Actress and outspoken Scientologist Kirstie Alley raised eyebrows following a lengthy bout of bizarre behavior on Twitter after getting called out for defending COVID-19 conspiracy theorists.
Alley—who publicly supported Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020 and has used her Twitter account to amplify propaganda related to the QAnon conspiracy theory—has frequently generated controversy with her own often deeply odd tweets.
And recent days have been no exception.
It all began with a tweet presumably referencing the pandemic and the vaccines in which she claimed "Physicians & Scientists" are being "BANNED"—a thing which is not happening.
Alley's tweet read:
"I can’t think of a time when differing medical opinions from HIGHLY qualified EXPERT Physicians & Scientists were being BANNED & labeled as 'MIS-information.'"
"This is the product of being dominated by the composite Entity of Big Pharma Big tech & Big government."
"BIG TYRANNY"
There are, of course, multiple strange fallacies in this tweet.
The medical and scientific communities generally do not disagree about the pandemic and the vaccines, except when it comes to the sort of alternative and holistic medicine practitioners frequently favored by right-wing conspiracy theorists (not to mention Scientologists) like Alley.
Naturally, Kirstie got quite a bit of blowback for these absurd claims—after all, it's not like these conspiracy theorists being banned on Twitter has stopped them from spreading conspiracies and we have the overwhelmed hospitals full of needlessly dying unvaccinated COVID-19 patients to prove it.
Alley just chalked all of that up to a violation of free speech rights in a subsequent tweet.
Alley, like so many misinformed others, seems to have missed the civics lesson about how "freedom of speech" doesn't mean "freedom from consequences" and how the First Amendment protects speech from the government, not citizens and corporations.
Criticism and deplatforming aren't violations of free speech.
Anyway, people didn't exactly take kindly to all her yelling. When they pushed back Alley moved on to her two preferred rebuttals—blocking and the homophobic bigotry for which she and Scientology, for that matter, have become somewhat infamous.
Charming.
Kirstie's days-long rant got so out of hand it resulted in her trending on Twitter for awhile.
This led to lots and lots of roasting and dragging.
