Actor and activist George Takei on Sunday pushed back against "trolls" on the Internet who are upset because the new show Star Trek Discovery will have a diverse cast.
The racist opposition to the new CBS spinoff boiled over last week after the show's first official trailer featured Asian actress Michelle Yeoh as the ship’s captain and black actress Sonequa Martin-Green as the first officer.
"Today in this society we have alien life forms that we call trolls," Takei explained. "And these trolls carry on without knowing what they're talking about and knowing even less about the history of what they're talking about. And some of these trolls go on to be presidents of nations."
"You know, when you go out into space, you're going to have even greater diversity," the actor noted. "These so-called trolls haven't seen a single episode of the new series because it hasn't been aired... and they don't know the history of Star Trek, that Gene Rodeneberry created this with the idea of finding strength in our diversity."
Takei pointed out that President Donald Trump's attempt to ban Muslim travelers also showed that he was "ignorant" of the history of Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II.
"The president was totally ignorant of the history of internment here," Takei said. "And these people claiming that Star Trek is... white genocide don't know what they're talking about, they're equal to the president of the United States. I think the president is as foolish and as uninformed and as ignorant as these trolls are."
