How My Hometown Got Eugenicized

The East Tennessee foothills are thick with nostalgia. You feel it when you drive past a vintage gas station sign or a collapsed barn in a cow pasture. Such artifacts endure like fading memories. Nothing lasts forever. There’s the threat of deconstruction, and of reconstruction—of total transformation. It’s the threat of progressive “evolution.”

Looking back, I reckon those spun-out holler shamans and cybernetic rednecks were omens of the imminent transhuman fusion. From mountain shacks down to the tidy subdivisions, you had all these sun-burnt naked apes who merged with their machines: guns, motorcycles, TV sets, you name it. Such men still had real vitality. But from an Übermensch perspective, they were just a bridge across a yawning void—like Zarathustra shouting “Hold my beer!” before stepping out onto the tightrope.

Over the years, this Tennessee transformation saw rapid shifts in gene frequencies, cultural modes, and technologies. The old was swept away, making space for the new. Many call it “evolution” as if this were some gentle metamorphosis. In reality, it’s a violent process: oftentimes gradual, sometimes sudden.

Looking back, I reckon those spun-out holler shamans and cybernetic rednecks were omens of the imminent transhuman fusion.

If by “evolution” you mean some combination of natural and artificial selection—as in the icy hand of Death raking across the hills and valleys, culling gene pools and meme pools alike—then I suppose you’re right. That claw has cut deep, targeting some of my friends and family. In the meantime, Nature brings forth new broods of varying quality, while Man invents new machines to give them. With every new generation, Death has fresh clay to shape.

This is “progress.” This is evolution.

The World of Tomorrow

The 1982 World’s Fair was a symbolic turning point. For six months, Knoxville was transformed. Eleven million hayseeds and city folks gathered from all over to gawk at futuristic simulacra. There were solar panels on display, power-generating windmills, a geodesic “Home of the Future,” apocalyptic laser light shows, a Japanese bullet train ride, a robot painting pictures, and satellite video devices that anticipated the Zoom wasp nests we now inhabit.

Alongside these future dreams, less innovative countries resurrected their folk traditions for American consumers. Visitors could participate in a simulated past or playact a fake future while guzzling cans of World’s Fair Beer—which turned out to be the most prescient image of America on dis-play. I was only three years old at the time. I remember riding on my uncle’s shoulders as he took me from one wonder to the next.

One of the big draws was Bill Suitor, “The Rocket Belt Man,” who piloted his jetpack up to the golden dome of the newly constructed Sun Sphere. You have to remember, the 1980s were an era of Walkman headsets and sturdy, box-shaped automobiles. No one even had a Nintendo yet. Men with unironic mullets and women with poofed up poodle hair gazed up at this flying cyborg in wonder and yelled, “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like ‘at!”

Today, the Sun Sphere still glistens above World’s Fair Park like some giant globalist eyeball observing the weird human-AI symbiotes below. From behind the sphere’s gold-plated glass, Knoxville looks like it’s covered in a fine layer of radioactive dust. On the pavement, digitized humanoids follow their smartphones around as if they were ants chasing pheromone trails.

Atoms to Atoms, Dust to Dust

Just down the road from Knoxville is the quiet town of Oak Ridge. It was founded as a sci-fi military op and has only evolved since then. During World War II, it was the actual center of the Manhattan Project. If Los Alamos was the brains, Oak Ridge was the brawn, where they built those machines of death. The entire area was a well-guarded black site, where the Greatest Generation developed atom bombs to vaporize anyone standing in the way of world peace.

To this day, the town remains an egghead outpost. Scientists of uncertain national allegiance are tinkering away at the Y-12 plant. They maintain existing warhead stockpiles, process uranium, and assemble or reconfigure nuclear weapon components. The old Museum of Science and Energy featured an ominous display of modern Doomsday bombs and missiles, arranged in evolutionary order. The row began with replicas of Little Boy and Fat Man, progressing to taller intercontinental ballistic missiles and thermonuclear warheads.

The nuke display freaked me out when I first saw it more than two decades ago. Now I’m more bothered that they scrapped a sobering reminder of our fragility in favor of more kid-friendly exhibits.

Eleven million hayseeds and city folks gathered from all over to gawk at futuristic simulacra.

