The Stories That Fascism Fears Most w/ Jessie Gender (Special Crossover w/ Resistance is Fertile)

“Fascism isn’t just about power—it’s about controlling the stories we tell. It warps narratives to justify oppression, trapping us in cycles of dominance and despair. But stories can also resist, break those cycles, and open the door to something new.“ This is how YouTuber and hardcore Trekkie Jessie Gender starts her video essay “⁠The Stories Fascism Fears Most⁠“ which we highly recommend. A few weeks ago, Elia Ayoub sat down with Jessie to talk about it. They got into their love of Star Trek – because of course they did – as well as other franchises like The Matrix.

This is a special crossover episode between ⁠The Fire These Times⁠ (Episode 199) and ⁠Resistance is Fertile⁠ (Episode 2), a Star Trek Anarchist podcast by Elia and carla joy bergman. Check it out! On all podcast apps.

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The Fire These Times

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Transcription: You can help ⁠Antidote Zine⁠ transcribe TFTT episodes here.

Show Notes

⁠Support the making of RIF on Patreon⁠
RIF BlueSky:⁠ @thestartrekpod.bsky.social‬⁠
⁠RIF IG⁠
⁠carla’s work⁠
⁠Jessie Gender’s YouTube channel⁠
⁠Music by NinePulse⁠
Tech by Chris Bergman

Transcript prepared by Shirley Yin and Antidote Zine:

Stories that I have been gravitating towards are stories about people building a better future based on a new way of thinking about the world, because we can’t keep relying on our present status quo. We need to think of a new status quo, and we need stories to help us think about what that’s going to be.

Elia Ayoub: Hi everyone, Elia here. This is a rather special episode, because it’s the first cross-post between The Fire These Times and Resistance is Fertile, a podcast that I recently launched with my good friend carla joy bergman on Star Trek, anarchism, the importance of political storytelling, and everything in between. We will do our best to be as regular as we can, but ultimately we’re doing this because it’s fun and because we feel like we need to.

Longtime listeners of The Fire These Times may know by now that I consider myself a big Trekkie. I talk a lot about Star Trek when I can get away with it, especially DS9 [Deep Space Nine] and TNG [The Next Generation], and on this podcast with carla we will be talking about all of these things and more.

I had Jessie on The Fire These Times before we actually launched Resistance is Fertile, but as Jessie Gender is best known on YouTube for her Star Trek videos, although she also does a bunch of other things as well, I decided for this episode to be a cross-post instead, so that we introduce Resistance is Fertile to the The Fire These Times listeners and vice versa. You will hear me referencing a “first episode”—that’s because Jessie was on The Fire These Times a few years ago.

EA: Hi, how are you, Jessie? Introduce yourself to our listeners in case they haven’t listened to the first episode.

Jessie Gender: I’m a YouTuber. I do video essays on queer topics, science fiction, nerddoms, pop culture, that sort of stuff. I’m a huge Trekkie—that’s the bread and butter, but I also talk about Star Wars, and about films generally. I also do news, reviews, and stuff like that on my secondary channel, and I’m a filmmaker.

I believe since we last talked, my movie Identiteaze came out, which is a science fiction film that stars John de Lancie from Star Trek: The Next Generation; Abigail Thorn, who many people may know from Philosophy Tube but has also been in Star Wars: The Acolyte, and House of the Dragon; and numerous other folks as well. That’s on Nebula. I’m very proud of that, and it was recently a honoree at the 2025 Webby Awards.

I’m also directing an episode for Nebula’s upcoming series that we’re filming this summer. I’m not sure when the release date is, but it’s called Sub/Liminal. And then I have a book coming out, hopefully sometime next year, that is a queer history of Star Trek.

EA: I don’t know if I’ve told you this, but you are the one who got me into DS9, which is, to this day, my favorite Star Trek. Last time you said that I need to watch Star Trek: Lower Decks, and I still haven’t done so, but I will at some point. I’m actually re-watching Star Trek because I’m starting a podcast with my friend, carla joy bergman, on all things Star Trek. We are both re-watching DS9.

JG: I love DS9. The first half of my upcoming book is arguing that Star Trek is this push and pull between wanting to imagine a better future, but being pulled back to the present. There’s a turn in the book is when I get to Deep Space Nine, which I talk about being a queer centering of the future, in the sense of people who are ostracized and marginalized. It’s such a wonderful series. I generally love Star Trek, but DS9 captures everything I love about Star Trek.

EA: I completely agree. That’s why the podcast is going to be called Resistance is Fertile, as in, not futile. We’re very proud of the pun.

Your video essay is called “The Stories Fascism Fears Most.” I’ve noticed that you’ve been doing quite a few videos on the importance of storytelling. How would you describe the moment that led you to making this specific video?

JG: The reason I made this video was frustration after the election here in the United States where Trump got elected. The video itself is an evolution of a Star Wars video that I did a few months ago, talking about how Star Wars is an American monomyth: the Ur-Joseph Campbell, Here’s the story of America, and how a lot of our storytelling, especially in Hollywood, centers on a monomythical framing. Even if you sometimes break it or change the rules a little bit, they still all center on the idea of a hero who goes out and later returns.

