it was just normal comedy.

I'm about to share with you the entirety of the portion that sent the Establishment, and those poor and pathetic souls who for some reason feel compelled to defend the Establishment, into a fit.

Harrelson tells a fanciful story about reading a movie 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. 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 going to believe that crazy idea being forced to do drugs? I do that voluntarily all day long.

That's it.

It's obvious enough that the story is a reference to our Covid experience, with the lockdowns and the mandates. But note that he even softens the blow by ending it with a joke about his drug habit.

Well, this little passage -- which, for heaven's sake, obviously has the ring of truth to it -- sent the media into hysterics.

Remember, Harrelson is insinuating that the media are all bought and paid for. And here's how they reacted, as if trying to prove his point:

Note the verb choices, too -- "spews," "rambles" -- intended to denigrate the speaker. And of course "conspiracy," the ultimate dumb-guy putdown.

To my mind Harrelson is wrong about 90 percent of the time, but when he's right, it tends to be -- as in this case -- about something fairly important.

But good for him, making the kind of observation that hundreds of people in public life would be making if we lived in a normal society.