Erik Soderstrom

Contributing Writer

Latest from Erik Soderstrom

With great trepidation, I tuned into Thursday night’s episode of NBC’s The Night Shift, knowing the plot would center on a mass school shooting and dreading slogging through a predictable story line. Imagine my surprise when conservatives not only weren’t the predictable, caricaturized villains commonly found flinging lead on network television, but were instead the victims of an amped up, coordinated anti-speech mob attack.

When Islamic extremists attack a military awards ceremony on a primetime television show, you can bet that within a few episodes it will be made clear that the suicide-vested attackers shouting “Allahu Akbar” will be absolved. The terrorism was just an act, theater for the witnesses and victims meant to distract the populace from the real attackers. In Shooter, the real perpetrator is our very own government—and possibly the United Nations.

For an hour, Mr. Mackey sat on my screen chanting “Guns are bad, Mkay.” Just minutes into the June 11th comedy special, all was clear: gun owners are “dumb people” with small—what drives liberals’ constant fascination with human sexual anatomy—who are being led like mindless sheep by the big, bad NRA. Although he never mentions the Brady Campaign or any of Michael Bloomberg’s bevy of anti-gun organizations, Klepper dutifully repeats their dogmatic hypothesis: all Americans already support a liberal wish list of gun restrictions which would sail through Congress but for the NRA’s meddling.

The May 17 episode of NBC’s reliably liberal Law and Order: Special Victims Unit quickly picked up the mantle of anti-Christian media, portraying Christians as humorless stiffs who believe rape can cure homosexuality. The episode centers on Ann Davenport, a small town girl from Indiana on a church trip to New York City. While the group is meandering through Times Square, Ann has the audacity to reach out to her lesbian friend Lydia who left Indiana at 16 to move to the city.

The opening of the May 3 episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit was eerily reminiscent of the actual scandal from which the episode was cribbed. Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor was exchanged for the “Coral Dragon” Chinese restaurant, but the basic story was identical. Intrepid conspiracy theorists uncovered a secret code in hacked emails that detailed a Congressional child sex ring. Countless victims were being held in the restaurant’s non-existent basement, just waiting for a brave “self-investigator” to rescue them.

“This thing you’re doing, it’s not a cause. … There is no change, Jas. You haven’t changed anything.” Those lines from an exasperated Kent (Idris Elba) on the April 23rd episode of Showtime’s Guerrilla epitomize the failure of British black power activists' violent actions in this series based in the 1970s.

Showtime’s newest series, Guerrilla, premiered Sunday night to bring the rise of the British black power movement in the 1970s to the small screen. The show is tailor-made to feed the worst assumptions about police brutality and institutional racism. At least in the series premiere, the police are depicted as irredeemably corrupt, wantonly abusing their power to terrorize Britain’s black community, the embodiment of the modern Black Lives Matter movement’s most virulent rhetoric.

The latest episode of ABC’s Designated Survivor made it abundantly clear that the conspiracy element of this show is merely a thin patina of intrigue allowing the writers to wipe away Republican congressional majorities and fantasize about the “progress” they could be making in the wake of a massive crisis. The April 12 episode doubled down on last week’s anti-gun rhetoric, mentioning “background checks” once every 3.8 minutes.

The Wednesday, April 5, episode of ABC’s conspiracy drama, Designated Survivor, may as well have been written by the Brady Campaign, or any one of Michael Bloomberg’s consortium of anti-Second Amendment organizations. For those unfamiliar with Kiefer Sutherland’s new role as President Tom Kirkman, he seems to have done a complete 180 from his days as 24’s Jack Bauer.

In a dramatic episode on Monday night, Quantico finally righted a colossal historical atrocity. They handed the White House to America’s first (unelected) female president. After watching terrorists murder his wife, President Todd resigns and hands the reigns to his far more qualified running mate, Vice President Claire Haas. But even before she can begin, Haas is besieged by doubters.


In Tuesday night’s episode of USA’s Shooter, Bob Lee Swagger (Ryan Phillippe) finally locates the actual bullet used to assassinate the Ukrainian president, a vital piece of evidence in his quest to clear his name. The bullet is essentially undamaged, the audience learns, and it’s unlike any other bullet on the market. In a scene reminiscent of the notorious Die Hard Glock 7, viewers are told this bullet was illegally manufactured from “hardened polymer.”

In an episode titled “#StayWoke,” ABC’s newest crime procedural, Conviction, went all-in on Black Lives Matter talking points. Within the first five minutes of the episode, various characters claim that white defendants get a pass, black demonstrations are called “riots,” but when whites riot it’s called a “demonstration,” that “justice is clearly not color-blind,” and that the black defendant at the heart of the episode was railroaded by an all-white jury in Albany.

In an overt nod to the continued liberal outcry about North Carolina's House Bill 2, Law and Order: SVU took up the transgender cause once again on Wednesday in the episode “Broken Rhymes” by depicting an innocent male to female transgender getting brutally beaten and raped in a public restroom.

Thursday night’s Notorious, ABC's navel-gazing news media drama, called out Brian Williams in an episode that revolved around the lead character Julia George's (Piper Perabo) disgraced former mentor, Dana Hartman. The former anchor was canned after it came out that she had fabricated an interview for her show. The fake interview led to the assassination of its real-world subject and Julia turned her in to the LA Times and the fallout ended Hartman's news career.