It centers this very individualistic understanding of our history, and in Star Wars, there is this push and pull between fascism and neoliberal-style democracy. Individuals get to decide for us whether we fall to fascism or whether we fall to neoliberal-style democracy, and everyone else gets “othered” around that. Star Wars constantly others Asian cultures, Jewish people, Indigenous cultures—pick your group and they’ve they’ve otherized them, in positive and negative ways.

I wanted to do a video after that about Star Wars: Andor, which has, within the Star Wars franchise, pushed towards more collectivist storytelling: How do we resist? How do we create new futures? How do we build new ideas of the world? On top of that, I did a recent video called “Dreaming of a Queer Internet,” which was about how the internet used to be a queer frontier where people found themselves, were able to articulate identities, and build a digital self that was in some ways truer to who they actually wanted to be than than who they were—and how it’s been corporatized over time. I use film history to discuss that, including David Cronenberg, Ready Player One, Hackers, and The Matrix.

Looking at those two things, and then seeing the election happen, I was getting very frustrated at people not understanding that a lot of why Trump won, in my opinion, is the story he’s telling. It relies on this monomythical framing of America that leans into fascism. There has also been a post-modernist, collectivist understanding that there isn’t one overriding myth of America. People have different cultures and tell their own stories, that make us more diverse and inclusive. We are stronger by understanding that humanity is many different things, and I think that’s a really beautiful thing.

Fascism is trying to pull back into a modernist perspective of there being one overriding story or myth, and we need to use violence—rhetorical violence, physical violence, institutional violence—to reassert the story that we’ve been telling. This story is ingrained in a lot of the in the assumptions that we make, such as the hero being generally white, cisgender, straight. We have a culture with ingrained cisheteronormativity.

I made a two-part video: the first video was a reiteration of the Star Wars video, just without overly focusing on Star Wars, and in the second video I was taking what I was going to do with the Star Wars: Andor video and extrapolating it out further, to talk about stories that are trying to tell a new version of the story, and a new way of how we can think about these things. I centered queer and trans stories, mainly, because that’s the story that I know, and that’s how I enter into this more collectivist thinking. That’s what I wanted to replicate—there’s many different stories, and ultimately, we need to have solidarity with each other, connect with other people, and we can create these these linking ideas. But we have to do it through understanding that everyone has their own stories and differences that they’re going to be telling.

I found that by being like, I’m trans; that’s what got me to escape the monomythical storytelling that America has, and from there, I started to link up to and understand other stories. The video is running through that as a concept, guiding people through my journey without overtly stating that. At the same time, people still don’t understand that. In a lot of stories told in the media today, people keep trying to pull the stories back to the monomyth and frame it in their conceptualization of the world that centers America. My point is, Here’s the journey I laid out for you, but also, at every single point along the way, people misinterpret it.

The way to go forward is to stop constantly going back and trying to explain to these people over and over again. It’s not necessarily trying to be antagonistic to them, but we spend so much of our time being like, Oh, look, this person said some ridiculous fucking thing about trans people today, and now we need to waste our time responding to that. If we do that, we constantly center them and that noise. I’m bored of that from a storytelling perspective. I want new stories. I want to hear new things. I want to be engaged intellectually and emotionally.

In terms of political movements, we need to start thinking of how we collectivize and connect with people, because one of the biggest problems that faces us today is how we atomize and segment off ourselves, especially on the Internet. It has become very difficult to have any conversation about our own individual feelings and needs, because it gets thrown into an antagonistic conversation like, You’re talking about trans women, why are you not talking about this or that other thing? I’m not trying to override that. We need to talk about these things in unison, but we can’t all talk about the exact same things.

I think we’re trained to think that everything needs to be for everybody, because our culture has told us that everything needs to be consumable by everybody. Instead, we need to understand, be empathetic towards, and learn from each other, but we need to be having conversations across differences, and not trying to create one overriding myth that we all need to shove ourselves into.

EA: What you’re saying made me think of the first compilation of solarpunk stories. It was published in Portuguese in Brazil [in 2013], and I had quoted him in an article I wrote for New Lines Magazine a few years ago. [Editor of the anthology Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro] said that he chose solarpunk because Brazil’s fantastic literature biosphere was already “polluted” with coal and petroleum. In addition, he chose solarpunk over cyberpunk, for example, not because there aren’t good stories in cyberpunk, but because there are so many stories in cyberpunk and not enough of other things.

I reached the same conclusion that you did, and what got me into thinking about solarpunk and even Star Trek, for that matter, was that I got really tired and even bored of the post-apocalyptic movies and series. Some of them are well done and have good storytelling, but there’s just so many of them that they got saturated in my mind. I get it: the world and the future is bad. Things are going to get bad. And in some movies, like I Am Legend, there’s a hero arc of one guy who’s going to save everything.

Around that time I got more into Star Trek as well; DS9 was very refreshing, compared to all of that. I didn’t reject cyberpunk or dystopian fiction or any of that, but it was just too much of it and not enough of everything else.

