Next time on Space Adventure Show:

Couple of things: firstly, I know this is an opinion piece and everyone is entitled to an opinion. Secondly, the writer has some hutzpah prefacing something on Fox News with: Even our entertainment is awash in bitter partisanship.

No, really. This is David Marcus of Fox News complaining about
how partisan entertainment has become. I wonder if it's medically possible
to be born without the part of the brain responsible for recognizing irony...

He's also not to be confused with Dr. David
Marcus: Kirk's son and the guy who tried to make
the "sweater knotted about the neck" look happen.

And lastly, is there maybe some other thing called Star Trek he could be referring to? I ask because David Marcus of Fox News, noted bastion of even-handed reporting, has written an option piece entitled: "Star Trek writers take Starship Enterprise where it's never gone before--woke politics." Oh, and I should explain what "woke" means, because literally no one outside of raging Right-wing lunatics uses the term any more. To be "woke" just means that one is aware of, and disapproves of, injustice. So it's kind of weird that he uses it pejoratively.

To be clear, I'm referring to the coup attempt 
by Trump supporters. Star Trek: Insurrection
was so-so, but it's not going lead to WWIII.

Anyway, in Marcus's piece, he first complains about how Stacy Abrams cameoed in the season four finale of Discovery as the President of Earth. An appearance he calls "electioneering." And I just, I mean, he knows she isn't actually running for Earth President, right? Next he calls out a new piece of Star Trek lore established in Strange New Worlds. Specifically the bit about how the oft mentioned and canonically murky World War III was in fact sparked by a Second American Civil War which itself is linked to the insurrection. 

In the episode, Captain Pike beams down into the middle of a planet very much like contemporary Earth, and similarly on the verge of self-destruction. He then launches into a Ted Talk about how humans nearly destroyed themselves fighting over petty nonsense. It's a great episode, but it's also the same plot as like three or four hundred episodes of Star Trek's other incarnations, so I have to ask, is why is this guy watching Star Trek?

Pictured: Sisko explaining to Quark why his greed-driven
misogyny-based civilization is bullshit. Just, bullshit.

Yeah, I get that his beef is that Abrams
is a gubernatorial candidate and not that
she's Black, but is it though? Is it?

I know that's the obvious response here, but Star Trek is famously progressive in its politics. And it has always been political. I mean, music, television, film, and art in general is political on some level. Usually, and often only subtly. But Star Trek is explicitly so. The original series can feel pretty dated now in its portrayal of women and people of color, but for the time it was pretty edgy. I'm not sure that suggesting that maybe a Black women could hold political office is, you know, radical. And Marcus aggress. 

I can't believe the writers of Star Trek
didn't check with Marcus before advocating
agenda items on their space adventure show...

Well, briefly agrees. About the roll of art thing:

"Artist can, always have, and should use their work to hold a mirror up to their culture and society, even to advocate for broad agenda items. What they shouldn't do is beam the equivalent of a 30-second Democrat Party political ad into the middle of a space adventure."

-David Marcus, on what artists

should and shouldn't do

Above: That time Star Trek pandered to
the niche Left-wing idea that racism is bad.

So to be clear, art should challenge the status quo and advocate for change as long as it doesn't make David Marcus uncomfortable or interfere with his enjoyment of a "space adventure." Got it. But if Star Trek's writers speaking out against things like white nationalism, transphobia, and misogyny, read to him as a thirty-second ad for the Democratic Party (stop saying Democrat Party, just stop) then it seems to me that maybe David Marcus should re-evaluate his choices? Like, all of them, because c'mon.

I don't want to gatekeep here, but is his Star Trek head cannon that the Right ultimately wins the culture war they made up? Like that the utopia of the twenty-third and fourth centuries where everyone is equal, racism is a thing of the past and humans have abandoned the very concept of money in favor of a philosophy of self-improvement somehow evolved out of the politics of the Republican Party? Because, no...

That's not to say that Star Trek doesn't ever depict a
version of the future that aligns with the GOP's philosophy.