It’s definitely not just Republicans but note that they’re the only one of those groups with bullion-dollar companies pushing a constant stream of messages downplaying they risk of COVID and hyping any plausible concern about vaccination or masks. If Rubert Murdoch gave the word, the amount of energy pushing antivax messages would go down by an order of magnitude overnight.
I'm not sure it's a guarantee that the power is flowing from the top down. It seems more likely that the big players are just going where the money is, i.e. where their voters already are.
It’s both: the big finders definitely will embrace any culture war issue which keeps people voting for the politicians who serve their interests but they also reliably push any issue which goes against certain topics relevant to their business. Even if something isn’t their industry they’ll push it if it cuts against the legitimacy of government regulations or is critical about science (e.g. the tobacco companies’ guys like Steven Milloy were trumping up those “DDT bans mean that millions of Africans die of malaria” stories a decade or so back because they wanted to lower trust in the same public health agencies who were leading anti-smoking campaigns).
