Art Fusco's History Blog

CBS blocks YouTube video praising Star Trek: Picard teaser

5/30/2019

JP's angry alter-ego is angry at CBS/YouTube

The Hope

Star Trek has long been a franchise about optimism and hope. It imagines a universe where the best of humanity is on full display. When I recently watched a video by Egotastic Fun Time's JP, featuring his reaction to the Star Trek: Picard trailer, I started sharing his optimism about the show.

JP's 10 minute reaction video played the one minute Picard teaser on a small window with the CBS logo looming largely over the video like a big ole' watermark, while JP spoke over the audio, clearly using the trailer in fair-use. He spoke about how he thought the teaser was good and how it had actually excited him about the upcoming Picard series, and it got me excited.

I agreed with him on the trailer - it was like CBS was throwing 'member-berries at us.

"'Member Picard? 'Member his vineyard and his wine?" (South Park reference)

The Struggle

I was also a little surprised that we both liked it. Since 2016, the Star Trek franchise has been marred with problem after problem. First, the third Kelvin movie, Star Trek: Beyond bombed in theaters, leading to the cancellation of a fourth Kelvin film, due to budget constraints. The following year saw the release of the first season of Star Trek: Discovery after months of delays, and the reaction to it was ... to say the least, mixed.

Some liked the new look and approach. Others hated it, but openly supported it out of fear that CBS would stop making Star Trek shows completely if Discovery bombed. Many Americans would have been open to watching Discovery, had it been on regular television, or a better streaming service such as Netflix, rather than the shoddy CBS All-Access (Americans can't get Discovery Through Netflix, only CBS All-Access). The rest were sadly disappointed at what Kurtzman tried to do and joined forces to make their voices heard on social media.

Season two of Discovery didn't do any better, despite rumors that it reportedly cost about $400 million dollars to produce, with the biggest offense being the re-imagined USS Enterprise bridge resembling a Twizzlers Factory. However, the audience who generally liked the show thought the best part about the season was Anson Mount's Captain Pike and began begging CBS to green light a show featuring Pike. CBS, out of touch with even fans of the show, instead announced that they were working on show featuring Michelle Yeoh's Georgiou, an over the top Empress from the Mirror Universe. Now there are rumors that even though a season three is green-lit for Discovery, Netflix and CBS refuse to cover the mounting costs which presumably leaves the show broke.

But through all of that, there has been one small shiny ray of hope. One tiny sliver of optimism that the franchise would indeed "live long and prosper". That hope has been for Star Trek: Picard. When Sir Patrick Stewart announced he would return to reprise his role as Captain Jean Luc Picard, I was so happy I cried. Then the realization that the same people who made Discovery would be the ones making Picard dawned on me and I have been nervous about it since. I mean, what if it sucks like Discovery did?

But then I saw JP's video and began to relax. This man is so positive and excited about the teaser, maybe I should just trust CBS. Surely they've learned from their past mistakes and do not wish to further upset the fans, since they're the ones paying the bills. Throughout the last few years CBS had begun to put their foot down when it came to copyrite issues, upsetting many fans. First they attacked fan films, which led to a lawsuit that put SO many restrictions on making a Star Trek fan film, that it drained any sense of creativity and vision from a project. Then they went after the gamers, specifically putting a cease and desist order on the creation of a free fan made interactive experience called Stage 9 that promised a recreation of the Enterprise-D that you could walk around in, like a digital museum. Then they went for the YouTubers, abusing their copyrite by blocking certain videos they didn't approve of, despite free-use laws.

But in this video, JP's being very positive and optimistic about what he just saw. This is certainly the type of promotion that CBS would embrace... no, I mean - should embrace. I, along with about sixteen thousand others watched this video, and seeing JP hopeful, also gave us hope.

"...then, the unimaginable."

JP then received an email from YouTube informing him that "the copyright owner" had "manually" claimed his video and then blocked it world-wide. JP responded by making another video where he explains the copyright claim and was clearly upset that CBS would go after such a positive and optimistic video and that it was probably a mistake to try and trust that CBS would eventually learn to understand Star Trek fans.

