‘Hercules’ star Kevin Sorbo says California can keep its taxes, traffic and ‘negativity’: ‘I’m done’

Kevin Sorbo packing up and leaving California isn't exactly breaking news in the sense that half of America's productive class has already made that trip. What makes it worth a paragraph is who's saying it and why. Sorbo isn't some anonymous small business owner fed up with permits and property taxes. He's a guy who spent years working in an industry that treats conservative politics like a communicable disease, and he's saying out loud what a lot of his peers only whisper at dinner parties after checking who's in earshot.

That's the actual story here, not the traffic or the tax rate. Plenty of people gripe about California's cost of living and then stay anyway because the work is there. Sorbo's challenge to other conservatives in Hollywood to stop hiding is the sharper point. If a working actor with real credits feels like he has to wait until he's already gone to say this plainly, that tells you something about the temperature in that town that no amount of box office data will capture.

We'd push back gently on one thing: leaving isn't the same as fixing. California's problems, the ones Sorbo is naming, don't get better because more people who disagree with the direction quietly exit stage left. Every departure makes the political culture in Sacramento a little more homogenous and a little less accountable. There's something to be said for staying and being the annoying voice in the room.

Still, we understand the math. Nobody owes a state their presence out of civic duty when the state has made clear, through its policies and its culture, that it doesn't especially want you there unless you keep your politics to yourself. Sorbo's not wrong about the traffic either. He's just one more data point in a trend that California's leadership seems determined not to notice..