Woke TV Is Back With A Vengeance In This New Paramount Show
Normally Stephen Miller, the White House homeland security adviser, spends his time focusing on major issues facing this country and the world at large — like removing illegal aliens from the United States, purchasing Greenland, deposing South American communists, and so on. But every now and then, Stephen Miller weighs in on topics that — at least on the surface, and several layers below the surface — don’t seem quite as important.
For example, the other day, Miller offered his assessment of the new “Star Trek” show on Paramount+, called “Starfleet Academy.”
Here’s what Miller wrote. It wasn’t exactly a flattering review.
Tragic. But it’s not too late for @paramountplus to save the franchise. Step 1: Reconcile with @WilliamShatner and give him total creative control. https://t.co/HRMDcYeBnU
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) January 16, 2026
Credit: @StephenM/X.com
Shatner, who of course played Captain Kirk in the original show, responded with this.
😳 😱
I am so on the same page with you @StephenM!
The fact that they have not cure Hyperopia by the 32rd Century is an abysmal oversight on the writers!😤Also @paramountplus needs to up the budget because I’m sure that a well oiled organization like Starfleet in the distant… https://t.co/96MtYUGGWf
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) January 19, 2026
Credit: @WilliamShatner/X.com
Shatner writes, “I am on the same page with you Stephen Miller!”
He also called out some “abysmal oversights” by the writers, and wrote, “shame on the line producers. I am ready to assume command of the series.”
Seeing this exchange, it occurred to me that this new “Star Trek” show is an ideal target for a deep dive — sort of like the one we did Thanksgiving week, with Ken Burns’ documentary about the American Revolution. That’s not because anyone should care about a new streaming show that’s complete garbage. Those are a dime a dozen. Except that these garbage streaming shows somehow cost like 100 million dollars to make, so it’s more like 1.2 billion a dozen. But I digress.
The reason we should talk about the state of “Star Trek” as a franchise — and the reason Stephen Miller probably cares about Star Trek — is that it’s a useful window into what the modern Left has become, where they went wrong, and how to defeat them. And on top of that, some of the scenes in this new show are genuinely hilarious — unintentionally — and it will be highly enjoyable to mock them. As a certified Trekkie, I’m more than qualified to weigh in here. I’ve been watching Star Trek ever since the days when Frodo and Hermione were battling Dr. Doom on the Death Star, so I know a lot about this series and the lore behind it.
Now, yes, it’s true that Star Trek began in the 1960s as a progressive, liberal show, by the standards of the day. And they weren’t exactly subtle with the messaging about equality. They had a black woman on the bridge, serving as a communications officer, which was unusual at the time. And by the time the movies came out, the writers decided that, in the Star Trek universe, there was no money at all. Everyone just worked for free, to improve mankind. It was a communist utopia.
But in those early communist Star Trek shows, there were still some elements that you could describe as Right-wing, at least in modern times. Everyone in the crew was physically fit, which you’d expect from the crew of a military vessel. So there was no body-positivity movement. The leaders were all highly competent, decisive men. The officers talked to one another like serious people, who understood the gravity of their positions.
As the author Isaac Young put it:
Star Trek’s beating heart was a professional 19th century naval crew in space. It was basically a love letter to Rightwing aristocracy and professionalism with a Leftwing coat of paint, and you can literally pinpoint the exact second it died by the BMI of the cast. https://t.co/wSsFHTDu19 pic.twitter.com/z6VuodF7w7
— Isaac Young (@HariSel57511397) January 12, 2026
Credit: @HariSel57511397/X.com
And more importantly, the old Star Trek shows explicitly rejected the idea that everyone is a “blank slate.” Every species on the ship was clearly distinct, in significant ways. According to my producers, who wouldn’t lie to me about something like this, the Klingons were the warriors who were obsessed with honor and violence. The Vulcans were cold and unemotional but highly logical. The Ferengi were scheming and untrustworthy. And so on. Ferengi sound to me like some kind of parasitic infection you pick up in an African jungle, but apparently they’re an alien species in Star Trek. The point is that these differences weren’t inherently good or bad. They were just unavoidable, consistent differences. That’s how liberals and most communists — including Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the series — used to view the world. They recognized differences between large groups of people, and they wrote a show about those people getting along, sometimes.