JP's YouTube notification/YouTube

Below are a couple of quotes from his video posted after the claim:

"It's a free promotion for everyone to enjoy and hopefully get pumped for Star Trek, and purchase subscriptions to CBS all access."

"People said I was crazy and that the show would definitely suck because CBS is making it... but I stayed strong, despite everything that was going on for the last couple of years that makes us want to make CBS "pay for what they've done", and break all of their little ships, I said "this trailer looks good"... I even kept fair-use in mind."

"This is why I stopped showing any still images on my views of Discovery and consequently just stopped doing Discovery reviews at all. Even though I tried to be fair in my reviews, talking about the stuff that I liked as well as the stuff that I didn't like and always expressing my hope for the series to keep trying to improve. But CBS, you make it impossible to want to support your content."

I've come to the conclusion that CBS is clearly out of touch with what Star Trek fans, and even Discovery fans want, and are incompetent at running this franchise. They can't get the Klingons right and they can't get the canon right. They disrespect the very shows that built their franchise and they disrespect the very fans that have been pumping money through the veins of this franchise for the last half a century. Now they're even attacking small time YouTube channels that give the slightest of hope that CBS would not disappoint them on Picard - only to then be unjustly dinged by them - probably because he didn't like Discovery. How disappointing.

Nobody wants Picard to fail. Captain Picard is one of the most beloved characters in the franchise and bringing him back may certainly pump new blood into it. However, if CBS continues to attack and disrespect its own consumers, then it's not gonna matter who's in it or whether it's good. You will just turn off so many people that they'll stop caring and they'll stop pumping money into it and they'll move onto other more successful franchises. If CBS cares enough about the future of Star Trek, the best thing to do is just sell Star Trek to a company that is willing to do what needs to be done, to see that the franchise lives long and prospers.

Watched JP's video on CBS below:

Click here to visit Egotastic Fun Time on YouTube

Update: CBS isn't the only one abusing the copyright laws, Disney is notorious for it and had even helped to create the most draconian copyright laws. Here is an example of Disney tagging a video from Geeks and Gamers over their views on Captain Marvel:

A more recent update from Geeks and Gamers. Let's stand together:

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The Need for Reform In San Diego's Law Enforcement, pt 1.

3/5/2019

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How many people have been lost?

As a San Diegan, I have seen that when you go into a police museum, or click on a history page of a police station, you wont hear much about their victims. They don't talk about any of the bad stuff, where they have blindly turned innocent people into victims. If there is any bad press, they simply ignore it, or discredit it, or even in some extreme cases, threaten journalists in the hopes that the bad press goes away.

It made me think: how many times has that worked?
How many times have people been unnecessarily slaughtered in order to maintain an image? How many times have we been lied to by our own story tellers?

As someone who has dealt with local media, I have seen what they can do to an issue you care about and so had long before decided to use my website and reach to spread a... let's say "unauthorized", but true story of law enforcement in the U.S. as well as in San Diego County. The following is the result of years of research combined with modern first hand protest experience.

However I feel that before I tell this this story, I must dedicate it to all of the people who have died in San Diego county whose names have been forgotten. Each life is important. A person who is 18 years old has been born, cleaned, clothed, groomed and fed by somebody. Somebody cared for this person and all of a sudden, a jumpy officer arrives and "fearing for their lives", shoots this 18 year old and kills them.

So every neighbor, teacher, parent, baby-sitter, family member and friend of this 18 year old are now affected. It becomes a community problem because the community sees potential corruption and want answers, however in most cases throughout American history, the ruling authority has never been accountable for its past. How did we get this way, allow me to tell you how we did:

Origins of Law Enforcement in the United States

Reeves and Shires
Hundreds of years ago, the Kingdom of England was broken down into a number of what were called "shires", later renamed to "counties". Each shire would elect their own special person to carry out duties on behalf of the crown, such as serve orders, enforce rules and regulations, or collect taxes. These people were called "reeves". Over time the words "shire" and "reeve" would come together to become "sheriff". The sheriff was important to the Crown, but so powerful that when King John of England was forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, twenty-seven of its sixty-three clauses had to do with limiting their powers. Once elected, a sheriff can deputize others, who then become sheriff deputies and they in turn would form posses to fight crime.

