Starfleet Academy Is Not Entertainment, It’s A Sermon

We brought Starfleet Academy up on Just the Guys for a reason: not because every new reboot deserves a trial by fire, but because the modern entertainment machine increasingly feels less like storytelling and more like conditioning.

And that’s where two “communist goals” land uncomfortably on the nose:

• Goal #21: “Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.”
• Goal #25: “Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.”

You don’t have to believe there’s a guy in a basement rubbing his hands together to see the pattern. You only have to look around.

The point isn’t subtle anymore—and that’s the point

One of the most telling moments in the episode wasn’t even about plot holes or canon. It was about tone—how modern shows don’t simply have themes. They announce themes. They preach.

Old-school Star Trek—especially in the era shaped by Gene Roddenberry—often embedded ideas inside moral dilemmas and layered storytelling. You didn’t have to agree with every conclusion, but you had to think. The show trusted viewers to wrestle with questions about duty, sacrifice, and human nature.

Now the pattern is different. Increasingly, the audience isn’t invited into a dilemma—it’s placed in a classroom. The message isn’t discovered; it’s delivered. The moral tension isn’t explored; it’s resolved for you—usually with a smug wink and a “how could anyone disagree?”

That’s not an accident of bad writing alone. It’s the predictable outcome of a media ecosystem that’s been captured by ideology and trained to treat culture as a weapon.

Goal #21 in plain sight: control the channels, control the “normal”

“Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures” doesn’t just mean who owns the studio. It means who writes the scripts, greenlights the projects, staffs the writers’ rooms, trains the next generation of creators, and decides what stories are “acceptable.”

When those positions are dominated by a single worldview, the output begins to look uniform—even when the settings are different. Sci-fi, comedy, drama, animation: same sermon, different costumes.

That uniformity is exactly how you move the Overton window without passing a single law. You don’t argue people into a new reality—you immerse them in it until it feels inevitable.

So when a show feels “in-your-face,” that’s not always a creative failure. Sometimes it’s a strategy: remove subtlety, remove ambiguity, remove debate. Replace all of it with repetition. Repeat the assumptions until the viewer mistakes them for common sense.

Goal #25: normalize the breakdown, then punish anyone who objects

The second goal—breaking down cultural morality through pornography and obscenity—doesn’t only mean explicit content. It also includes the broader project of lowering standards: turning shame into stigma (shame is internal; stigma is external punishment), turning restraint into “repression,” turning holiness into “hate,” turning boundaries into “bigotry.”

Even when a show isn’t explicitly pornographic, it can still carry the same corrosive function:

• Mock the idea of virtue as naïve.
• Treat self-control like it’s outdated.
• Present disorder as liberation.
• Portray moral disagreement as emotional violence.
• Reward the characters who “transgress” and humiliate the characters who hold the line.

This is how a culture learns to laugh at what it should honor—and honor what it should fear.

And once enough people absorb it, the script flips: those who resist cultural breakdown are framed as the problem. They’re the “threat.” They’re the ones who must be corrected.

“It just reflects present-day” is not a defense—it’s a confession

One of the most important takeaways from the episode is this: even if you believe the show is simply reflecting modern society, that argument doesn’t rescue it—it indicts us.

Because if our entertainment now reflexively mirrors confusion, decline, self-indulgence, and contempt for tradition… then what does that say about where we are?

If the standard defense of propaganda is “this is just how people are,” what you’re really saying is:

“We’ve already moved so far that ideological programming looks like normal life.”

That’s the real danger. Subversion doesn’t succeed when it forces you to agree. It succeeds when you stop noticing you’re being shaped at all.

Why this matters beyond one show

It’s easy to argue about canon. It’s harder to talk about culture—because culture is the water we swim in.

But the stakes are higher than whether a franchise is “ruined.” The stakes are whether Americans can still recognize:

• the difference between storytelling and messaging,
• virtue and vibes,
• freedom and indulgence,
• dignity and decay.

When media becomes a pipeline for ideological instruction, it doesn’t just entertain people. It trains them—especially the young—to see the world through a preloaded moral lens.

And when that lens becomes dominant, it doesn’t merely influence opinions. It influences what people believe is possible, acceptable, and worth defending.

The line we have to hold

The answer isn’t to panic at every new episode of every new reboot. The answer is to regain moral clarity and refuse cultural hypnosis.

We have to be the kind of people who can say:

• “That’s propaganda,” even when it’s trendy.
• “That’s obscene,” even when it’s popular.
• “That’s destructive,” even when it’s profitable.
• “That’s not normal,” even when we see it everywhere.

Because if we can’t name what’s happening, we’ll keep adapting to it. And if we keep adapting, we’ll wake up one day and realize the subversion didn’t conquer us with tanks—it conquered us with screens.

The fight for a nation is always, eventually, a fight for its culture. And the fight for culture begins with the courage to tell the truth—out loud, without apology—before the lie becomes the default setting.

If they’re asking you to accept the breakdown as normal, your job is simple:

Don’t.