Leftist Regurgitates Repulsive 'Starship Troopers' Bug Narrative, But This Time for 'Star Trek'
Leftists seemingly can’t help themselves in allying with the enemies of humanity when it comes to science fiction properties. The latest example? Star Trek.
X user Robert Florence posted, “Arguing with Star Trek fans who are convinced that Star Trek is a right-wing power fantasy is the new arguing with Warhammer 40K fans who think the Imperium of Man are goodies.”
This tired argument is the same one numerous leftists made in response to The Domes of Calrathia novelist Isaac Young when he shared in a now famous thread explaining why Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 Starship Troopers film failed as a parody.
Young pointed out that the humans are depicted as attractive, relatable, orderly, and technologically advanced. They have clean cities, fit soldiers, and a functional society.
On the opposite end they are fighting back against grotesque bugs that want to murder them and ransack their planet.
The director’s attempt at campy exaggeration backfired because the Federation looks appealing and worth defending compared to the alien horde. As a result, the majority of viewers root for the humans.
In response to Young’s thread thousands of leftists raged against the “fascist” Federation, memed about bug sympathy, and accused him and others of missing the “point,” all while ignoring how the aesthetics and relatability undermined the parody. Young’s thread didn’t just critique the movie; it forced people to show their cards.
They became a meme:
In a separate thread analyzing the responses to this initial thread, Young noted how trying to debate with facts with leftists was pointless, but engaging them with the memes like the one above was. He explained, “The memes were far more effective than the actual arguments over the movie because they exposed where the Left’s priorities were. It was never about Starship Troopers. It was about their hatred for healthy modes of human existence.”
Florence is doing the exact same thing with Star Trek and Warhammer 40,000. He’s siding with the various demonic and alien factions that want to wipe out humanity.
It’s clear that the bug sympathizing reaction in regards to Starship Troopers is not a one-off glitch, but is clearly a recurring signal flare. It shows what is at the heart of leftist belief: perpetual revolution against what is beautiful, true, just, and good.
This same impulse explains why so much of current Hollywood output works overtime to reframe grotesque characters, outright monsters, or unambiguous villains as protagonists or misunderstood anti-heroes. Audiences are nudged (or outright lectured) to relate to the deformed, the chaotic, the destructive, whether it’s giving sympathetic backstories to serial killers, humanizing alien invaders as oppressed minorities, or turning moral monsters into tragic figures fighting “the system.” Immorality gets recast as liberation; evil gets portrayed as a valid response to “oppression” or a quirky aesthetic choice. The goal isn’t nuance, it’s subversion: erode the instinctive rooting interest in healthy, competent humanity so that nothing stands as unambiguously worth defending.
Florence’s smug analogy isn’t clever subversion—it’s the latest regurgitation of that same repulsive impulse. By slapping the “right-wing power fantasy” label on fans who simply want Star Trek to remain an optimistic vision of human potential (rather than a lecture on why strength and self-defense are suspect), he does exactly what the bug-sympathizers did: project, strawman, and ultimately align rhetorically with whatever opposes ordered, competent human civilization.
NEXT: Robert Picardo Is Wrong: Star Trek Is An Inherently Right Wing And Christian Property
It would be a big help if someone would rat me out to those guys as a conservative, Christian adjacent science fiction author.
I could use the publicity.
You know you are f@cked in the head when you see politics in everything