JD Vance Doesn’t Want to Help Married Parents. He Wants to Hurt Single Mothers.

 

Jessica Grose

Sept. 9, 2026

JD Vance Doesn’t Want to Help Married Parents. He Wants to Hurt Single Mothers.

Eleanor Davis

“You’re reading the Jessica Grose newsletter.  A journalist and novelist offers her perspective on the American family, culture, politics and the way we live now.

For years, Vice President JD Vance has railed against universal child care and made snide comments about working families with little ones at home. On Twitter in 2021, he claimed that “normal” non-affluent Americans prefer “a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.”

Of course, no parents want their kids in “crap daycare.” But what American mothers prefer is far more complicated than Vance’s caricature of the desires of frivolous and wealthy parents who don’t want to care for their own children. According to a November 2025 analysis from the conservative policy and research organization the Institute for Family Studies, a majority of all momswith children under 5, regardless of education level or marital status, prefer to work rather than stay home full time. Unmarried mothers without a college education constitute the group least likely to say their “ideal status” does not involve a job, which makes sense, since single mothers tend to be the most financially vulnerable.

But instead of crafting policy that might help hard-working single mothers — like his own mother — Vance is reportedly championing a federal policy that would take funds earmarked for child care for low-income parents and change the eligibility requirement to include married families with a parent who does not work.

The money, about $9,000 per child, comes from the Department of Health and Human Services. The $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund was created in the 1990s to support low- to moderate-income parents so they could work or get an education. “About 80 percent of the 870,000 families who currently get the child care subsidies have single working parents, most of them mothers, according to Health Department data,” reported my newsroom colleague Coral Davenport. About 40 percent of American children are born to unmarried parents.

The money is currently distributed to states via a block grant, and it typically goes directly to child care providers. The proposal viewed by The Times would not increase the amount of funding, but it would create “the option for a new category of care, parent-based child care, that will allow one married parent to receive C.C.D.F. assistance to care for their own child, while a spouse works at least 35 hours per week.” If this draft rule goes into effect, it will almost certainly hurt child care providers who rely on this funding to stay afloat. And because stay-at-home, married parents will likely be battling for the same pot of funds, it could also prevent single parents from earning money for their families.

In the past Vance has said he approves of unpaid caregivers like grandparents and other relatives in lieu of center-based child care, but the funding under discussion is for stay-at-home spouses. Extended kin would likely not be eligible for the benefit, either, to offset the cost of work they may be foregoing.

This proposal is especially cruel in light of recent cuts to programs that support low-income working families. The Trump administration is already hard at work trying to gut Head Start, a program that provides child care and other services to poor children from up to age 5. First, the administration tried to zero out funding for Head Start in a budget proposal. Then, it illegally withheld funding from the program, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. Now, it seems to be trying to destroy Head Start by deregulating it, eliminating the program’s requirements to provide disability services, home visits, health screenings and other benefits.

That’s not the only part of the safety net for children that has been shredded. Even as grocery prices continue to rise, the administration’s policies have cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to the bone. An analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, suggests that more than one million children have lost food assistance since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was passed in July 2025 and made it harder to qualify for the program.

Cuts to federal health care also seem to be harming children. According to Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, enrollment inMedicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program has declined by 2.4 million since January 2025. This suggests that the number of uninsured children is on the rise, Joan Alker, the executive director of the center, noted on X.

While Vance policy’s orientation is pronatalist, the evidence from international experiments of the effects from giving people money to marry or have children is not conclusive. In China, for example, the government has tried to carry out a range of policies, from cash vouchers for newlyweds to baby bonuses, and yet marriage and fertility rates continue to decline. “Marriage registrations in China fell 6.2 percent year on year ​in the first quarter and are about half 2017 levels,” Reuters reported in May, and the Chinese birthrate is at a record low.

Hungary, where Vance campaigned on behalf of the former prime minister Viktor Orban, adopted some of the most generous family policies in the world, spending over 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product to boost fertility rates mostly among married, heterosexual parents. The policies did not work in the long run, and Hungary’s fertility rates are about where they started before the pronatalist push.

The state of American family policy is so poor that our federal government could do about a million and one things to help parents that would be more effective and more desired. According to the survey I cited earlier from the Institute for Family Studies, 85 percent of mothers ages 25 to 55 with children under 18 said that paid parental leave would be “extremely” or “very” helpful to them and 80 percent said that child tax credits would be extremely or very helpful to them. Lower-income moms support the tax credit at a higher rate than wealthier moms, while higher-income moms prefer parental leave, but a vast majority of both groups want both of those things.

