Yeah, that only shows how stupid the original Star Trek often was. Just because they hadn't yet had a Trump or a Hitler in Uhura's century is no reason for her not to know that "words" are exactly what scum like that rises to the top on.

Agree, the scum is leveraging wetware vulnerabilities in our species around sound bites, tribes, labels, and twisted facts.

But I think that was Roddenberry's point: we can only advance after excising that primitive baggage.