Stacey Abrams might run for president of the United States one day, but she’s already won the office in the Star Trek universe. In the season four finale of the Paramount+ TV series Star Trek: Discovery, Abrams takes on the role of president of United Earth and greets the crew of the USS Discovery before announcing that the planet will be rejoining the United Federation of Planets.
Sorry for the spoilers, but you need to understand just how innocuous this appearance is before you learn how much conservatives freaked out about it.
Abrams’s appearance — which, again, is totally normal within the canon of the show — caused a complete and total freak out within the conservative universe. The National Review ran an article titled, “Stacey Abrams Does Not Deserve to Be President of Earth.” Why? Because she didn’t win an election. “Abrams is, at this time, most famous for losing the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and then proceeding to deny she had lost it,” the article argues — which ignores a whole lot of advocacy work by Abrams in registering hundreds of thousands of new voters, and also her successful career as a novelist, but sure.
Sen. Ted Cruz, who somehow doesn’t have anything better to do despite his state experiencing an ongoing natural disaster, tweeted “what…the…HELL…is…this??” upon learning Abrams popped up as president on the Star Trek series.
It’s a cameo, Ted. Have you watched Star Trek? This is not new. Abrams is a self-described Star Trek superfan, and the Star Trek universe has been littered with celebrity guest appearances over the years, ranging from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to Stephen Hawking. There is nothing out of the norm happening here.
None of these ghouls actually care about this, of course. If any of them are even remotely invested in Star Trek as a franchise, they know that Abrams pretty much perfectly aligns with the show’s politics. They just know that whining about it will earn them some cheap culture war points, which they can cash in at a later date when they need to fire up the hate machine to pass some restrictive, repressive law that relies on driving the wedge between people. You know, basically the opposite of the whole message of Star Trek.