JS: I love cyberpunk fiction; it’s one of my favorite genres. But I agree, because with a lot of dystopian or cyberpunk stories, the general idea tends to be like, Oh, look, it’s capitalism gone amok. These stories are often very queer in ethos—people trying to find their own identity within this future, whether through technology, or augmenting themselves, or some form of the internet like the metaverse. When I say queer, I don’t necessarily mean in terms of sexuality, though it can be that, but rather people who are marginalized and trying to find their own identity within a society that is telling them to subsume themselves into the dominant culture.

That’s why I love cyberpunk stories, but these stories are just our present day extended out, and not necessarily thinking of new things. I also really like post-apocalyptic fiction, but it’s often doing the Walking Dead thing of like, The human beings are the walking dead, and we’re really just evil, and we’re always going to be atomizing ourselves, me versus you. It centers a very individualistic presumption of our modern day culture, in America especially, and so once society falls, everyone’s just going to be up for themselves.

I’m not saying that these stories are fascist, but it falls into a sort of rhetoric and logic that fascism relies upon, which says we need to desperately hold on to the status quo, our institutions, and the way things are, because if we don’t, then everything will fall apart and it’ll all be chaos. So we need to vilify the queer or marginalized people who are ruining the fabric of our society. Because if we ruin the fabric of our society, then everything goes to shit, whether that’s because God said so, or because the apocalypse will happen, or because Western society will fall (usually a combination of all of those).

I like stories like Star Trek or solarpunk because it gets into an idea that I’ve been really gravitating towards. I think the best articulation of it I’ve seen is by a queer philosopher named José Esteban Muñoz in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, which I referenced in the video.

[Transcriber’s note: here is the quote.

“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.”]

When we form queer communities (again, I’m not referring to queer in terms of sexuality), we’re forming a microcosm of that future between ourselves, and we then build that future. That can connect very easily to political rhetoric and raising consciousness about things like workers rights: for example, workers unions are building a new and different future for themselves. We’re always aiming for a better future on the horizon.

I’ve been looking for stories that reflect that, and Star Trek is an interesting one that I always come back to, because Star Trek, especially outside of DS9, is depicting a better future, but it also sometimes reflects the assumptions of our modern day: for example, the white hero captain, and generally an extension of American liberal philosophies. But sometimes there is a tension with that because it also has a collectivist future that is trying to respect diversity of thought and ideas.

DS9 is a show that perfectly encapsulates that: it says, here’s those ideals, here’s how the institutions of those futures fail those ideals, but here’s the people living in that future, the queer weirdos on the outskirts of the Star Trek society that actually live up to them. That’s why I like Star Trek, because it’s hopeful yet a critique of our institutional present.

Those are the stories that I have been gravitating towards: stories about people building a better future based on a new way of thinking about the world, because we can’t keep relying on our present status quo. We need to think of a new status quo, and we need stories to help us think about what that’s going to be.

EA: There’s this concept of elite panic. The stories that dominate what we tend to consume, such as post-apocalyptic ones, tend to reflect a certain worldview, as you just said. That’s a worldview that results in Peter Thiel thinking he can just have a bunker in New Zealand, or Mark Zuckerberg buying an island in Hawaii. Because fundamentally, they believe that’s all they need to to be safe in the future. What I find fascinating about that kind of conceptualization of what they think the future could look like is that they imagine that there is such a thing as a self-sustaining bunker. They think, I just need my island, or mountaintop, or my own bunker, and I don’t need the rest of society. I don’t need humans. That’s just not how most people experience the world.

And yet that’s disproportionately represented in the stories we tend to hear, because it reflects a certain vision that people who are in positions of power and influence believe. Whereas the way people actually behave in the face of disasters is completely different. In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit talks about Hurricane Katrina, which was one of the big case studies where people actually came together and there was a lot of mutual aid and people helping one another. And yet, in some media reporting of Hurricane Katrina, which you can see if you go on some of the web archives, it was all about looting, just purely imagined most of the time, and there were these white militias who were “defending their neighborhoods” against no one.

What’s relevant to what we’re talking about is that there are stories that are replicated or propagated in our media and our culture: a lot of it is American, but it’s also global, because of the export of the US and Western culture and concepts. It projects a certain vision of the world. This concept of realism, or capitalist realism (as described by Mark Fisher) really bothers me—even those of us who can be called anti-capitalists, or who don’t believe that capitalism is a good system, are still limited by capitalism in our vision of the horizon. It’s very difficult to imagine a world that does not include this thing called capitalism.

JG: As the phrase goes, It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

EA: There is that Ursula K. Le Guin quote saying that We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable, but so did the divine rights of kings. I think Ben Shapiro or someone has a sticker on his laptop that says, Facts don’t care about your feelings. There’s so many implications from that: of course, he doesn’t have these feelings, things that other people are constrained by, he’s above it all. And also that there is such a thing as just pure facts, especially in social contexts (as opposed to gravity, for example).