Few are asking for what Vance and the administration are proposing. While this rule, if it ever goes into effect, might help a small number of one-income, married families in the short term, it could actively harm single and married parents who rely on day care if their centers go into a death spiral from losing a big chunk of federal funding.

I can only conclude that the administration’s plans are either meant to pit stay-at-home parents against working ones, or to punish single parents — and their children — who need support the most.

1. 

   Jessica Grose

   Opinion writer

   What do you think should be the top policy priority to help families thrive? Among the most popular proposals I see discussed are child tax credits, paid family leave, flexible work arrangements and government subsidized child care.

---

End Notes

• Jon Ronson is one of my favorite nonfiction writers. His 2015 book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” basically predicted the next decade of culture war cancellations. I highly recommend his new book, “The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men.” When I first saw the title, I admit I inwardly groaned, because I thought it was going to be another “woe-is-men” book. But it’s so much weirder and deeper than that. Unlike many other books about unmoored men, “The Castle” understands that male unhappiness is infectious and has a blast radius. Ronson actually bothers to ask the question: What havoc is male purposeless wreaking “on the lives of their loved ones — their partners, mothers, children?”

  Feel free to drop me a line about anything here. Read past editions of the newsletter here.

If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here.

Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.“

 

New Accuser Sues Foundations With Ties to Cesar Chavez

“The lawsuit, the first of its kind since revelations against the union leader emerged this year, accuses two foundations of failing to prevent “abusive, rogue and inappropriate” behavior.

Sept. 9, 2026Updated 10:25 a.m. ET

The suit accuses two foundations of failing to properly supervise Cesar Chavez, the labor leader.The Bakersfield Californian/ZUMAPRESS.com, via Reuters

By Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes

The reporters have interviewed more than 100 people about Cesar Chavez and the accusations made against him by several women. Their reporting began in 2021 after The Times received a tip.

A longtime volunteer with the United Farm Workers claims in a new lawsuit that Cesar Chavez, the civil rights leader, raped her one night in the 1970s at the union’s headquarters in central California.

The woman’s suit, filed last week in state court in California, accuses nonprofit groups affiliated with the Chavez family and the U.F.W. of negligence, sexual harassment and violations of state civil rights laws. It appears to be the first such suit of its kind since an investigation by The New York Times published in March found compelling evidence that Mr. Chavez had sexually abused, assaulted and harassed underage girls and adult women as he built the most influential farmworkers union in the United States.

The suit illustrates the legal and financial risks faced by groups with ties to Mr. Chavez in the aftermath of the revelations, particularly as California has in recent years extended the statute of limitations for victims of sexual assault to file civil lawsuits to include assaults that occurred decades ago.

California allows victims to sue not only perpetrators but also institutions that knew or should have known about abuse. Other women, some of whom have made their accusations against Mr. Chavez public, say they are also considering legal action.

The Cesar Chavez Foundation, one of the nonprofits that was named in the lawsuit, said in a statement that it had only recently become aware of it. “We are reviewing with our legal counsel and will respond in a way that stays true to our mission and values,” the statement said.

The other nonprofit that was sued, the U.F.W. Foundation, which is a separate organization from the farmworkers union itself, did not respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for the U.F.W. declined to comment.

In the lawsuit, which the woman filed anonymously as Jane Doe, she describes a previously unreported attack by Mr. Chavez in 1973. The woman, whose family lived and worked in Mr. Chavez’s compound for years, has spoken to The Times repeatedly over the last five years, and told her story on the condition that she not be named for fear of retaliation against her and her family.

She is the second woman to publicly accuse Mr. Chavez of raping them when they were adults. The other is Dolores Huerta, his U.F.W. co-founder and one of the most prominent Latina activists in the country. Ms. Huerta, 96, told The Times that Mr. Chavez had sexually assaulted her in a car in Delano, Calif., in the winter of 1966 and had previously pressured her into having sex with him in a hotel room in 1960.

Two other women, Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas, said he had molested and assaulted them when they were underage from around 1972 to 1977, starting at the ages of 12 and 13.

La Paz, near Bakersfield, Calif., was the headquarters of the U.F.W. and where Mr. Chavez lived and worked.Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

The accusations by Ms. Huerta and the others earlier this year set off a national reckoning over the legacy of Mr. Chavez, who became one of the most significant Latino figures in American history and who died in 1993 at 66. California has renamed the state holiday known as Cesar Chavez Day to Farmworkers Day, as officials around the country removed Mr. Chavez’s name from schools and streets, and covered or took down murals and statues bearing his likeness from college campuses and local parks.