The sheriff would use local militias at times to help keep the piece, though they were often routy and hard to control. A sheriff's jurisdiction is within the county in which they were elected.

Slavery
The first "indentured servants" (slaves) came to Jamestown in 1607. "Indentured servitude" was allowed under the English's "Headright system", an agreement to provide seven years of free labor in return for a trip to the Americas and after the seven years was up, the "servant" was freed and given a plot of land to start their own farm. Yet, about half of the "servants" that arrived wouldn't survive in Virginia's climate and many that did would have their "servitude" extended for various reasons. England had been sending its orphans and unwanted poor to the Americas for only a short time, but soon some of them stopped being poor. They learned how to exploit others and made a lot of money bringing people over and working them to death, then passed that tradition to others.

The idea of the sheriff was also exported to the North American Eastern Seaboard, and the first sheriff was Captain William Stone who was appointed in 1634 to the Shire of Northampton, Virginia. There was a landmark court case in 1655 called "Johnson vs. Parker" where the two disputed whether an "indentured servant" named John Casor still belonged to Anthony Johnson, or was free to work for Robert Parker. The outcome affirmed that Casor did in fact belong to Johnson for life and it suddenly became safer to call "indentured servants" what they really were: slaves.

As an Independent Union

The United States would officially gain its independence from England in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris, about seven years after the Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence. Twenty three years later in 1799, the state of New York decided to free slave children who were born after July 4th of that year. Ohio abolished slavery in 1802 and New Jersey gradually did so starting in 1804. When Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory that same year though, tensions began to rise over whether or not the new territories would allow slavery.

Thomas Jefferson called for criminalizing the slave trade in 1806 and factions soon emerged. By 1820, these factions in Congress compromised on the issue of slavery: In the new Louisiana territory, minus the future lands of Missouri on parallel 36°30′ south, slavery would be prohibited. In return, Maine would enter the Union as a free state. When Mexico gained their independence from Spain the following year, they decided to abolish slavery, but many slave owners living there got around this by declaring their slaves as “indentured servants”.

The First Detectives
As populations swelled in the United States and the industrial revolution took hold in the northern states, it became more difficult for the sheriff and his deputies to keep order in a single county. As night watches began to spring up across the northern states, workers kept going on strike for higher pay and safer working conditions. Instead of negotiating with them, the factories would simply hire more workers, who would cross the picket lines to work. To protect the strike breakers, factories hired private police from a firm called the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to escort them to the factories.

Created in Chicago in 1850, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (or the "Pinkertons") were one of the first private police agencies created and its creator, Allen Pinkerton would go on to lead Abraham Lincoln's private security on several occasions (excluding that night of his assassination, as the Secret Service was established earlier that day by Lincoln's pen, but not for Presidential or personal protection, but to combat money fraud). As they escorted strike breakers to their factories, the Pinkertons would often beat pro union workers. The Pinkertons were also the first to use mugshots and would hold the largest collection of them.

Mexican American War
From 1846 -1848, the United States was at war with Mexico and as a result of Texas' annexation with the US. By the end of that war, the United States gained what was known as Alta California and Nueva Mexico territory. This is especially important because San Diego lies at the border between Alta and Baja California, splitting the native Kumeyaay tribe in half. We will get more into the consequences of the U.S. takeover of California in a later chapter.

Slave Catchers
Meanwhile in the 1850s, the southern states remained agricultural and full of African slaves. These slaves would occasionally escape into the northern states, where slavery had been banned. To help prevent this, some white southern residents would take it upon themselves to become fugitive slave catchers and started slave patrols. They didn't just limit their duties to catching runaway slaves however, they would also be the judge, jury and executioner of slaves who simply wandered too far from the tree line. In cases where a slaves life is spared, they are still usually beaten to a pulp.

If you like movies and aren't sensitive to violence, I recommend watching the 2016 movie Birth of a Nation. It's based on a true story and the man who beat Nat Turner's wife into a lumpy pulp was a slave catcher (played by Jackie Earle Haley).