JG: It goes to what they argue, him and other conservatives like Matt Walsh: that there is an overriding “truth.” Matt Walsh was the most overt example of this, because he was always talking about “truth,” but it’s ingrained in pretty much all of their thinking that there’s some overriding truth to the world that queer people or people of color are getting wrong, or more often than not, actively lying about to try to trick you into falling into their trap. And the “truth” is usually relying on people’s “common sense,” as they will say, but the common sense that they have been taught is based on culture: there are only two sexes, biology determines your path in life, and biology is binary. I use that as the closest example because I’m trans, but also the white status quo, heterosexuality, all of these things.

To go back to my video and what we’ve been talking about here, the “left” has been good at articulating why a thing is bad, but when we constantly talk about why a thing is bad, we’re still centering that as the overriding discussion. So you’re just offering people: Okay, I get capitalism is bad or I get conservatism is bad, but what do I do? I keep seeing over and over that people don’t know what to do, don’t know what to go forward with, because we have been so isolated by the internet, and COVID accelerated the isolationism that we have. People just reach for what’s easy, and if they don’t have community and other people to interact with, they can get sucked into these ecosystems of regurgitating horrific things.

It’s very much what I was trying to do with the video, because I’m focused on pop culture. I try to be an educator and an activist for trans rights and everything, but I grew up doing film and I teach film—I’m not necessarily a political organizer. There are some writers who say things like, Stories can change the world! but why I think stories are important is because they introduce people to new ways to think and dream about the world. Once you can dream of these things, then people can articulate them and make them actionable and say, I want to reach for that. I want to build the Star Trek world or this solarpunk world. Then there can be some sort of consciousness-raising and organization around that.

I want to make stories, and my hope with the things I make is to get people to think of the world in a new way. But I never think that that’s going to be the spur for change. It’s going to be the thing that gets people to think about what we can change and what we can build, and I think we’re at a place where we don’t even have that. That’s the foundation that we need to be building more of.

We need new stories. That’s why I rail against stuff like AI storytelling taking over Hollywood—it’s capitalism. They want to make everything cheaper, but AI cannot create anything new, so it’s going to continue to tell the same capitalist, Western cultural stories over and over again. People also don’t have time to write new stories, so they just write what they know. A lot of my writer friends tell me things like, Oh, we have a week to write an episode, so I’m going to just regurgitate what I can as fast as I can. People are not living life as much; this is why it’s hard to tell these new stories, because we’re not able to see it, and to me, the future dims more and more by the fact that we don’t think of more stories.

I’m not trying to get doomeristic about it. I think there are plenty of stories and people writing them, but it comes from marginalized groups, like queer people or people of color. I also mentioned this at the end of my video: I’m specifically talking about the trans story, but Octavia Butler’s been saying this, Indigenous communities have been writing that, there’s Arab communities and Arab fantasy as well. This stuff exists and has been here, but we have not been focusing on or centering it.

EA: I had you on in 2023, and it was actually a few months before I finished my PhD, which was on Lebanese cinema. Long story short: there was a civil war in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990, and the movies I focused on are the post-war movies (nineties onwards). I wrote a very long doctorate, and by the end of it, I realized that I had seen probably most of the films that were released since the nineties, as it’s not a huge industry. And there were these underlying themes that were repeating in Lebanon, usually about reflections on whether we’ve healed from the war and hauntings from the war.

There were a few, but very few, films imagining us moving beyond that, beyond the post-war moment. I realized later this was my bridge towards solarpunk and Star Trek. As you explore in the video with DS9, it’s not about erasing the past or pretending that the trauma isn’t there or the war crimes didn’t happen, but it’s acknowledging what happened. And what do we do with that information? How can we move on—and not “move on” in the sense of forgetting or erasing, but how do we heal, effectively?

JG: That’s why I love DS9 so much, because it is about that. All the other Star Treks are about characters who were born into that future unscathed. They encounter traumas throughout the story, but they get to exist in that future relatively unscathed and are the ur-heroes of those stories. But in DS9, from the very first episode you get this man who has been traumatized by the Borg, which is literally portrayed as Captain Picard, and it’s not incidental that he’s a Black man.

There’s so many episodes of DS9 that interrogate what it means for a Black man to be the hero of this very American franchise. There’s a really wonderful scene in one of the later seasons [episode “Badda-Bing Badda-Bang” from Season 7] that I love, where all of the characters are doing a heist in Vegas in the Holodeck. It’s meant to be fun, and everyone’s choosing their roles, but Sisko is not wanting to get involved. He has a great discussion about the story being set in Vegas, where he as a Black man at that time would not have been allowed in, so how can he go and have fun? He’s talking about Vegas, but he’s also talking about Star Trek in general: How do I, as a Black man, get to sit in this pretend future where everything’s great and not acknowledge the pain that exists here?

The show is constantly revisiting the theme of this pain. We see it with the Bajorans, who are indigenous groups that dealt with a fascist and settler-colonialist invasion of their home world, and are now healing from it. The show is constantly asking, How do we build a better future from that pain?