As part of its response to the allegations, the U.F.W. announced that it was establishing a system for women to tell their stories of abuse and to start a process of reconciliation between the union and survivors. The union began a partnership with two organizations to offer survivors confidential counseling and a 24-hour bilingual crisis line. The crisis line has received calls, but a representative of one of the groups declined to say more for confidentiality reasons.

The U.F.W. Foundation is a nonprofit group that was originally called the National Farm Workers Health Group, which Mr. Chavez helped lead when it was first founded in the 1970s. The foundation now is an advocate for farmworkers and immigrants, and provides legal services for immigrants in California.

The Cesar Chavez Foundation was founded in 1966 by Mr. Chavez as the National Farm Workers Service Center. The organization, which later changed its name and expanded its mission beyond assisting farmworkers and their families, now operates Spanish-language radio stations, develops affordable housing and provides educational programs for schoolchildren in the Southwest. In its most recent federal tax filing, the nonprofit foundation listed assets of more than $260 million and revenue in 2024 of more than $40 million.

Earlier this year, the Chavez foundation issued a statement describing the allegations against Mr. Chavez as shocking and painful, and telling survivors that they believed them, honored their courage and were “very sorry for the harm you have carried in the shadows for so long.” The group has said it has been working with leaders in the field of sexual abuse and engaging in a “necessary conversation” about the organization’s identity.

The woman who filed the lawsuit said in interviews and in court documents that the assault happened around her birthday in early 1973 when she was living, along with dozens of others, at La Paz, the mountain compound near Bakersfield that was the headquarters of the U.F.W.

Her husband, a longtime Chavez ally, was working on union business in the nearby town of Delano. Her friends and colleagues threw her a birthday party in La Paz’s communal kitchen. At the party, Mr. Chavez began making sexual advances, she said. He kept giving her wine, she said, and asked her if she would let him in if he visited later that night. She said she told him no.

She eventually left the party and went to her home, she said. As she approached, she saw one of Mr. Chavez’s bodyguards outside on the steps. “The chief’s inside,” she recalled the guard telling her.

In her bedroom, she said Mr. Chavez forced himself on her and pulled her onto the bed. She said she felt powerless because of Mr. Chavez’s role as an authority figure for her family.

“He took my pants down, and that was it,” the woman said in an interview in 2023. “I didn’t have sense of self to push back.”

Her account was corroborated in interviews with people she had confided in years ago. A friend of the woman said that when he worked with her in 1994 or 1995, she told him that Mr. Chavez had sexually assaulted her and that she was still struggling to cope with the emotional trauma. Elements of the woman’s story also were consistent with emails she had written to a historian in the early 2000s.

The woman described a second episode a few years later at Mr. Chavez’s house in which she said she felt manipulated to have sexual contact with him again.

Mr. Chavez’s house in La Paz.Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

The episodes, she said, have haunted her for more than 50 years. Her struggle over whether and how to speak out has been a lingering issue in her life and has aggravated her health problems. She said she has battled thoughts of suicide over the years and tried to take her own life in 1979.

Her suit, filed in Superior Court in Kern County, the home of La Paz, seeks unspecified monetary damages and a jury trial.

The suit accuses the Chavez and U.F.W. foundations of failing to properly supervise Mr. Chavez as her landlord and her employer and of failing to prevent him from behaving in what the lawsuit describes as “an abusive, rogue and inappropriate manner.”

The suit claims that the defendants were aware of Mr. Chavez’s abuse of girls and women but hid evidence of his misconduct to prevent the wrongdoing from becoming public. It alleges that a pattern of exposing women to sexual abuse, concealing complaints and failing to take corrective action violated a state law that prohibits businesses from discriminating based on gender and other characteristics.

“Our client wasn’t the first and she wasn’t the last,” said V. James DeSimone, who is representing the woman pro bono along with the law firm led by the Los Angeles lawyer Mike Arias. “She does not want her legacy to be that she took down the U.F.W. She wants her legacy to be she’s one of the people who demanded accountability so that women in this generation don’t have to go through the same abuse.”

Miriam Jordan contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Manny Fernandez is the California editor at large for The Times. He was previously the deputy political editor and spent more than nine years covering Texas as the Houston bureau chief.