The First Police
Philadelphia was the first city in the United States to organize a police force in 1833, followed by Houston in 1841. New York followed in 1845, New Orleans in 1853 and Baltimore in 1857. The main difference with police was that instead of being elected or deputized, they are hired, not by a factory or by a wealthy citizen, but by a city. As more and more cities started their own police forces, many deputies, Pinkertons, night watches, and slave patrols would be hired into them.

Roots of the U.S. Civil War

While this was all going on, civil war between the states loomed very real in the background. Acquiring the southwest would become more expensive than anticipated. With California entering the Union as a State in 1850, in conjunction with the population boom in industrial northern cities, congressional power in both the House and the Senate then switched towards the northern states. This would cause Democrats in the southern states to freak out and take drastic measures to take back control.

Media in the 1850s would also raise tensions. Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852, and sold hundred of thousands of copies. The book opened many people's eyes on the hardships of slavery and took a lot of criticism by the southern states for it. By 1854, Congress came out with the Kansas-Nebraska compromise, which drew a line from Missouri to the border of California, allowing slavery south of that line, with a provision of popular sovereignty.

Sectional tensions started to became violent in May 22, 1856 when two days after Senator Charles Sumner gave an impassioned antislavery speech, a Representative named Preston Brooks beat him with a cane in the Senate Chamber. Really, he came up to him, shared few words and went to town, beating Sumner up. He beat him so bad; Brooks broke his cane and nearly killed Sumner. That same year, a new political party, the Republicans, put out their first presidential candidate: John C. Freemont from California. The Republican Party became known as an abolitionist party when it came to slavery.

Sectional tensions got even worse on March 6, 1857 when the Supreme Court struck the Kansas-Nebraska Compromise down as unconstitutional in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. It did so by declaring that Scott, a slave and a black man, could not sue for his freedom after entering a free state with his master, because Scott was not considered a citizen of the United States, he was considered property instead. They also talked about how “dangerous” it would be if the “negros” became citizens:

“It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its [a slave State's] own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon public affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.”

-Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of the United States Supreme Court, Dred Scott V. Sandford, 1857

By now, the Republican Party had established itself with a platform against the spread of slavery, and just short of supporting abolition.

In October of 1859, the same year the African slave trade ended, a white man named John Brown, along with twenty-five others, entered Jefferson County, Virginia, with the intent of raiding an armory in Harper’s Ferry. Brown was an abolitionist who was hoping to break into an armory and give stolen guns to run-away slaves in order start a full scale slave revolt. When the raid started though, he received little help. President James Buchanan called in a unit of Marines to quell the rebellion. A "hero" of the Mexican American War named Colonel Robert E. Lee, led the unit.

Brown didn’t last long, his small band of fighters were killed and when he tried to make a final stand, the Marines broke in and he was subdued. He was taken to Charlestown, VA, tried and sentenced to death by hanging. About two thousand people had arrived in Charlestown to participate in or witness the execution, including some notable figures, as Nora Titone writes in “My Thoughts be Bloody”:

“Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson watched the scene intently, noting that the coffin was a handsome affair of dark walnut, protected by a poplar crate. Brown was conveyed a short distance out of town to an open pasture where his gallows loomed… John Wilkes (Booth) had been awake since dawn, along with the other Richmond Greys. They lined up by height close to the scaffold, no more than 30 feet away, and stood at attention in the rough grass.”

When the 22-year-old Booth learned of the looming execution, he ditched his role at the Marshall Theater, obtained a uniform and snuck on a train to Charlestown. He stayed there for two weeks, standing watch with the Richmond Greys and performing Shakespeare for troops at night. On the morning of the execution, December 2nd, he had a perfect view of the gallows. As soon as he saw Brown step onto the platform, Booth started feeling sorry for the man:

“Booth watched Brown scan the tree-line hemming the field. No mob armed with hand grenades made its appearance. The surrounding forest was undisturbed. Watching comprehension dawn on Brown’s face, John Wilkes later said he felt ‘a throb of anguish in his chest’. ‘He was a brave old man’, John Wilkes told Asa, ‘his heart must have broken when he felt himself deserted’. Brown may have been a villain and a vigilante, but John Wilkes could not help honoring the man for his courage.”