Going back to the quote from José Esteban Muñoz, we queer people are always focusing on the horizon, trying to escape our constant present, which is a representation of the status quo that we’re always trapped in, and we glance to the past. It’s why I love queerness as an overriding discussion, because it centers the non-linearity of time in people who are marginalized. Queer people have to understand that we are stuck in a present where we are seen as queer and ostracized and different, but we also have to reinterpret our own personal past, where we had to come to understand that we are queer. We have to understand that trauma and understand that our puberties, our growing-ups, are going to be different, especially trans people who literally have different puberties. But then we also learn that our history is often erased and destroyed, as many marginalized peoples’ are, and having to re-find it. So our understanding of our past is constantly being interrogated.

At the same time, we’re also reaching for a future that is something better. Queerness is a great metaphor for this marginalization, being in a constant non-linear negotiation with past, present, and future. It’s about negotiating the traumas of our own personal history, our communal history, refining our communal history trauma—because a lot of it’s been erased, regardless of what marginalized community you’re in, through colonization and such. And then trying to build a better future while constantly in negotiation with all of these things. That’s why I love DS9 so much, because it is a show about representing the non-linearity and the healing of all of that.

EA: The heist episode you mentioned also reminds me of Octavia Butler’s book Kindred, where a Black woman is dating a white guy in modern [Los Angeles] and she’s just moved into suburbia. I don’t want to spoil it too much, but something happens and she is brought back in time to slavery and then forced back into the present repeatedly. There’s a lot of politics of temporality, but what was extremely powerful about that book is that you really realize that they can only go so far. The fact that’s even acknowledged was so powerful for me because I’ve gotten used to stories that try to retell the past by, for example, having Marie Antoinette’s second in command be a Black man for some reason. I’m not saying this cannot be done in an interesting way, but it can be done in a very problematic way where it’s introducing modern desires for “diversity” and putting that onto the past.

JG: Bridgerton.

EA: Exactly, stuff like that. I’ve seen it used often enough in a way that’s just there to make the past look less problematic. An example on the flip side of that is the cartoon The Jetsons, which was released in the 1960s and is set in the 2060s. What’s interesting about The Jetsons is that there are robots and flying cars and whatever, but gender norms are just white American suburbia of the 1950s. They assume that the future would be like that as well, because that’s what it was when they were imagining it.

JG: He still goes to work, for a boss who’s kind of a dick, he’s still middle class, he has a robot who, if not directly Black-coded, is clearly reminiscent of the slave labor we have—it’s just a replication of the present with bigger technology.

EA: When I watch bits of that now, I think, Clearly they got this all wrong, because that’s not what the future is going to look like, or what the present is even like today. I extrapolate from that and think about what stories are being told in the present day about the future that are making the same mistakes and assumptions—the same realism limitations of the horizon.

Even in the Lebanese films that I was studying, there’s only one that comes to mind that tried to imagine the future. It’s called The Lebanese Rocket Society, and it’s a documentary about the actual space program that happened in Lebanon in the 1960s at Haigazian University, which is the Armenian University in Beirut. The story is fascinating, and in final scene, a different director is brought in to do this experimental thing where he tries to imagine what Lebanon would have looked like had the space program continued (it was stopped in the 1960s for geopolitical reasons—long story short, the Americans and Israelis were not happy about it).

This phenomenon is called retrofuturism. The problem with how it was done is that it more or less imagined Lebanon as a certain vision of America, knowing that America did have a successful space program and went to the moon. It followed a deterministic timeline, effectively arguing that had we succeeded in the space stuff, we would have modernized in a very specific, almost scripted way. It reminded me of your critique of Star Trek: Picard, actually. They tried to go back into the past to do a bit of fan service, but it got stale in the end and felt like it didn’t go where it could have gone.

JG: Picard season three was basically them doing TNG again, but in the future. Even most of the characters were like, the next Next Generation. The finale of season three was called “The Last Generation” and was about the fear of the future, and all of the TNG characters have kids in that season; Picard and Geordi have kids, and they essentially fit in the same roles as their parents, constantly replicating the present, just with younger people.

Going back to your point about Lebanese Rocket Society replicating the American version of the space program—I hate to keep bringing it back to Star Trek, but I think it’s such an interesting ur-example of the underlying assumptions of American society and Western culture. One of the constant things you see in Star Trek, especially in The Original Series and The Next Generation, is the assumption of a linear path towards progress. Even when talking about the Prime Directive, which is that we can’t interfere with societies unless they get warp, they use the phrase “pre-warp civilization,” which has the underlying assumption that warp is deterministic, and all cultures will eventually follow the same path to reach warp drive, where they are mature enough to interact with the rest of society. Until they have reached this certain bar of technological development that mirrors Western cultures, they are “primitive”.

That’s an underlying assumption that’s very obvious, but it’s shown throughout the series that there is a sense of a predetermined linear path of progress that everyone’s eventually going to align up on. It mirrors Western culture, and how much respect we have for a civilization is based on how much they mirror human development, where “human” means “American.” I don’t know Lebanese film, but it sounds like that idea has seeped in there too, this idea of Western culture that everyone’s got to be like us.