Sarah Hurtes is a Times reporter working on international investigations from Brussels“

 

Oil Hits $100 a Barrel as Turmoil Intensifies in Middle East

“The cost of crude has risen 40 percent since the start of the war in Iran, pushing up the price of gasoline, diesel and other refined fuels.

Sept. 9, 2026Updated 8:15 a.m. ET

Price of Brent crude oil

How much the international benchmark costs

The global price of oil reached $100 a barrel on Wednesday for the first time since July as tensions in the Middle East escalated. That’s nearly 40 percent higher than on the eve of the war in Iran.

The rise reflects investors’ concerns about how long the war, now in its seventh month, will last; tensions have snarled a large chunk of global oil shipments.

Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil prices, briefly surpassed $100 a barrel in July. In the early months of the war, Brent peaked near $120 a barrel. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, is up 41 percent since the start of the war, at $95 a barrel.

Crude oil is the primary ingredient for fuels like gasoline and diesel. Rising oil prices have pushed the average price of gasoline in the United States past $4 a gallon, according to the AAA motor club, while diesel this month hit a record high, surpassing its previous peak set four years ago. Diesel is now nearly $6 a gallon, up more than 55 percent since the start of the war.

“The biggest impact of the conflict has been on petroleum products rather than crude oil itself,” Bank of America analysts said in a research note on Tuesday.

Such high fuel costs squeeze businesses and households as the cost of transporting goods, growing crops and driving a car get more and more expensive. Volatile energy prices remain one of the biggest wild cards in monthly inflation reports. The next measure of U.S. inflation is set to be released on Friday.

Since the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February, oil exports from the Persian Gulf have been greatly curtailed. Iran has used force to keep most ships from passing through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman that before the war carried a fifth of the world’s oil. The U.S. Navy is helping ships navigate the strait, allowing some oil to flow and helping to keep prices from rising more.

But shipping risks in the region remain high. The Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen has restricted tanker traffic at the southern end of the Red Sea, which Saudi Arabia has used as an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia injured dozens of civilians, Saudi officials said. The Saudi energy ministry said attacks on energy facilities had temporarily disrupted operations.

“For now, lower-than-expected supply, declining inventories and geopolitical uncertainty will likely keep oil price risks high in the near term,” the Bank of America analysts said. They added that a cease-fire deal could result in a “swift reversal” but that a broader conflict resulting in major damage to energy infrastructure could push prices as high as $150 a barrel.“

 

Iran Signals Readiness to Escalate Fight in Face of Rising U.S. Pressure

“The Iranian government is taking an increasingly aggressive approach as it confronts a growing economic threat and worries that its grip on the Strait of Hormuz is slipping, analysts say.

Sept. 9, 2026Updated 8:04 a.m. ET

Iranians are feeling the strain of the war, which has made a longstanding economic crisis worse. Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

Iran has signaled that it is willing to escalate its fight with the United States, with senior leaders issuing increasingly sharp warnings in recent days after attacking American warships for the first time.

The country’s leaders are taking a more aggressive approach as Iran faces mounting economic pressure and they worry that their grip on the Strait of Hormuz is slipping. The American blockade is making it nearly impossible for Iran to ship oil, its main money source. And in effect, Iran sees escalation as the primary leverage it has against the United States, analysts said, warning that the recent clashes could reignite a full-blown war. 

The U.S. military said Tuesday that it had destroyed five Iranian oil tankers in retaliation for attempted strikes on a U.S. Navy warship, while Iran said it launched strikes at a base used by American forces in Jordan in response. The attacks occurred three days after Iran made its first known attempt at striking an American military vessel.

On Sunday, Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s lead negotiator and the speaker of Parliament, told lawmakers that the era of “proportionate responses” to American attacks was over. Iran’s security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, also announced plans to impose a “restricted zone” for shipping in the Persian Gulf that would go beyond the country’s efforts to control the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has largely withstood the heavy military campaign launched by the United States and Israel in February. But the war of attrition in recent months has created an economic threat that is now pushing the government to intensify its rhetoric and attacks.

An American naval blockade has prevented Tehran from exporting much of its oil, the country’s main source of revenue, making a longstanding economic crisis even worse. On Tuesday, the government raised some gasoline prices because of fuel shortages, a move that is expected to further roil a country already struggling with soaring inflation and unemployment, and a rapidly depreciating currency.

At the same time, U.S. naval escorts have enabled a trickle of oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, undercutting Iran’s closure of the waterway, which has caused global oil prices to rise sharply. The number of ships getting through is small, and the effort is extremely costly for the United States, but it has prevented oil prices from rising further and blunted Iran’s ability to impose economic pain on Washington.