But new Star Trek, like modern Leftists, takes a very different approach. They enforce the fiction of blank-slateism — meaning that everyone starts life with a blank slate. Under this worldview, no particular demographic has any inherent advantage or disadvantage over another. We’re all the same; we’re just molded by our environment. This is unscientific and factually, obviously wrong. But it’s a core tenet of Leftism. And that’s why, at every opportunity, “Starfleet Academy” on Paramount+ takes pains to push blank-slateism.
For example, no longer are Klingons a warrior race that’s fixated on honor and warfare. Instead, Klingons are now into science and bird-watching:
Watch:
Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
So, you can already see that racial diversity was very, very important to the writers of this show. Unfortunately, writing was not important to the writers of this show. A lot of people have accused Starfleet Academy of having bad acting, which it does. But you can’t blame the actors. Think about the dialogue here. One character says: “I watch birds. They’re beautiful.” And the other says: “Nice.”
What do you want an actor to do with that? You try delivering those lines in an award winning way. Daniel Day Lewis couldn’t elevate this material. It’s impossible.
But at least it really subverts your expectations to have a gay birdwatching Klingon. And more to the point, it completely erases anything unique about the entire race. And of course, the people who are writing this trash — the people who are going out of their way to turn traditionally masculine characters into effeminate bird-watchers — are women. A large portion of the writing staff of this show, including the lead writer and a show runner, are women. And with this show, they’re showing us exactly how liberal women see the world in 2026.
For instance, judging by this show, liberal women still haven’t recovered from Donald Trump’s first term. They’re still very upset about the fact that, when parents commit crimes, they’re separated from their children. In fact, that’s the plot device that “Starfleet Academy” uses in order to put the entire show in motion.
The show begins with the villain — a white guy, of course, played by Paul Giamatti, who is way, way too talented to be here. Paul Giamatti on Starfleet Academy is like if Marlon Brando was still alive and played the villain on the 5th season of “Stranger Things,” opposite a bunch of actors who wouldn’t get the job if they auditioned for a high school play. Anyway, Giamatti, who must be working to pay off some serious gambling debts or something, plays a character who is working with an impoverished woman to commit a space robbery. And a Starfleet officer is ultimately murdered during the robbery. By any measure, this crime means that both Paul Giamatti, and the mother, should go to prison for a very long time.
Instead, they throw the book at Giamatti, and the mother has to go to rehab. Yes, rehab, for committing felony murder. So already, this is an extremely lenient sentence for the mother, by any measure. She commits robbery and murder, and her sentence is to talk about her feelings.
But the show immediately tells us that, in fact, that sentence is a great travesty of justice. That’s because the mother, in order to go to rehab, has to be separated from her child, who is taken into the custody of Starfleet. The Starfleet woman who issues the sentence — played by Holly Hunter, who’s extremely difficult to understand when she talks — comes to regret it. She has a full-on meltdown, actually. She quits her job in Starfleet and becomes a teacher. And that leads to this remarkable scene, where a high-ranking officer tries to convince her to go back to work. This is one of the most cliche’d kinds of scenes in shows like this, but they manage to make it even worse than normal.
Watch:
Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
First of all, what a way to date the show. Everyone can tell that they wrote this a decade ago. The Left doesn’t pretend to care about “family separations” anymore. They’re straight-up admitting that, in their view, only Nazis enforce immigration law, period. They’ve dropped the pretext of being outraged by “family separations.”