Joseph Campbell’s argument of the monomyth was that there is one central myth in all of human culture that every other culture has found, and he can slot them all into. And what a surprise, the best version of the monomyth was found by Western people: Look, the white people figured it out and did it best! He argued that Jewish people didn’t understand their own myths, and they need to be “corrected” and “fixed.” He did that for everyone: Indigenous cultures, Middle Eastern culture, everyone. It’s this idea that everyone will eventually return to the mean, which is what white people want and what Western culture wants, and then they try to propagandize that presumption out.

When Star Trek pushes against that, it subverts that concept. It’s also why you see this push in modern culture against “woke DEI” in television and movies. In the big monocultural products that have been made in Hollywood, like Star Wars, Star Trek, or Marvel, marginalized people in those stories tend to get vilified because they’re either not showing the perspective “we” want, or, more often than not, you’re just sticking a woman into the slot that is made for a man, and they’re still telling that same monomyth. Because we center men, masculinity, white dudes, cis dudes, straight dudes in our culture, seeing someone else in that role gets people angry because this is the story made for the dominant people on the hierarchy.

EA: You also talked about The Matrix series, which is often referenced in a completely decontextualized manner. Because I do a lot of research on the far right and conspiracy stuff, and I’ve spent a lot of time listening to and reading about people like Andrew Tate and QAnon, I actually forgot that there is a movie called The Matrix by two directors who are trans women, which is an allegory about being trans. Going back to the editor of that solarpunk anthology, my imaginary was colonized or polluted by these other associations.

There was a recent interview with Lily Wachowski where she said, the Nazi in the White House, Elon Musk, has used the Matrix for his own agendas. I was thinking that, if the people who created the thing are telling us what the thing is about, yet the thing has also been used in a completely different way, isn’t that a good argument that ultimately we are ruled by stories? If “facts don’t care about one’s feelings,” as they say, wouldn’t it at least matter what the directors who made it said it was about? And yet, what the actual directors say The Matrix franchise is about hasn’t seeped into the dominant narrative about it.

JG: Saying this as someone who loves The Matrix, it speaks to the failures of the original movie that the most recent one, The Matrix Resurrections, was trying to rectify. The implication of the original movie is that Neo is not actually The One who can save us all, but his relationship with others, and most specifically with Trinity, his love for Trinity, lets him be The One. When they kiss at the end of the movie, he’s then able to get powers. It is specifically his relationship with other people and building that community that allows him to gain that power and be stronger.

But the failure of that movie is that it makes that idea metaphorical, and not explicit, so you can still read him as the powerful strong dude who gets the girl and saves the day. He becomes strong through that individualistic, monomythical concept that then can be easily co-opted by people like Andrew Tate who argue: You can’t beat the Matrix, you just need to be the winner of the Matrix. They’ll frame it like, I’m Morpheus, you need to destroy the Matrix, but they’re not really arguing for you to upend our status quo. They’re just saying, be the most dominant person and be the best at winning the game, the best at dominating women, and dominating capitalism. Win the game and you’ll become The One.

What Matrix Resurrections is most overtly trying to engage with is how capitalism took The Matrix, sold it as a product, and stripped a lot of the meaning from it. Because capitalism just tries to remove meaning from stuff and sell it as empty product, using signifiers like toys and merchandise and video games. That’s what we’re seeing with the franchisation of things like Star Trek and Star Wars too. I think the Star Wars sequel movies are the biggest example of stripping meaning from the franchise for shallow signifiers of what the original story meant.

Capitalism gains power by keeping us separated but longing for connection, and once we’re isolated, it can extract resources and labor from us. In the movie, Neo was never The One: he is weak and on his own, and it’s only when he links up and supports Trinity, that someone else, Trinity, can also become The One. No one person is The One; it’s about a collectivist future where we all can become stronger by building each other up and connecting with each other. It’s capitalism that’s trying to keep us apart and preventing that from happening. That’s what that movie is trying to say.

I feel like the reaction to the movie was very interesting and telling, because it got torn apart in reviews. There’s things you could argue about in terms of some quality-related stuff, but people really reacted against that message because it was countercultural to what people ingrained as the message of The Matrix. The message was: You cannot be powerful by yourself, you need to connect with others, it’s not about you destroying the system, it’s about you destroying the system with others.

I also talk about the queer movie, I Saw the TV Glow, which is even more obviously a trans metaphor. I can describe it very simply as, What if Neo took the blue pill? It’s essentially the same story. Even though it’s more overtly a trans metaphor than in The Matrix, people still misinterpreted it because ultimately our culture doesn’t teach people the media literacy to understand these stories, because it would then mean teaching people to understand different perspectives than the dominant one, and that’s dangerous to the dominant culture.

