Back in the '90s, coming home from school meant one thing — for cool kids, anyway — turning on the TV and enjoying two hours of steamy action-adventure nonsense with Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.
But time has revealed that not all heroes are everything they're cracked up to be. Seeing Kevin Sorbo transform from the wise and kind hero of weekday adventures to a xenophobic demagogue pushing Christian-conservative propaganda, has been hard to watch. The feeling it leaves us with is one that only Sorbo himself can adequately express.
But his rhetoric has reached new heights of upsetting delusion since Donald Trump lost the presidential election in November. Since that time Sorbo has sagely speculated that the media was intentionally lying about the election results "so that the riots will be MASSIVE when Trump is re-elected."
It may come as no surprise that an aging white man who has been accused of sexual harassment and stars in movies about loving God through the 2nd amendment is a Trump supporter. As a conman, serial adulterer, and alleged rapist, Donald Trump is broadly popular within whatever form of Christianity it is that worships wealth, blames the poor for their own suffering, and rejects desperate travelers from different cultures.
Still Sorbo's political commentary on Twitter has become increasingly disturbed and — since Wednesday's attack on Capitol Hill — completely divorced from reality. Despite positive identification of Trump supporters, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and white nationalists among the crowd, Sorbo clings to the absurd notion that the insurrection was staged by Anti-fascist activists posing as Trump supporters.
It doesn't matter to him that their tactics have even been endorsed by prominent Right-wing figures. Kevin Sorbo knows that the chaos reflects badly on his side of the political aisle, therefore it must be an Antifa false flag.
Fortunately, not every legendary hero of daytime television has suffered such a pathetic fall from grace. As it turns out, Xena herself — the ululating warrior princess known as Lucy Lawless — was waiting on the sidelines to put Sorbo in his place.
When he expressed his doubt that anything so unpatriotic could be attributed to the people who voted for Donald "I like people who weren't captured" Trump, Lawless stepped in to call out Sorbo — AKA "Peanut" — for his own contribution to the chaos. He went from claiming that Democrats were cheating, and saying of the effort to storm the Capitol building, "it's happening," and "history is being made," to denying that the people set in motion by such rhetoric could possibly be his political allies.
So when he said that the insurrectionists didn't "look like patriots," Lucy Lawless agreed calling them instead "your flying monkeys," and "homegrown terrorists ... that go out and do the evil bidding of people like you who like to wind them up like toys." Ouch.
Lawless wasn't done either. When someone shared their account of Kevin Sorbo spreading sexist slander against her on the set of his Sci-Fi series Andromeda, she responded with laughter, saying, "Oh, Peanut! You slay me!" It turns out Xena throws shade almost as well as she throws that bouncy metal hoop thingy.
As if her "peanut" commentary wasn't enough to make us fall in love with her all over again, the New Zealand actress then redirected all the attention it was bringing to supporting a good cause. Directing her followers to the "hard truths" being shared by young climate activist Greta Thunberg, and encouraged them all to "get behind a climate/habitat saving org."
It turns out that Lawless has been a staunch supporter of climate activism for decades, and was actually arrested in 2012 for participating in a Greenpeace takeover of a Shell oil-drilling boat in the arctic. In case you're taking notes, Kevin, this is what proper civil disobedience looks like:
Maybe the reason people were so disappointed by Wonder Woman 1984 is not just the awful writing overflowing with nauseating cliches. Maybe it's that Gal Gadot, with her "Imagine" version of activism, just isn't the mythical warrior princess we need right now. Lucy Lawless is.
Add stories about Lawless staying with a fan at her deathbed, and it starts to seem like her TV heroism was nothing compared to the real thing.