Oct. 26, 2025 7 AM PT
To the editor: Thanks to contributing writer Matt K. Lewis, whose op-ed led me to turn to a contributor to violent rhetoric in my own living room: my TV streaming services (“Left and right have united in favor of puerile, violent rhetoric,” Oct. 24). How many of the plots in movies and TV series have increasingly revolved around corrupt, venal, duplicitous leaders from the White House, CIA, FBI, military, city or county? And how many of the heroes who rise to take revenge and fight for freedom and the American way are wronged citizens, disrespected or disgraced military veterans or government operatives whose spouses have been killed or who experience a crisis of conscience?
Is it too far-fetched to imagine that a regular consumer of a diet of righteous violence could come to see it as normalized? Could some perpetrators of the violence that we’ve seen in the news been primed with televised justification? This could be a small ingredient to Lewis’ still-tepid frog-boiling pot, but we’re seeing the bubbles.
Sheldon Roth, Northridge