EA: I’m sure everyone will have seen this by now, but there was recently a trend online of “Ghiblification,” where OpenAI introduced a tool to make scenes look like Ghibli movies. I was angry at the trend, because the trend was shit, but I was actually weirdly comforted by the fact that this is the best that they can do. Billions of dollars have been put into this AI industry, and the closest thing they have done to what they clearly seem to think is art is a simulacrum of what a bunch of Japanese designers, who were doing this by hand, managed to do like in the 1990s and early 2000s. For me, there’s something powerful about that. When that trend happened, I saw the worst ones: the ICE one, the IDF one. It definitely pissed me off, as someone who really loves Ghibli movies, but then I decided to just watch a Ghibli movie instead.

I watched Kiki’s Delivery Service, and it reminded me of what actually makes a movie like that so powerful: there isn’t even a bad guy, and that’s common to many of the Ghibli films. There may be a “bad guy” who is a misunderstood person who can be talked to, or the bad guy is actually the system. These stories already exist and clearly resonate—why would they spend so much money to do something that’s just a simulacrum of it? If they have this much money, why can’t they do something else, or something better, even?

The answer is: they don’t actually believe that art exists. They really think it’s this technical thing; [Gareth Watkins] calls AI the “[new] aesthetics of fascism,” the victory of technology over art. Ultimately, they don’t actually believe that one needs to “waste time” perfecting small details like how a little girl would put on her shoes (in Spirited Away). They don’t understand why you would waste your time doing that if you can have something that looks close enough.

I find it powerful that I actually do know why: because it’s beautiful and people actually enjoy it, and it is something that will live through the generations, whereas these trends just come and go.

This is something that we as a collective already have and is important to remind ourselves of. When you’re going through a doom-and-gloom mood, for very understandable and legitimate reasons, ask yourself, Do you actually know any examples that can contradict this feeling that you’re currently feeling? For me, when I’m feeling down because of something horrible happening, I try to pause and ask myself, Does that mean that I am downplaying the good that a lot of people are doing in the world? (I’m being simplistic about what “good” and “bad” mean here.)

This goes back to the “pollution of the imaginary” idea, that my mind was already saturated with a certain vision of the world, and it was no longer doing me any good to just have that reiterated time and time again. I wasn’t learning anything new, even factually, it was just reaffirming something that I had already concluded, like This is the stupidest timeline. Sometimes I joke that I wish we had more interesting enemies—we’re still living with the consequences of elite panic. It’s not that it doesn’t matter that these people don’t have much of an imagination, because they have a lot of resources and power and affect the world we live in, but there is something quite powerful about the fact that they don’t seem to know what they think the future should actually look like. Their idea of the future is just a projection of the present.

JG: Going back to the Ghibli AI art, like I mentioned earlier, they only want to replicate the same story that we’ve already seen. They can only like steal what Ghibli’s already done and do a facsimile of it that’s not as good, and may have extra fingers or whatever. It may look nice on first viewing, but if you look closely, there’s no detail and there’s no humanity in it. It’s even the same style of character standing in the same pose every time; for example, they did a Star Trek one, so it’s wearing a uniform with a shitty looking thing. They see art as product. They see art as the end goal, not as an expression of humanity.

I’m not necessarily against AI inherently. I mean, I have issues with the ethical things: they’re stealing to scrape for their language models, the environmental costs. But if we removed that and all of the data was sourced ethically and it didn’t cost any power to do it, I’m not necessarily against AI if it was a tool to help people express themselves. But what it is ultimately being sold as right now is not as part of a process to enable people to do something. It is being sold as: We can use this to become end product. The people who want to use it don’t have an interiority that they wish to reflect and sit within, they just wish to regurgitate stuff to get stuff down.

It goes back to your point of elite capture: these people are unable to imagine a future. Elon Musk, for example, loves Star Trek and wants to create a future where he can make Star Trek with his rockets and SpaceX, but really, he’s not replicating Star Trek because he can’t really imagine Star Trek. All he can do is this capitalist realism of replicating his current present. It’s because they don’t really want to introspect, they want to hold themselves at the top of the hierarchy, and they are attacking anyone who is going against their worldview. As a result, they’re not willing to interrogate themselves, their interiority, question themselves, or grow.

It leads me to this conclusion that is hopeful, even in its darkness, which is that humanity will always continually re-find its own heart. Even if fascism takes over and destroys everything, kills everybody, and does all the horrible things, as long as there are two people left in the world, they can form community and empathize with each other, humanity will continually find its own heart. Again, I love queerness as a metaphor, because queer people spring up from whatever group and whatever culture.

Culturally, we currently understand queerness and transness as sexuality- and gender-based oppression, but whatever status quo gets created that tries to affirm itself, there will be people who fall outside of that and will be queer and marginalized in some way. As a result of that, there will be an interrogation and introspection of this conversation between ourselves and the Other and who we are, both the Other within ourselves and the Other in our society.

People will continually re-find these stories and ideas and concepts, but what is at risk is the history: fascism erases history, cultures, and peoples. What we stand to lose are the people today, but also the cultures and rich histories that have existed from time immemorial that get flattened or wholesale erased to fit into a story. I believe humanity will constantly find the truth of its own heart and want to express its heart, but how much we will lose, and how long it takes to get there, how many people die, is the real urgency. I do believe that ultimately fascism is a loser’s game. The question is just how long we have to fight the battle.

