Even before Picard had aired, CBS All Access’ latest pathetic attempt to compete with Netflix by monetizing the Star Trek brand, had telegraphed that it would be another social justice disaster.
Patrick Stewart had described the streaming series as "me responding to the world of Brexit and Trump". The response is a social justice tantrum that, like its STD predecessor, is a train wreck that takes the obligatory shots at President Trump, FOX News, Brexit, and our refusal to admit Islamic terrorists.The latest ‘Woke Goes Broke’ entry though will still help finance the Roddenberry Foundation. And the Foundation, named after the original creator of the Star Trek TV series, will continue financing radicals.
The Roddenberry Foundation has already announced its 2020 class of ‘fellows’. The criteria are not scientific research or literary excellence, but shrill leftist tantrums and identity politics bigotry.
And the ‘class’ of those getting a $50,000 award includes Linda Sarsour: an Islamist bigot.
Linda Sarsour fills the coveted Roddenberry Foundation ‘anti-Semitic’ slot previously held by Charlene Carruthers, a Women’s March board member, anti-Israel BDS activist, and admirer of Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan is the leader of the racist hate group, The Nation of Islam, who has praised Hitler.
The Roddenberry Fellowship announced Sarsour’s place in its 2020 class after the outcry over her leadership of the Women’s March due to her support for Farrakhan and anti-Semitism. Around the time of the Roddenberry award, Sarsour had made yet another bigoted remark, claiming that Israel, “is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else.” Not a problem for the Roddenberry Foundation.
There is a certain irony in a foundation named after a militant atheist promoting an Islamist who defends the abuse of women in Muslim countries. But it’s the same hypocrisy that transformed a leftist movement skeptical of religion into the biggest cheerleaders for a crude and violent belief system.
Where Gene Roddenberry had once ridiculed religious people, "for most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain" and "if people need religion, ignore them", the Roddenberry Foundation now funds Islamists who believe that the Koran must rule America.
Last year’s Roddenberry Islamist was Alia Salem: the former head of CAIR’s Dallas-Forth Worth branch. CAIR, a Muslim Brotherhood organization with links to Hamas, has a theocratic vision of the future.
CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad had declared, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran … should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.” And, presumably, throughout the galaxy and across the universe. If given a chance.
Salem was named in 2019, the same year that Charlene Carruthers had also been named as one of the Roddenberry fellows. Carruthers had praised Farrakhan as “wise and selfless”, accused Israel of “apartheid” and praised the “righteous fight for BDS.” While Roddenberry was not Jewish, many members of the show’s cast, writing, production, and technical staff were. It is unfortunate that the Roddenberry Foundation is using the proceeds from their creative work to subsidize hatred of Jews.
While Roddenberry has long since passed away, his resentment against the role of the Jewish figures involved in Star Trek had flared up in the past. “Gene was anti-Semitic, clearly,” Leonard Nimoy, the Jewish actor who had portrayed Spock, told a journalist. "I saw examples not only of him practicing anti-Semitism, but of him being callous about other peoples' differences as well.”
But the Roddenberry Foundation’s funding of bigots has less to do with Roddenberry’s own issues than with its embrace of militant identity politics. Another irony for a foundation funded with the proceeds of a series that had once condemned racial divisions and separatism as reactionary and destructive.
Carruthers is one of a number of black nationalists funded by the Roddenberry Foundation.
That includes Alica Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, who had declared that, “whiteness has no shame.” In her twisted racist mind, “whiteness” is a mythical evil force which “attempted to de-fang the power of Black Lives Matter as a slogan and a rallying cry with All Lives Matter.”
The idea that all lives don’t matter is central to black nationalism as a supremacist ideology.
Garza had also agreed with Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic comments about Jews.
"My sister Ilhan correctly identified powerful forces, like AIPAC, that are shaping policy and practice not only in this country but all over the globe," Garza said. "So much so that this president began to attack our sister and call her anti-Semitic.”
This is the sort of gutter bigotry that the Roddenberry Foundation and the Star Trek brand now funds.
And yet it’s another paradox for a foundation named after a former member of the LAPD to embrace racists who hate the police. Gene Roddenberry hadn’t merely worked for the LAPD while trying to kickstart his entertainment industry career, he had based Spock on the LAPD’s Chief William Parker.
Parker, who made the LAPD what it is, has been a favorite whipping boy of contemporary noir LA movies. He’s also the man who called police, the “greatest dislocated minority in America”.
Roddenberry had written speeches for Parker during the Watts Riots and during later riots, had called in favors from old pals at the LAPD to protect his sets, and had even pondered using a phaser rifle from Star Trek to deter potential rioters. During an even later riot, he had reportedly carried an actual rifle.
If Roddenberry were around today, there’s little doubt that the people the foundation named after him funds would violently hate him. And, at some point, his name will have to come off the foundation.
That auto-cannibalism is a fundamental element of progressive politics which devours its founders.
Gene Roddenberry’s secular humanism is unfashionable in an age where progressive means embracing Islamism. His military and law enforcement background gave Star Trek a structure, but would soon be unfashionable even in his own time. His philandering feminism would set off #MeToo alarm bells today. Star Trek’s racial integration is equally outdated in an era when racial separatism is touted instead.
Today the Roddenberry Foundation funds racialist activists who want to dismantle the criminal justice system and consider police officers to be racist murderers. That is the legacy of leftist politics.
There is in the end no country, no planet, and no galaxy for dead lefties. Just their money.
The original Star Trek with its love of naval tradition and disdain for hippies, its vision of racial integration and scientific progress, is as politically unfashionable as its creator. It endures in the great intellectual property garbage bin of Hollywood, which is no longer capable of creating anything new, but obsessively recycles all the old names, Star Wars, Star Trek. Lost in Space, and attaches them to disposable rants about Trump, Brexit, and whatever political meme is ascendant this year.
And the money goes to fund leftist racists boldly going into a future where no bigot has gone before.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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