Others around Booth noted the agitation in his face; it could have been that he was reminded of his own father, who had lived a rough life, or it could have just been his first execution. However, despite the abandonment, Brown was acting differently from what Booth had thought – Brown quietly cooperated and showed no fear. There was some difficulty getting the ropes to properly function, so the executioner decided to take an axe to them. It worked and the trap door dropped, sending John Brown to his demise. Watching Brown die affected Booth. The agitation on his face had changed into a look of sickness. He was trembling, and said he felt faint. Stonewall Jackson would later write of Brown’s death:

“His arms below the elbows flew up horizontally. His hands clenched, and his arms gradually fell, but by spasmodic motions. Only then did a strong wind blow the lifeless body to and fro.”

Then Abraham Lincoln was elected. The southerns states didn't like him.

The American Civil War began and was fought mostly over the issue of slavery. Lincoln had been elected November 6, 1860. By December 20th, before he was even inaugurated, South Carolina declared their independence from the Union. Mississippi soon left on January 9 1961, followed by Florida on the 10th, Alabama on the 11th, Georgia on the 19th, Louisiana on the 26th, and Texas on February 1st. These states then joined to create the Confederate States of America, which was born on February 8th.

Back at the Capitol during Lincoln’s inaugural address, on March 4, 1861, his message to the South ended:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Later that month, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens gave a speech in Savannah, Georgia in what is known as the “Cornerstone Speech”, declaring that the separation was specifically over the issue of slavery:

“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact… The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature… Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.”

The Confederates were taking a huge risk. They had tried to preserve the institution of slavery by law and ballet and failed. Violence would be the next step.

Reconstruction

After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the Union army had occupied the southern states and split the confederacy into five military districts. Those districts forced each state to recreate their own governments, but they now had to include African Americans. This meant that now, African Americans could now participate in their local government.

There were differing ideas about how the federal government would handle the captured districts. Lincoln himself wanted to simply forgive the rebellious states and allow them to re-enter the Union with little punishment. He also wanted to further protect the rights of African Americans and was instrumental in passing the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution which MOSTLY abolished slavery.

After Lincoln's assassination, Andrew Johnson took over as President. Johnson was harsh with the confederates, but also opposed giving citizenship to former slaves. The 14th Amendment, which did give all free men citizenship was ratified in 1868, despite Johnson's veto, and one of the conditions for re-entering the Union was that each southern state would have to ratify it. The last amendment to be passed during this time was the 15th Amendment in 1870, which outlawed discrimination at the polls.

The advancement of African Americans into citizenship and government positions angered many southern whites who, in 1866, joined together to create a terrorist organization called the Klu-Klux Klan. These groups used terror techniques such as beatings, murders and cross burnings to keep African Americans and those who supported them from making it to the polls. The techniques worked and with less Republicans voting, the Democrats took local governments in the southern states.

The 1876 Presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J Tilden ended with disputed electoral votes in three southern states: South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. The Republican congress set up a committee to decided who would win the Executive Office and in the negotiations, Republicans agreed to allows the Democrats to take back control of the southern states, promised to build a transcontinental railroad through Texas, and promised not to meddle in the south's affairs. For the first time, but not the last, the Republican party has turned a blind eye to the plight of the very African Americans they once helped to free.

In return for the South, Rutherford B Hayes was declared President elect, and Union troops finally left the south. Reconstruction was now over and it has officially failed.

Moving Towards Civil Rights

By the end of Reconstruction, police in southern states enforced a series of vagrancy laws and black codes that were passed by state legislatures after the Civil War to keep the disenfranchised, including the newly freed slaves, from advancing economically or having true freedom. For instance, after the Civil War, the South suffered a shortage of labor. Eight southern states established "convict leasing", the hiring of prisoners for laborious jobs. People suspected of being jobless were arrested and leased to plantations or businesses for work. African Americas weren't allowed to own property or businesses of their own and they were kept from voting or taking office.