EA: The Thousand Year Reich lasted twelve years, and it was obviously catastrophic in those twelve years, but the fact that it did not last a thousand years says a lot about their limitations. You almost paraphrased James Baldwin—I may only know [six] people, but that’s enough—in the sense that, you can’t abandon the world if you know people who are fighting for the world. It’s a betrayal of them, and it’s a betrayal of many other people.

As an aside, I do wonder, when people like Musk and others talk about Star Trek, do they have a specific one in mind? Is it just The Original Series because that was the big one at the time?

JG: It’s the same thing with The Matrix. They’ve erased the specificity to fit in with their myth. Tim Pool once mentioned that he always looks to Picard as this hero of masculinity, which is funny, but what I think he means is that he sees Picard as a leader of a ship, the guy in charge who makes strong speeches and can make ethical determinations. I think that’s what he’s pulling from without understanding the specificity of his character beyond the guy who does the speeches. If you go and rewatch the shows, Picard has his faults: he’s an isolated man, he doesn’t want to have kids around him, and at the end of the show he tells his crew, I should have played poker with you guys before this.

People also forget this, but some of the best episodes of TNG that people usually point to are when Picard is fighting against the system. In “The Measure of a Man”[Season 2 episode 9], he’s fighting for Data’s rights against Starfleet, which is trying to dehumanize him. Those speeches are usually done when people or the system fails to live up to Starfleet’s ideals. But when people like Elon Musk or Tim Pool point to Star Trek, they’ve erased that specificity and are framing it in the underlying Western cultural assumptions about “progress,” like the technological aspects, the better future as defined by warp drive, rather than the better human future as defined by the humanist ethos of Star Trek.

It’s why Star Trek has such an interesting tension, because there are moments where it creates something new and moments where it just replicates the present. The book that I’m writing is about how Star Trek can be read as an American monomyth or a queer monomyth, and I’m arguing that we need to create a queer overriding narrative that we can we can center and point people towards. We need to create a narrative for people based on understanding others, creating cooperatives and collectives, understanding differences in our diversity. At the same time, we can’t flatten all cultures into one narrative; we need to celebrate the cultural specificity of people and the vibrancy of what it means to be human. It’s very difficult—there’s even contradictions in my own argument: create an overriding myth, of people having different myths!

That’s the beauty of humanity, though. There’s not one truth, and many realities and cultures do exist, and humanity is always going to be a constant engagement with things across differences. We’re going to harm each other, but instead of our culture where harm then is used to create dominance and push people away, those should be moments for engagement to reach out and reflect on why we caused harm and how we can build from there.

EA: I have the sentence in front of me, from when Sisko talks to the Bajoran provinces: “That is why I am here. Not to conquer you with weapons, or with ideas. But to coexist and learn.” I find it fascinating that they also included “with ideas,” like there is an this understanding that ideas can also can be a violent thing.

I wanted to end with a comment on your video: “I’m a 16 year old homeschooled autistic trans boy living with a conservative religious family. For as many years as I’ve been outed to them, through complete isolation, self hatred, and trauma, I’ve been able to survive because of stories. For so long, fiction has been my only friend, my only hope, my only comfort. It means so much more to me than just entertainment. Without it, I might not be here today. As a writer myself, I’ve noticed so much of what you explained in this video. Art of all kinds has been so commodified and devalued. It feels like there are very few writing to tell a story that actually means something, writing to expand on the past and project the future they want to see in our world (if it isn’t violence or domination). Storytelling means nothing if you have nothing to say to the world besides what has already been pushed a million times. Writing should reinvent and inspire the world we live in, not glorify the worst parts of it.”

Jesus Christ, this is very powerful.

JG: I wish I was that articulate!

EA: That summarizes the saturation of our imaginaries, the pollution of our imaginaries, the limitations due to capitalist realism, all of the stuff we just talked about. You have a sixteen-year-old trans boy clearly going through difficulties, also saying that this is quite literally a matter of survival, and also to push beyond them.

JG: Acknowledge the pain and know that the pain exists, but how do we grow from it? How do we heal it? How do we carry the scars? I think that’s ultimately what a lot of culture wants to do. For example, in America we want to deny that slavery has lasting scars to this day, and so those wounds stay open because no one wants to acknowledge them. It’s a much larger conversation.

Hearing stuff like that, it saddens me that he is dealing with that, but it also gives me such hope that there are people who are that young who still see it. I still get the doomerism of like, Maybe I’m talking into a void, and it gives me hope that I’m not.

EA: I feel like this a positive note to end on. What are you working on that people should look forward to?

JG: I am directing an episode of Sub/Liminal, which is a series that will be coming out sometime. If you are looking for my writing, I am working on a book that we don’t have an official title for yet, but is currently listed on Amazon as The Star Trek Guide to Gender. I’ll make an official announcement when we update the title.

Other than that, just follow me on YouTube and Nebula as Jessie Gender.

EA: I’m pretty sure I’ll invite you on again to talk about your book. Well, Jessie, thanks a lot for coming on.

JG: Thank you for having me.