Elon Musk seems to once again have entirely missed the point after calling for the creation of a real-life version of “Star Trek”‘s fictional officer training program.
“Let’s make Starfleet Academy real!” the billionaire tweeted, possibly in response to news from CBS Studios that a forthcoming spinoff series of the same name has begun filming.
Unsurprisingly, the anti-political correctness crusader seems not to have grasped that both the new “Starfleet Academy” show and “Star Trek” universe as a whole are so known for their diverse representation that they may as well have been “woke” since before woke became a reactionary buzzword.
Indeed, as filming for the new show begins, critics have lauded the diverse casting for the latest series even as they’ve pointed out that the show has been perennially progressive and political — a science fiction epic that dared to imagine a world beyond capitalism, racism and scarcity.
Though it’s far from revolutionary now, “Star Trek” made waves in its original series when actors William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols shared an onscreen kiss during the show’s third season in 1968.
While it wasn’t the first interracial kiss on TV as many often claim — that distinction goes to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz on “I Love Lucy,” which ended more than a decade prior to “Star Trek”‘s famous smooch — it was still a groundbreaking move to show a white man and a Black woman kissing on television during the civil rights era, and aired just 18 months after the Supreme Court’s “Loving v. Virginia” case ruled interracial marriage legal.
Beyond the screen, the show’s casting choices have since its earliest days also been celebrated as diverse.
From casting actor George Takei, a Japanese-American gay man who was interred with his family during World War II’s brutal stateside camps, as USS Enterprise helmsman Hikaru Sulu on “Star Trek: The Original Series” to including nonbinary Latinx actor Blu del Barrio as the series’ first NB actor or character in “Star Trek: Discovery,” the show has stuck to its guns both behind the camera and in front of it.
In the Star Trek universe, officers in the unified Starfleet space force must first matriculate through the four-year Starfleet Academy in the San Francisco Bay area before being deployed into the final frontier.
If such an institution truly existed — and in a certain sense, NASA’s Space Camp could be considered our current age’s archaic counterpart — there’s little doubt that it, too, would instill the same principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) evidenced in the series’ universe.
And if Starfleet Academy was real, there’s little doubt that modern-day Musk and his anti-woke lackeys would hate it.
More on Elon’s swings and misses: Elon Musk Accidentally Reveals That He Completely Missed the Point of These Famous Movies
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