One of Whoopi Goldberg’s big stories was, on seeing Lt. Uhura at age ten running into the next room. “Mama! There’s a black lady on TV and she ain’t a maid!”
The American Gestapo immigration authorities are starting to build out a transportation and storage infrastructure to efficiently move large numbers of people between their concentration camps lucrative for-profit prisons perfectly unremarkable detention facilities.
“It’s beginning to smell a lot like Nazis…”
Edit to add: it occurs to me there might be an upside. This could be the incentive that has been lacking up to now for Americans to properly invest in and upgrade their train networks.
Used to be, among fans? It’s always been a progressive franchise. I wouldn’t think that the Venn diagram of Star Trek fans and the people who were to become the MAGA crowd would have much overlap.
You wouldn’t think so, but you’d be mistaken. As I said, you don’t have to look far to find a LOT of people who claim to be long-time fans who are pissed as hell about how Star Trek “turned woke.”
Claim. I’d bet they’d be tripped up by the simplest trivia question imaginable.
“What is Kirk’s rank in TOS?”
“Who? And why was he tossed? Too conservative, for the libtards most likely.”
To be fair, while TOS was progressive for its time, it also was explicitly pro-America, pro-military, pro-Christianity, and showed a version of the future that was diverse but still dominated by white men. The culture on the Enterprise was one of a volunteer benevolent dictatorship (which maybe is a glib way to describe military deployment in general?)- Kirk did what he did for the good of America (I mean the Federation/Enterprise), with insight from trusted advisors, and everyone else’s job was to trust and obey.
It offered a version of the future that could easily feel like a natural extension of the status quo. Yes, it asks some challenging questions. Yes, it does an ok (for the time remarkable) job at minority representation. But the Roddenberry vision side-steps the “how we get there”, and allows viewers to mostly feel like whatever cultural differences we see in TOS happened easily, inconvenienced no one, and were adopted universally. Sounds like my kind of revolution!
Once TNG showed up, all bets are off, but honestly if there are folks who actively like Star Trek who also are claiming that today’s Trek too woke, I assume they are thinking about TOS as a reference point. And I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong that it’s different.