But in Star Trek, apparently, they’re still hung up about the fact that, if you murder someone, you’ll get separated from your family. If you have a child, you should be able to commit any crime you want. That’s their position. And then we learn that, in fact, the entire show is going to be a power fantasy for the white liberal woman who’s been frozen in a time capsule since 2017. The white female captain decides to track down the child, 15 years later, and offer him a career in Starfleet — even though, by that point, he’s become a criminal himself.
Watch:
Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
This is the dream of every Leftist woman who voted for Kamala Harris. They dream of breaking oppressed, multracial illegal aliens (and other criminals) out of prison. The more crimes they’ve committed, the better. And of course, in this show — spoiler alert — the multiracial criminal saves the ship in the end. He reprograms the villain’s goo that’s eating the ship alive, or something like that. So he’s a genius, in addition to being a criminal. He’s far smarter than any of the professional officers on the ship, somehow. All he needed was a better environment — and for his mother to get away with murder.
This is the blank-slate fantasy that underlies Leftism. And at some level, they know it’s a fantasy because they don’t pretend to take anything in this show seriously. The old shows would at least try to present thoughtful, intelligent content. But throughout “Starfleet Academy,” the female captain sits in her chair like a cat lady who’s lounging at her house, watching reruns of Grey’s Anatomy.
Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
She keeps the same posture even when the ship is being attacked and nearly destroyed because she decides to take a random detour. Sometimes she has her glasses on, because in the future, they’ve figured out intergalactic space travel and teleportation, but not optometry. And by the way, speaking of that “attack” on the ship — the big dramatic moment in the show — it gave us yet another insight into the IQ of the writer’s room.
See if you notice anything odd about the dialogue in this scene:
Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
Yes, they’ve got a ton of injuries on the crew. Things are blowing up, and people are seriously hurt. Some senior officers have been impaled, in fact. But on the bright side, there are “no casualties.” Not to nitpick, but somehow, through the entire production of this show, none of the 15 executive producers, none of the 20 writers, none of the crew members, none of the actors, and none of the directors picked up on the fact that a seriously injured individual counts as a “casualty.” The show made it all the way through production without a single person noticing that the doctor of the ship doesn’t know what a “casualty” is.
A few minutes earlier, when the attack began, there was another technical error. This one, admittedly, is a little harder to spot. But if you’re watching the video version of the podcast, see if you can identify it:
Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
They say the incoming fire is coming from the port side of the ship. And then they cut to the CGI shot, where the fire is clearly coming from the starboard side.
It’s obvious what happened here. The woman writing the show — who was probably hot and bothered by all of the fan-fiction she was writing about rescuing a multiracial criminal and turning him into a Starfleet officer — quickly looked up the definition of “port.” And she learned from ChatGPT, which also wrote most of the script for her, that “port” means “the left side of the ship when facing the front.”
But for this definition to work, you have to understand that you’re facing the front of the ship, while facing in the same direction as the bow of the ship.
So in this diagram, “port” is the red portion of the diagram. So in this CGI shot, the weapons are hitting the starboard section of the ship, not the port.
In a show with any standards, they’d be embarrassed by this. The bridge crew on this ship is supposed to consist of professional, highly trained officers. But they don’t know the difference between port and starboard.
Of course, the point of modern storytelling in Hollywood isn’t to create a realistic environment, or believable dialogue. Instead, they’re contractually obligated to shoehorn as much Leftist ideology as possible into the episode. And to that end, we’re introduced to a “jerk” character among the cadets, who of course is played by a white actor. So the villain and the jerk cadet are both white men. But to the extent that white people are portrayed positively in this show, they’re either salivating over criminals, or they’re lesbians delivering DEI struggle sessions.
This is from Episode 2 — it’s a viral clip you may have seen already.
Watch:
Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
One thing you immediately notice when you watch these woke streaming shows is just how bad they look. Putting aside the atrocious ChatGPT dialogue and the wooden, lifeless acting. It just looks cheap, even though they spent more than 10 million dollars per episode. They had better sets, with more character, in the 1960s. From the looks of it, it appears that they shot the entire season of Starfleet Academy at a Chuck-e-Cheese. And hired the employees to be the lead actors in the show.
