As a non american, one of the things I find most interesting about Star Trek is that it has been running for so long that it betrays the american zeitgeist and the writers’ cultural milieu for every decade it is written in. So you learn a lot about these people (and the american people as a whole) just by looking at the sorts of things they put into these stories.

The stories of how Star Trek came into being have changed over time, even though certain fundamental truths remained there. Take the formation of Earth’s utopia for an instance. In the original series the mainstays were a trial by fire in WW3, the eugenics dictatorships and vulcan solidarity. These are quite revealing for an american population that just came out of WW2, was plunged into the Cold War and was in the grips of a form of neo-great awakening that involved amongst other things alien worship. 90s Trek kept all of those plot points, but shifted the emphasis just a bit as it revisitted everything. The biggest contribution of 90s Trek comes from DS9 and Enterprise because they made it clear that the rise of the human utopia was a political affair, not a technological one. Things like the Bell Riots and neither the Humans nor the Vulcans having replicators make it clear to the audience that it wasn’t magic that solved Humanity’s material conditions, it was work.

Current Trek stumbled into all of that with jaded cynicism, so it couldn’t help but ruin it all. Rolling back the acquisition of Replicators because they are Star Trek iconic was bad. Where it crosses into outright evil however is in the premise behind Star Trek Picard. The series decided to ‘tackle’ current issues like deportations and climate collapse. As naive as the Bell Riot storyline was, in Picard humanity can either find a magical microbe Jupiter’s moons or whatever - that solves all disease, hunger, climate collapse and so on - or it is fated to become the biggest genocidal fascist dictatorship of all time. This reflects the writers’ preconceptions about the world they live in. There’s no politics. There’s no redistribution. There’s no caring for each other. Either americans magically solve all their problems with an app or, well, its genocide time. C’est la vie.

Think I’m inferring too much? They spelled it out during promos for the Section 31 movie. DS9 introduced Section 31 as a rogue agency, antagonist and villain both. Their actions were Not Good. You can at best argue that the actual heroes won the Dominion War regardless of what Section 31 did and then, at the end, capitalized on Section 31’s actions to avert a massacre. Which would still be in spite of Section 31’s beliefs: because Odo couldn’t have cured the Great Link of Section 31’s virus if Bashir and O’brien hadn’t stolen the cure against Section 31’s wishes. If Section 31 had gotten their way, the Federation would have won the war without their help, the Changelings would have gone down fighting and the final battle for Cardassia would still have ended with the genocide of the Cardassians. Arguably the Alpha Quadrant could have lost so much in that final battle that whatever was left of the Dominion could still pour in and do irretrievable damage in retaliation. All because the rogue agency just knew better.

What does current Trek say about this? Well Section 31 is good and based actually. They are the heroic CIA, keeping the world safe so the dumb liberals in the audience can enjoy the good things in life. That’s what the promos said. That’s what the story is about. Good spies making the tough choices, for the benefit of all.