“How do you regain the momentum? You escalate,” said Farzan Sabet, an Iran analyst at the Geneva Graduate Institute, a research group. Iran will likely attempt to intensify the military confrontation, he said, while seeking to avoid a return to full-out war. “It’s highly damaging, but at the same time, they hope it raises global oil prices or fully re-closes the Strait of Hormuz,” he said.

‘Make or break moment’

Senior Iranian officials have said they are open to negotiating a return to the fragile Memorandum of Understanding that halted the war in April and was meant to lead to talks on an Iranian nuclear deal.

But President Trump has said he has no interest in negotiations, preferring to maintain his strategy of attrition and suffocating Iran economically.

Iran’s leadership believes that now may be the best moment to raise the stakes, ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November when an unpopular war could hurt Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.

“All signs point to a make or break moment,” said Mohammad Ali Shabani, an Iran analyst and editor of the regional news website Amwaj.media. “I’m not sure the Iranians are going to wait until after the elections to be attacked if diplomacy fails.”

Iran’s move to strike two U.S. warships with ballistic missiles was a significant escalation, said Hamidreza Azizi, a senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Iranian forces had previously made no serious effort to target U.S. naval ships and seemed reluctant to conduct attacks that could cause heavy American casualties. “These calculations have obviously changed,” he said.

The U.S. decision to retaliate by striking three Iranian oil tankers — and sinking one of them — was an indication of how seriously Washington took the Iranian attack.

“Both sides are trying to dictate their red lines and trying to push the red lines of the other side as far back as they can,” Mr. Azizi said.

It was also a recognition that Iran’s military capabilities have evolved. Before the war started, the United States did not think Iran could target American military bases in the region with precision, he said. But in recent months, Iran has shown it can do so, including with a strike on a U.S. base in Jordan in July that killed two American soldiers.

Iran could become similarly adept at targeting naval fleets, Mr. Azizi said.

Iran has also been very public about its efforts to capture and learn from its enemy’s weapons. On Tuesday, Iran’s state news agency IRNA announced that naval forces of the powerful Revolutionary Guards had seized a U.S. submarine drone known as the Dive-LD. Iran has previously managed to reverse-engineer weapons offered to it by its allies or captured from its enemies.

U.S. Central Command said the drone was an older model that had malfunctioned and “neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified sonar or radar equipment.”

Mr. Rezaei’s announcement of a new “prohibited zone” in the Persian Gulf was another attempt to ratchet up the confrontation.

The security chief offered few details about the plan, but Mohamed Ghaderi, a Tehran-based foreign affairs expert, said it was designed to increase the cost for vessels passing through the strait with a U.S. naval escort and warn them they may not be safe even once they do.

“Compliance with Iran’s new rules can be a condition for safe and consequence-free passage,” he said. 

These escalatory moves come amid fresh regional turmoil, with Iran’s Houthi militia allies in Yemen launching attacks that wounded dozens in the south of Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, and the kingdom vowing to retaliate. Whether coordinated with Tehran or not, renewed conflict in Yemen would help Iran in its goal of putting more pressure on global energy prices.

Economic crisis

For Iran’s leaders, what they have called a U.S. “economic war” has become a domestic security risk that has prompted them to take a more aggressive stance.

A rising sense of economic despair among Iranians could spark a new wave of anti-government protests. Last December, a currency crisis triggered nationwide demonstrations, which security forces crushed with deadly force.

Iranian officials are anxious that Israel may exploit any discontent to support dissidents or an insurgency, said Hadi Borhani, a professor of Israeli and Middle East studies at the University of Tehran.

He pointed to recent statements by Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said this week that “there is still more to complete. I mean, first and foremost, the toppling of the regime. This regime in Iran — its end is near.”

The Iranian government does not want to wait for Israel to act.

“They believe Iran should change the situation, possibly through a more damaging or aggressive move that can raise regional tension,” Mr. Borhani said.

Some Iranian leaders also believe now is a good moment to act because Mr. Trump will return to war after the midterms anyway. The president will either feel vindicated by an unexpected electoral victory or feel that  he has nothing more to lose by pursuing his own strategy, several of the analysts said.

Mr. Sabet, however, expects that worsening global economic conditions will eventually push the Trump administration to ease tensions.

Even though the U.S. naval escorts through the Strait of Hormuz have allowed some oil to move, he said, global crude stockpiles are not being replenished fast enough, and natural gas and other critical oil derivatives are not getting through. Those shortages are likely to inflict more pain on the global economy.

