Boldly going where K-Lo once forbade National Review writers from going, Jim wrote at great length this morning about Star Trek, and the flaws of the society it depicts. His motivation (this time) was the appearance of Stacey Abrams, who is not governor of Georgia, as “United Earth President” on a recent episode of Star Trek: Discovery, the current iteration of the long-running sci-fi franchise, currently airing on Paramount+.
Jim has covered the Star Trek criticism, so I’ll focus on Stacey Abrams. Abrams is, at this time, most famous for losing the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and then proceeding to deny she had lost it, behavior that Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger has convincingly argued is morally indistinguishable from — and helped set the stage for — former president Donald Trump’s behavior after the 2020 presidential election.
And earlier this week, Matt Mashburn, a member of Georgia’s state elections board, argued that the House January 6 Committee’s decision to pursue the legal argument that those who argued the 2020 election did so knowing this was false and then raised money off of it anyway are guilty of fraud should make Abrams, who has profited handsomely in her own way from her election denial, nervous. As Spock once said, sauce for the goose.
Would Star Trek ever dream of making Donald Trump “President of Earth”? And I don’t mean in the way that the evil genetic superman Khan Noonien Singh once despotically ruled one-quarter of earth’s population. In classic Trek fashion, Abrams is shown as the logical and inevitable result of the kind of technocratic progressivism that the show has long advanced, a fruition of our highest ideals. Her behavior in the political sphere does not seem to bear this out. Apart from the election denial, there was this infamous photo, showing her reveling in the disparity of being maskless while surrounded by masked children. Given this, why hold her up as a model?
Then again, this is not the first time CBS has given a platform to an election-denying sore loser.