In 1892 a New Orleans man named Homer Plessy decided to challenge these laws. Plessy boarded a first class white train and was asked to move to the "blacks only" train, he refused and was arrested. He sued and the suit made it to the Supreme Court, resulting in the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision. Not only did Plessy lose the case, but the case legitimized the establishment of "separate but equal" codes, beginning the era of the Jim Crowe Laws.

1900s
Until the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, State and local officials established laws separating blacks and whites from schools, cafes, universities, churches, restrooms and even drinking fountains. Discrimination against African Americans prevented adequate funding for schools and stopped them from being hired at high paying jobs or buying homes in prominent neighborhoods. The murder and lynching of African Americans continued without those responsible being arrested or charged. In many cases, law enforcement was complicity in the murders.

By 1953, racial prejudices ran rampant throughout the whole country, especially in the south. Once again the laws were challenged. The parents of a little girl named Linda Brown sued the board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in order to place her in a school that was close to home but for whites. The Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954 overturned the decision left by Plessy vs. Ferguson. The Supreme Court had decided that keeping children separate simply due to skin color made them feel inferior, affected their development and deprived them of equal protection laws.

This enraged the south and it would take years to integrate schools. Many schools chose to shut down or become private, rather than integrate. In some extreme cases, the state capitols rise the confederate battle flag over their buildings, or put up statues of Confederate heroes to send a message to African Americans looking to settle down. In Alabama in 1955, a young woman named Rosa Parks walked into a bus, paid her fee and sat down near the front. When she was asked to move to the back of the bus to allow a white man to sit on front, she refused. Parks was arrested, which would kick off the Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by a young reverend named Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Klingons and Canon - How CBS shifted the conversation to bigotry

1/29/2019

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I'd like to take a detour today and talk about something that I think is important - Star Trek fans are divided and that division is escalating into ugliness.

Then...

My earliest memory of Star Trek were the movies. I was born in 1983, almost 20 years after The Original Series premiered. The first film I remember seeing was the Search for Spock on VHS. When The Next Generation premiered in 1987, I remember watching episodes in-between Nickelodeon and Fox Kids programs as a kid and really liking Data. By the time I grew up in the early 2000s, I had caught up with everything Star Trek. I was really into the idea of a peaceful Earth as well as the (mostly) peaceful exploration of space and was saddened that Nemesis had pretty much been the final TNG movie. Enterprise would last for a few more years but would be done by 2005.

I actually was lucky enough to see William Shatner, Avery Brooks, Scott Bakula and Patrick Stewart in panels at the San Diego Comic Con in around 2011 and the following year, I stole a kiss from Mr. Shatner (A Hershey's kiss - That's another story). The title of my history book, Before First Contact is a nod to my favorite Star Trek movie. Also, I hate flying and so I wear my TNG communicator badge when I do (Talk all the shit you want). So why am I telling you this? Because before getting into the point of this article, I thought it would be important to lay out my background and views on Star Trek, since I've been accused of being a few things lately (Russian troll, etc).

When the JJ movies came out, I accepted them when my friends did not, specifically because they went out of their way to separate that timeline from the prime timeline. Then at around 2017, I heard they were coming out with a new Star Trek show that was set in the prime timeline and I was excited. I had assumed they'd make a few changes, but mostly stay loyal to canon, and that was it. The first episode I saw of Star Trek Discovery left me full of confusion: Why does the tech look more advanced than the Enterprise D? How come Spock had never mentioned having an adopted sister? And WTF did they do to the Klingons?

My questions went on as I went through the next few episodes: Why is there a mutiny by Spock's sister 10 years before TOS where Spock once said nobody in Starfleet had ever mutinied? Why is there so much animosity between the crew? And what is up with this giant tardigrade plot? It all started to become a distraction. I began to realize that I really didn't like this iteration of Star Trek and went online to see if people were agreeing that this Trek was all wrong and noticed that there were a lot of comments that were asking the same questions I had asked. Then I went to Forbes and read about how the critics of Discovery were saying racist things, giving many examples. Ok, that's not my problem with Discovery, so I moved on and found an EW article with the lead character responding to the critics... no wait... she's responding to the "racist critics".