“That is when I see them muddling their way toward some kind of limited or de facto deal,” he said. “Don’t think of it as an M.O.U. plus — think M.O.U. minus.”

Sanam Mahoozi contributed reporting.“

Star Trek Predicted Our Political Crisis

 

Trump PANICS As MASSIVE Protests SURGE Across US!!

 

Trump PANICS As MASSIVE Protests SURGE Across US!!

‘I suggested maybe a lighter touch’: William Shatner on Star Trek at 60 | Star Trek | The Guardian

‘I suggested maybe a lighter touch’: William Shatner on Star Trek at 60

"The actor and others involved with the phenomenon speak about the legacy and progressivism of a much-loved science fiction TV series as it reaches an important milestone

David Smith

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek. Photograph: FlixPix/Alamy

‘The mystery of time,” muses William Shatner, and for a moment we are back on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise listening to one of Captain Kirk’s philosophical tag-line speeches. “Not just the passage of time and our perception of it, but what is time? What does 60 years mean? It really is meaningless, isn’t it, 60 years, in terms of what time is? On the other hand, Dolly Parton just died. It brings up the whole concept of the passage of time and what that means.”

In an episode called The City on the Edge of Forever, Shatner’s Kirk travelled back in time and fell in love with a pacifist (Joan Collins) only to discover that she must die to prevent Nazi Germany winning the second world war. Such ethical quandaries help explain why Star Trek will celebrate its 60th anniversary on 8 September not just as a force in US culture but a mirror held up to the country’s politics.

Born in the idealism of the 1960s, the show offered a utopian vision of the future in which humanity sought to explore rather than conquer. Diversity, empathy and reason had triumphed over tribalism, superstition and greed. Big government and big tech were liberators from scarcity and inequality. Star Trek’s fans included Martin Luther King and his wife, Coretta, who said it was the only programme they allowed their little children to stay up and watch.

But six decades on, the Enterprise is encountering some cosmic turbulence. Donald Trump’s America is convulsed by polarisation, culture wars and the retreat of liberal democracy, along with anxiety over artificial intelligence and climate catastrophe. Paramount, merged with Skydance Media for $8bn, promptly cancelled the latest Star Trek series amid claims that it was too “woke”.

The rightwing complainers yearn for a return to the days of Iowa-born Captain Kirk, who fits their conceit of an all-American hero, even though Shatner is Canadian. When he was hired in 1965 after NBC rejected Jeffrey Hunter’s dour pilot performance as Captain Pike, he brought an athletic, theatrical charisma that lifted the cerebral storytelling.

“I saw the film and I thought it was really interesting, a little ponderous,” Shatner, a sprightly 95, recalls of the original pilot via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles, with his dogs sleeping nearby. “So I suggested maybe a lighter touch, and we made another pilot and it sold.”

That lighter touch did not prevent Shatner from making history. In 1968, he and Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt Nyota Uhura, shared television’s first high-profile scripted interracial kiss in the episode Plato’s Stepchildren. Was he aware of its groundbreaking importance?

Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner. Photograph: Paramount/Sportsphoto/Allstar

“I was told,” he says, sounding reluctant to be cast as a civil rights activist. Shatner muses about “infrequent hates” that are “dramatised by documentary filming” to shock audiences and contends: “The vast majority of us just want to live and have your barbecue and live in peace and quiet and go do what you want to. You believe what you wanna believe and, if you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you. I think most people want to do that and if we could elevate those people to express themselves more, we’d discover that humanity really just wants to be human.”

Star Trek is still pushing boundaries, much to the chagrin of unlikely fan Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff and driver of Trump’s extremist immigration policy. In January Miller cited a social media account called End Wokeness that mocked the newest Star Trek series, Starfleet Academy, as “Beyond parody”. Miller himself wrote: “Tragic. But it’s not too late for @paramountplus to save the franchise. Step 1: Reconcile with @WilliamShatner and give him total creative control.”

Shatner laughs at the idea of White House aides spending their days picking holes in Star Trek. “Can you imagine they’re watching TV, criticising TV. I mean, it’s bizarre! I don’t understand it. I don’t know why they don’t – I don’t want to be political. I’m Canadian in America but it’s enthralling.”

He rejects Miller’s notion that Star Trek’s inclusiveness has gone too far. “I don’t know what going too far is. Where’s the demarcation line? Who drew that line? ‘Now you’ve gone too far.’ Excuse me, I didn’t realise that. Where should I have stopped? And by the way, what is ‘woke’?”

