This is seriously so tone deaf, I don’t know where to start. Don’t name your initiative after the title of a chilling warning from TNG.
This week, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth touted their desire to “make Star Trek real”—while unconsciously reminding us of what the utopian science fiction franchise is fundamentally about.
Their Tuesday event was the latest in Hegseth’s ongoing “Arsenal of Freedom” tour, which was held at SpaceX headquarters in Starbase, Texas. (Itself a newly created town that takes its name from a term popularized by Star Trek.)
Neither Musk nor Hegseth seemed to recall that the “Arsenal of Freedom” phrase—at least in the context of Star Trek—is also the title of a 1988 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That episode depicts an AI-powered weapons system, and its automated salesman, which destroys an entire civilization and eventually threatens the crew of the USS Enterprise. (Some Trekkies made the connection, however.)
Kegsbreath and Space Karen are probably the two most tone deaf, incomprehensibly incompetent individuals that I’ve ever known. This is just more proof of how absolute bellends with no critical thinking skills can fail upward and cause untold damage; yet defying all odds, they still reach positions of power that unlock their ability to cause massive amounts of damage. Fucking wild.