This little town is the kind of place that attracts high IQs, both biological and non-biological. For decades, Oak Ridge National Laboratory has housed the world’s fastest supercomputers: Titan, Jaguar, and now Frontier. This mechabrain status is constantly shifting back and forth between the United States and China. As of this writing, Frontier is holding on at second place.

Naturally, Oak Ridge High School is itself a laboratory for human-machine symbiosis. Starting this year, every kid will be given an AI tutor as a spirit guide for an uncertain future. They could have run controlled experiments to see what happens when you meld young brains to nonhuman digital minds. Instead, tech accelerationists are trying it out on most of the planet, because they can.

This Tennessee technodrome is a stark contrast to the double-wide meth labs out in the hills, at least on the surface. Taken as a whole, the entire Tennessee Valley is best viewed as an array of cultural Petri dishes—a laboratory run by a transnational Borg. The test subjects are a mix of dethroned Anglo conquerors, Scots-Irish rebels, Cherokee savages, immigrant invaders, and increasingly human-like machines. Over the course of deep evolutionary time, the best-adapted mutants will flourish, while those who are maladapted will get Darwinized—or eugenicized—whatever term helps you sleep at night.

Tarantino Tweakers

The late Bill Hicks used to rib his fellow Southerners for being ignorant, racist, unevolved primates. “In many parts of our troubled world, people are yelling ‘Revolution! Revolution!’” he’d quip in his comedy routines. “In Tennessee, people are yelling ‘Evolution!! We want our THUMBS!’”

As a tribute to Hicks, whenever the band Tool performs in Knoxville, frontman Maynard James Keenan commands his Southern fans to raise their thumbs in the air. Every time, he scans the crowd and sneers, “Just checking.”

Growing up here, the cultural references to my area revealed an obsession with perverse and violent elements. A good example is Quentin Tarantino, who lived in Knoxville briefly in 1973. His later work was inspired by all of the Kung Fu movies playing in theaters around town. In his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, the Nazi-scalping protagonist was from nearby Maynardville. True to form, Brad Pitt nailed the hillbilly accent.

On a more sinister wavelength, when Tarantino penned the script for the 1994 movie Natural Born Killers, he named his mass-murdering antiheroes Mickey and Mallory Knox. Their over-the-top accents drip with backwoods psychosis. In the film, Mickey Knox is asked when he started thinking about killing. “Birth,” he replies. “I was thrown into a flaming pit of scum, forgotten by God... I mean, I came from violence. It was in my blood—my dad had it, his dad had it. It’s all just my fate.”

Sounds like half the kids I grew up with, many of whom died young.

“You’ll never understand,” Mickey tells the faux peacenik reporter in his final prison interview. “You and me, we’re not even the same species... I used to be you. Then I evolved.”

With Natural Born Killers, Tarantino grafted some Lovecraftian hillbilly soul onto Kung Fu action aesthetics, which Oliver Stone and Trent Reznor overlaid with a dark soundtrack that includes Marilyn Manson’s “Cyclops”—a slappin’ lil’ tune about TV-addled housewives having their minds warped by the one-eyed electronic monster.

If natural selection is a bitch, eugenics is an abusive drunk.

In subsequent years, the film would inspire multiple real-life killings. “Media is like the weather,” as Mickey Knox explained to the reporter, “except it’s man-made.” One of those murders took place up the interstate from Knoxville, near a rest stop on I-81. Six demented kids aged 14 to 20 drove down from Kentucky, kidnapped a Norwegian family of four, lined them up in a ditch, and shot them all in the head. The two-year-old son survived, although he lost an eye.

The boneheaded murderers were swiftly apprehended. According to court documents, these Kentuckian killers had fried their circuits with LSD. They believed their thwarted murder spree would kick off Armageddon. One of the teens testified that they were inspired by Natural Born Killers and Marilyn Manson, whose infamous persona is a chimerical blend of Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson.

Seven years later, Manson was type-cast as a child-molesting trailer-dweller in Asia Argento’s 2004 smut film The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. It was shot in Knoxville and features landmarks such as the rower-boy statue on Gay Street. One scene was filmed in the first county jail I was ever locked up in.