I started to see a strange pattern. I'm seeing a lot of comments on Facebook and YouTube about what I will call "Klingons and canon", but I'm reading a lot of articles about racism, and sexism. I'm reading things like "Haters are gonna hate, and “Discovery” detractors will continue to heap abuse on the show. Ignore them. I’m not for a moment suggesting this is a great “Star Trek” series, but it is a good one. It might even turn out to be great."

What? How is it gonna be great when they resort to stealing plot points from an unreleased video game?

The racism and sexism always felt like a bullshit argument. Who literally thinks people who have been Trek fans since the 60s (or in my case the 80s), through 5 iterations of diverse casts and the first interracial kiss in television history, are all of a sudden angry about a black female main character?

I started thinking to myself, "Why does this feel like a political campaign?" It only took leaving a few comments on Discovery's page to realize that it essentially was. The media had seen the small amount of legit sexist and racist comments out there on the internet and decided to pick up on it, knowing it would receive more clicks and interactions than stories about Klingons and canon. Once they turned that molehill into a mountain, it was easy for CBS to look like the hero for having a diverse cast, even though the history of Trek always held diversity. It was now also easy to dismiss the Klingons and canon arguments as also from racists or sexists. After getting responses to my comments from people who obviously didn't understand canon, and after forcing myself through the entire first season, I decided that the higher ups at CBS simply didn't care about their older Trek fans and was doing their best to tap down legit criticism by mixing them with the racist criticisms.

That was a sad day for me. Coming to that realization was a punch in the gut. I had loved Star Trek all my life and now, the very entity that owned it was not only disrespecting its own canon, but its own fans. I gave up that day, tried to make peace with it and decided to just settle on liking the Orville.

Now...

About 3 months ago, I started getting heavily spammed by CBS and Discovery's YouTube and Facebook pages about the new second season. I had already heard that Discovery's first season didn't perform as well as it was predicted to, that Netflix had paid for that season and were not satisfied with the results and that the Short Treks were a failed attempt at raising extra money. Still hurt from the way CBS treated people who didn't like Discovery for legitimate reasons, I tried to remove their ads from my page and surprise! They still came back after a few days through the Star Trek and CBS pages and even the Discovery page came back after a while.

Not even wanting to think about the show anymore, I realized that I'm getting all this spam because I have identified myself as a fan of Star Trek. So I figured that the algorithms would get the hint if I just left negative comments about the show, so I began to actively leave negative comments. I don't remember exactly, but it was stuff like, "This show doesn't follow canon", "The aesthetics and lighting is all wrong" or "Now you're bringing in Spock and the Enterprise when you originally said you wouldn't? And he now has feelings?!"

I didn't attack anybody personally, just talked about why I didn't like the show. Soon, I started receiving negative and disrespectful personal comments in return, as well as people telling me to go away. There was this account named "Jawan Kasfartan" who claimed to be an expert in canon, but kept getting things all wrong. When I called him out on it, he began following me to other pages and harassing me.

Eventually, something woke up in me. I had joined a few Star Trek fan pages and had since been muted or booted from those groups over my disgust for Discovery. The thing that awoke in me, saw what was going on and decided, "I don't need to take this shit". I soon joined a few anti-Discovery pages and decided that if these trolls were gonna be combative, then I had better come prepared for such combat:

"Watching Discovery is like going to the Hawaiian islands to have fun, when all of a sudden volcanoes start erupting, but instead of lava, they release the Earth's secret reserve of poo-poo. You try to run from the poo-poo, but it's too late. Because the poo-poo is moving as fast as a pyroclastic flow, this "poo-pooclastic" flow quickly catches up to you and you not only get poo-poo all over yourself, you also suffocate in the poo-poo, and because you cannot breathe the poo-poo, you die.

Billions of years later, alien archaeologists dig up the now hardened coprolite fossils that incase you and put it on display in the museum, like you were from Pompey, calling you "The Poo-poo person" This is what it is like to watch Star Trek Discovery."