In creator Gene Roddenberry’s 23rd-century vision, nation-states no longer exist and planets have banded together to form a sort of United Nations in space. Poverty, disease and hunger have been eradicated, currency has largely disappeared from Federation life and citizens pursue self-improvement rather than private accumulation. To some, it might sound like John Lennon’s Imagine. But others would rather not imagine it.

In 2017 the billionaire investor Peter Thiel told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times: “I like Star Wars way better. I’m a capitalist. Star Wars is the capitalist show. Star Trek is the communist one. There is no money in Star Trek because you just have the transporter machine that can make anything you need. The whole plot of Star Wars starts with Han Solo having this debt that he owes and so the plot in Star Wars is driven by money.”

Shatner, who travelled into space for real aged 90, sounds wryly amused. “Peter Thiel must be a very bright, creative man, full of opinions and he’s made a lot of money which should indicate he’s very self-sufficient and has ideas. He talked about money. Well, that’s one aspect. You need money to live. But you need other things as well and the other things are represented by Star Trek. I’d love to talk to him. I’d love to get into a discourse on the differences between Star Trek and Star Wars.”

One difference has been articulated by Shatner’s friend, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who argues that Star Trek adheres more closely to real science. Another can be traced to the franchises’ origins: whereas Star Wars draws on the classic hero myth outlined by scholar Joseph Campbell, Star Trek was forged in the horrors of the mid-20th century.

Roddenberry was a decorated second world war bomber pilot who later survived a harrowing commercial plane crash in the Syrian desert. His writing partner Gene Coon had served in the marines and received training as a war reporter during the Korean war era.

Joan Collins and William Shatner in Star Trek. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/CBS/Getty Images

Mark Altman, co-author of The Fifty-Year Mission and director of a new documentary, The 60-Year Mission, says via Zoom from Los Angeles: “Their approach to Star Trek was they had lost a lot of friends and had seen war up close and they didn’t romanticise it. They knew the cost of war. They weren’t changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. They loathed war.

“That’s something I find shocking, these deeply conservative fans like Stephen Miller say, ‘I’m a huge fan of Star Trek.’ How is that possible? Did they miss the memo that in reality, Star Trek abhorred war, and it always said that talking is the way to resolve conflict?”

Nowhere was that clearer than in the 1967 episode Arena, in which Kirk refuses to execute the monstrous Gorn that has obliterated a Federation outpost. “Kirk makes this decision not to kill this alien creature that has annihilated our base and killed his friends,” Altman notes. “Some people look at it and say, ‘Oh, it’s this goofy monster in a suit.’ But there’s a reason an episode like that becomes so iconic: it’s the message as well as the visuals.”

Viewers in the late 1960s were accustomed to all-white TV westerns. On Star Trek, they encountered a meritocracy: an African American woman, Nichols’s Uhura, answering communications with unflappable authority (she was poised to quit after one season but King persuaded her to stay); George Takei’s Sulu piloting the flagship barely two decades after Japanese Americans had been interned; and an alien second-in-command, Leonard Nimoy’s Mr Spock, acting as what Altman calls “the ultimate immigrant”.

Altman points out that this integration extended beyond the main bridge crew: “What about the diversity in the guest characters? In one episode you have Captain Kirk answering to his superior, Commodore Stone, played by the late Percy Rodriguez. Many years before Colin Powell, Kirk is answering to an African American who’s his boss. That stuff resonates too.”

The original series ran from 1966 to 1969, crashing headlong into the Vietnam war, racial violence and the assassinations of John F Kennedy, King and Robert F Kennedy. Animated series and films followed. Then came The Next Generation (1987–1994), starring the Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Deep Space Nine (1993–1999), Voyager (1995–2001) and several subsequent iterations.

The cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Photograph: Cine Text/Sportsphoto/Allstar

Altman regards Kirk as an analogue for John F Kennedy, the young president who had pledged to reach the moon before the decade was out. “The final frontier is the New Frontier. Kirk is very much a Kennedy-esque liberal. He’s liberal on social issues but more hard-nosed on defence. It’s more of a traditional moderate than what we see with democratic socialists today. It’s a meritocracy; it believes everybody needs to start from the same starting line but then it’s about your gifts and you have ability.

“But if you look at The Next Generation, it’s a very George HW Bush vision: consensus-building, a thousand points of light. Kirk has a line: ‘When this becomes a democracy, I’ll let you know.’ Picard was more of a consensus builder who had a lot of meetings to get a lot of input from people. It was more of an HW Bush thing.

