Former star of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys Kevin Sorbo is back with yet another bizarre, misinformed hot take about the pandemic.
The former actor, who has become notorious in recent years for his diehard support of former Republican President Donald Trump and his amplification of conspiracy theories, tweeted a perspective on influenza that left many people scratching their heads.
In his tweet, Sorbo combined several of many Republicans' favorite things: claiming COVID-19 is just the flu, lamenting the loss of simpler times that never existed in the first place, and of course calling everything he doesn't like Communism.
See the deeply strange results below.
Sorbo wrote:
"Remember when we treated the flu with tea, soup, and saltines instead of communism."
Based on Sorbo's past hot takes, he presumably means for the flu to stand in as a proxy for COVID-19 and to imply that pandemic mitigation measures like masking and vaccines are totalitarian abuses. You know, standard Republican fare, it's basically a right-wing Mad Lib.
But the tweet makes very little sense. That isn't how the flu is or ever has been treated, for starters. And Sorbo's blasé attitude is a striking departure from how conservatives have been talking about the flu over the past two years.
Crowing about how deadly the flu can be and citing its yearly death counts has become the standard right-wing premise on which to claim that we're all overreacting to COVID-19--or even to claim it's a media-abetted Democratic hoax. "People die of the flu too," has practically become right-wing dogma.
Sorbo himself has trafficked in this nonsense, as seen in the tweet below.
But now, apparently, the flu is just something you tweet with soup and crackers? Okay then.
So, which is it? Is the flu a deadly killer that proves we're overreacting to COVID-19? Or is the flu just something you treat with soup and crackers?
And what on Earth does any of this have to do with Communism?
If you're struggling to make an ounce of sense of this tweet, you are not alone--much of Twitter, many conservatives included, were basically like, "sir, what?"
Weird and misinformed tweets have become something of a specialty of Sorbo's, from bragging about abusing Starbucks employees to misunderstanding the basics of American history. So this new probably won't be his last.