Mind you, I still didn't really take any of this seriously. Dealing with actual life and death stuff in the real world, I found this stuff a fun diversion from my activism. It didn't even bother me when Discovery's page blocked me from commenting on their posts (I still get their ads). I didn't really began to take this seriously enough to write an article about until recent events motivated me to. As a guy who now simply hated Discovery, I fell into that crowd and started following YouTube pages like Doomcock and MechaRandom42, who are huge critics of the show.

MechaRandom42 started off as a gamer channel until this stuff with Discovery started splitting the fans. She then changed her format into a commentary channel. Last week, she posted a video speculating about whether or not Discovery would return for a third season. In it, she predicted that it wouldn't based on a few suspect tweets from cast members. This triggered Chris Hunter - the son of Jeffery Hunter, who played the original Captain Pike in the 60's pilot - to write a Facebook post asking for people to go to her page and attack her.

Surprised that the son of a Star Trek actor would act this way, MechaRandom42 went live to talk about it. Hunter went to the comments section of that video to leave a threatening comment:

He did apologize for these comments the following day, claiming that it wasn't him who made the comments... I don't know what he means by that, but it doesn't change the fact that those comments came from his account and that he had possibly put this woman in danger. He also tarnished his fathers name in the process. All of this because he didn't like what she had to say about the show.

While I thought this would be a decent example to show that Discovery fans are maybe too passionate about a TV show, I soon learned that other fans applauded Hunter's actions. I will leave an example here:

(You can find the full conversation here) He continues after I mention that they're commentary and not news:

Now we've gone full circle. Instead of talking about Klingons and canon, we're once again talking about "racists and bigots". Predicting this, I lay it on them.

I think he knew he was on the ropes at this point, so he tried to throw a curve ball and accuse MechaRandom42 of something specific and in turn I ask for evidence:

I call him out as full of BS and his response was:

Surprise, surprise! Lots of anger and passion, but no evidence or substance. He even changes the story to say that it's now YouTube deleting the videos. This person basically gave me an empty rant about how this woman was a racist and a bigot but gave me no evidence of this. In my activism, I have dealt with local politics and life and death situations with the understanding that violence is a line that I should never cross and here is this dipshit who wants this woman jumped because she doesn't like a fucking TV show.

I blame CBS for taking advantage of the earlier media reports and allowing fans to dismiss other fans who dislike Discovery as bigots or trolls. They sent cast and crew members to the media to address the racism instead of Klingons and canon, and now that's all this shit has become. Because of that I have absolutely no intention of returning to the franchise unless CBS acknowledges this, nor will I return for any Picard series or whatever else comes and I'm now even boycotting the Late Show, even though I love Stephen Colbert, because CBS obviously doesn't care about losing viewers. I also will continue to talk shit about STD online because fuck those haters, I have the freedom to say whatever I want as long as it doesn't promote violence.

The saddest part about it however is not my departure from something I have loved so much, but the fact that the heads of CBS would probably read this article coming from a guy who was a diehard Trek fan since the 1980s and would probably respond with a "Good Riddance". That truly hurts - but not as much as their wallets will hurt, now that mine and many other wallets are closed.

-Rot in hell, Discovery.

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CBS blocks YouTube video praising Star Trek: Picard teaser

The Hope

The Struggle

"...then, the unimaginable."

The Need for Reform In San Diego's Law Enforcement, pt 1.

How many people have been lost?

Origins of Law Enforcement in the United States

As an Independent Union

Roots of the U.S. Civil War

Reconstruction

Moving Towards Civil Rights

Klingons and Canon - How CBS shifted the conversation to bigotry

Then...

Now...

Do you see this?

Archives

CBS blocks YouTube video praising Star Trek: Picard teaser

The Hope

The Struggle

​"...then, the unimaginable."

The Need for Reform In San Diego's Law Enforcement, pt 1.

How many people have been lost?

Origins of Law Enforcement in the United States

As an Independent Union​

Roots of the U.S. Civil War

Reconstruction

Moving Towards Civil Rights

Klingons and Canon - How CBS shifted the conversation to bigotry

Then...

Now...

Do you see this?

Archives

"...then, the unimaginable."

As an Independent Union