Every generation of Star Trek has been denounced on arrival as woke propaganda, civil-rights sermonizing, or pinko nonsense. The original series was blasted for interracial crews and utopian politics. The movies gave us San Francisco, flower power, and literal “save the whales” messaging. The Next Generation was mocked as preachy, soft, and politically correct. None of this is new.

What is new is selective memory. People who now defend “classic” Trek don’t realize that their affection for it is proof they evolved alongside it. If they were 30, 40, or 50 in the late ’60s, they would’ve hated Kirk’s Enterprise. If they were that age in the ’90s, they would’ve called Picard’s Enterprise moralizing nonsense. Time softened the edges, not the ideas.

Starfleet Academy is just the next expression of the same trajectory: optimism, pluralism, competence, anti-authoritarian ethics, and a belief that cooperation beats domination. Trek has never been neutral, and it has never pretended to be. The franchise doesn’t shift left so much as it drags each generation—kicking and screaming—forward, then waits until they forget they ever resisted it.