The rest of Episode 2 isn’t much better. They have a telepathic species using sign language, for the first time in the show’s history, as a way to appeal to the deaf community. Yes, in the future, telepaths — who by definition have an extremely advanced system of communication that’s beyond human comprehension — are also using sign language. They apparently retconned this, changing the way the whole species works, just for the sake of appealing to deaf people.
Then they spend the rest of the episode telling us that walls are bad, and that Donald Trump is a bad man because he built a border wall. Again, parts of this show were definitely written a decade ago. Then, in a more modern touch, they also tell us that the multiracial criminal isn’t actually a bad guy, because he didn’t get “due process.” You see, he’s just like Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Watch:
Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
First of all, even if you commit a crime outside of a “jurisdiction,” you can still be considered a criminal in that jurisdiction. If a high school student commits some heinous crime in Tokyo, and somehow escapes to the United States, the United States will still definitely treat him like a criminal. We certainly wouldn’t let him into West Point, which is what’s basically happening in this show. We’d arrest him and put him on a flight to Japan.
And for what it’s worth, the telepathic guy actually makes a great point in this scene. We’re supposed to think he’s obnoxious, but he’s absolutely correct. He points out that Starfleet’s standards must be pretty low, if they’re letting a criminal into their highly selective academy because a liberal white woman is attracted to him. And in response, the white liberal captain explains that, actually, they didn’t lower the standards at all. You see, in this Leftist fantasy, the multiracial criminal from a broken home has a 98th-percentile test score.
That’s a revealing moment, in a few ways. The writers could’ve said, “Yeah, he had bad test scores, but he brings other skills to the table.” But they insisted on keeping the line about 98th percentile scores, so they can have a girlboss “gotcha” moment where she puts the racist white man (again, another nasty white man) in his place. And they included this line because, even in their fantasies, Leftists still recognize that objective standards are important. They just imagine that, since everyone is a blank slate, all of their preferred demographic groups are capable of meeting those standards — even though it’s not remotely true.
Every streaming service, across virtually every show, in virtually every genre, is now full of shows like this. To give just one more example, there’s a new Agatha Christie adaptation on Netflix, where they introduce a black character (who wasn’t in the original novel) who lectures all of the white people about how Europeans destroyed Africa. It’s just a constant stream of propaganda, and all of it says the exact same thing.
Watch:
Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
They insert dialogue like this, where it obviously doesn’t belong or make any sense, into modern adaptations of classic works of literature. You’re trying to watch a mystery series based on a novel from the 1920s, and instead of getting that, you’re informed that white people caused all of Africa’s problems. And the person telling you this is a Cameroonian scientist, not a German like the original novel, for the simple reason that the writers felt compelled to deliver yet another lecture on colonialism. They really thought that would be compelling to watch.
They’ve done this to Star Trek, they’ve done it to Agatha Christie, and they do it to everything else. Streaming services are full of this garbage — most of which is based on fabricated history, bad data and anti-white feminist propaganda.
We put a lot of effort into my show, “Real History,” for exactly this reason. You can make a very strong case that, if more people understood history, then streaming services would have a lot less slop. That’s because, in all of these shows, the writers see themselves as “atoning” for past “injustices.” They believe it’s their role to bring about “equity” because of atrocities that never actually happened. And audiences, for the most part, don’t know any better. Particularly if you went to public schools, then no one ever told you the truth.
But even if you don’t buy that theory, the fact remains that most new streaming shows are unwatchable. They treat you like you have a Somali-tier IQ, and they beat you over the head with Leftist messaging. “Real History” — which will continue monthly, with new episodes — is my effort to combat this trend and ultimately, to end it. Let’s hope there are many more similar efforts to come.
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