“You can extend that to a lot of Star Trek shows which were clearly influenced, if not necessarily by the president, by the tenor of the times. Deep Space Nine was heavily rewritten in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots and the beating of Rodney King. It was all about rebuilding and asking, can’t we all just get along? It has one of the great Star Trek quotes: ‘It’s easy to be a saint in paradise.’ When you’re on a starship and everything’s great, it’s easy to be a saint in paradise. But on a station, there’s more of a struggle and more conflict.”

The latest series, Starfleet Academy, starred Oscar-winner Holly Hunter as the captain and a chancellor alongside Paul Giamatti as its central antagonist. The show boasted the largest and most expensive physical set in the franchise’s history. Set in a distant future where young cadets rebuild the Federation following an apocalyptic event, it was designed as an allegory for institutional renewal.

But following Paramount’s merger with Skydance, which is led by David Ellison, who is the son of Trump ally Larry Ellison, Starfleet Academy was cancelled, with its forthcoming second season set to be its last. Miller had been joined by tech billionaire Elon Musk in a Maga pile-on denouncing the show’s alleged wokeness.

Paul Giamatti and Holly Hunter in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Photograph: Brooke Palmer/Paramount

Altman is scathing of the rightwing crusade. “How can you criticise Starfleet Academy on the ground that it’s too diverse? It’s absolutely ridiculous, and particularly if you’re someone who’s claiming to be a Star Trek fan who needs to understand that diversity is in the DNA of Star Trek.

“Diversity as a strength is something that’s celebrated as a through-line in all the Star Trek series. The series can be very different but one thing that has never changed from 8 September 1966 is the value of diversity in making these crews stronger. If they were all homogeneous, they would not be able to as effectively deal with the challenges they face in the cosmos.”

That sentiment is shared by the veteran actor Robert Picardo, who spent seven seasons playing Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram and reprised his role in Starfleet Academy. Speaking by phone, the 72-year-old does not mince words: “Let’s face it: when someone that high up in the administration and also Elon Musk piled on the same day, do I think it’s a coincidence that the new owners of Paramount cancelled our show the first moment they could have? We did not get a fair shake. We were killed in the cradle.”

Picardo adds: “Yes, there was the fact that we had a gay Klingon. Did a lot of people get over-exercised about that? My feeling is, get over yourself! There seems to be a movement to drive us back to the 1950s. Star Trek is all about the future, not about returning.

“In that climate the core values of Star Trek – science and also diversity and inclusion – are going to get lumped in with what is under attack. Some people say, do you feel that it was at all current politics that had to do with your cancellation? If we caught the same flu that Stephen Colbert and the editorial freedom of CBS 60 minutes caught then we’re in excellent company.”

If Star Trek’s social politics were prescient, its engagement with science and technology was frequently uncanny. Decades before smartphones, tablets, automated doors and voice-activated digital assistants, the Enterprise was operating with personal access display devices, communicators and talking mainframes. But it also interrogated the ethics of innovation.

Robert Picardo in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Photograph: Miller Mobley/Paramount

For Picardo, who spent seven years embodying a holographic doctor wrestling with sentience and civil rights on Voyager, current debates around Silicon Valley’s generative AI boom feel oddly familiar. “The explosion of the technology and the pace at which it is happening is something nobody could have predicted.

“It’s a useful tool but it’s raised all sorts of issues. We actually did episodes on Star Trek where my character wrote a book and then there was the question of whether an artificial intelligence could have intellectual property rights. We did the whole issue of whether an artificial intelligence can have an original idea or if it can only slice and dice human ideas scraped from the internet, from everything ever written.”

Sixty years on, Star Trek’s faith in a United Federation of Planets that has outgrown bigotry, racism and nationalism feels perversely quaint in an era that has seen Trump champion “America first”, deride the UN and denigrate the very concept of empathy. The show, whose future is uncertain as Paramount’s new owners focus on a proposed $110bn acquisition of Warner Bros, offers utopia in a time of dystopia.

Picardo observes: “Post-9/11, a lot of science fiction has become very apocalyptic. It’s in some hellscape future with a few straggler survivors and Star Trek is the opposite of that. But to me, the biggest damage that’s been done in current politics is the destruction the idea of truth or that there is such a thing as a fact and our word does matter. I worry about Star Trek’s survival in a post-truth, post-literate world.”

‘I suggested maybe a lighter touch’: William Shatner on Star Trek at 60 | Star Trek | The Guardian