Coincidentally, Marilyn Manson’s first tour bus driver, Tony Wiggins, hails from the next county over from where I grew up. His country rendition of the band’s single “Cake and Sodomy” is on Manson’s 1995 EP Smells Like Children. Wiggins’s cheerful twang evokes the shadows of this here holler. He was also a key figure in Manson’s 1998 autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell. In the book, Manson credits Wiggins for teaching him the art of redneck sadomasochism. This includes tying up young groupies with asphyxiation knots and torturing them to extract their darkest secrets.

These days, Tony Wiggins is a local legend in my hometown, both for his tour stories and his firewater. When I was growing up, this was a dry county. You couldn’t buy liquor or wine, only beer—except on Sundays. This was mainly due to Southern Baptist teetotalers, but their influence has waned. When the liquor laws changed 10 years ago, Tony Wiggins opened my town’s first package store.

Monkey Trials and Eugenics Nightmares

You might say folks around here are evolving. Yankees are pouring in, forests are being cleared, shopping centers are popping up, and fentanyl is culling the native population. Taking over where their evangelical predecessors left off, corporate America is bringing civilization to a backward people.

Evolution is a recurring theme in Tennessee culture—on both biological and cultural levels. Up until a few years ago, there were persistent attempts to either force schools to “teach both sides” of the evolution versus creation debate or to ban them from teaching evolution altogether. Every year, the University of Tennessee celebrates “Darwin Day” in defiance of these efforts. It’s an attempt to distinguish the intelligentsia from those tick-bitten monkey people off-campus.

This rivalry goes way back. If you head southwest from Knoxville, you’ll find the little town of Dayton. On the way, you’ll see a massive nuclear reactor with steam drifting off its cooling towers. They’re a cheerful reminder that ascendant man has dragged himself up from the mud. In Dayton’s quaint town square, the courthouse serves as a national shrine to the Spirit of Evolution.

Back in 1925, Dayton had its 15 minutes of fame with the Scopes Monkey Trial. A persecuted schoolteacher, John Scopes, was arrested for using the evolution textbook Civic Biology in defiance of state law. The newly formed ACLU funded his defense. The Monkey Trial created such an uproar that the acerbic essayist H. L. Mencken came down from Baltimore to poke fun at Tennessee’s thumbless degenerates.

The prosecutor was the populist firebrand and radio evangelism pioneer William Jennings Bryan. For years, Bryan had warned that a Darwinian view of human origins would degrade our moral fabric. People who thought of themselves as animals are liable to behave as such. Besides, how could human beings—made in the image of God—have descended from mere apes? (Today, we ask how that image can be remade into a machine.)

In the end, John Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. The victorious Bryan took a three-day victory lap, preaching in churches around the state. On the third night, he died suddenly of apoplexia in his sleep. They say his face was frozen in a wry grin.

Gabriel Gigliotti

Despite the best efforts of Southern fundamentalists, evolution is still taught in Tennessee schools—or at least a sanitized version of it is. One hundred years after the Monkey Trial, sophisto-libs remember it as a victory of The Science™ over superstitious rubes who probably say “ni**er.”

When I last visited the Dayton courthouse, there was a copy of Civic Biology displayed behind glass as a testament to American progress. By happenstance, it was opened to page 195. One passage hits the thorny problem of human variation head-on: “Although anatomically there is a greater difference between the lowest type of monkey and the highest type of ape than there is between the highest type of ape and the lowest savage... there is an immense mental gap between monkey and man.”

This implies that savages have wee brains in their itty-bitty skulls. Ironically, this is how Yankees and snooty West Coasters see Tennesseans—except, unlike with the “savages,” anthropologists never measured our Southern skulls to be certain.

If you were to open the display glass and turn the page, you’d get a shot of the hard stuff: “At the present time, there exists upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and to an extent, in structure.” The text goes on to boast that “the highest type of all [are] the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”

So natural selection favored Whitey—or at least the royal breeds. But what of the Mongoloids of Asia, the Aborigines of Oceania, the Negroids of Africa, and the Injuns of America who still struggle to live among such noble stock? Leaf over to page 263 of this once forbidden textbook, and you’ll learn: “Just as certain animals or plants have become parasitic on other plants or animals, [so inferior humans] have become parasitic on society... corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease.”

That sounds harsh. Yet the distinguished author of Civic Biology, George William Hunter, explains that compared to rats or rabid dogs, colored folks and white trash have it pretty good. “If such people were lower animals,” Hunter wrote, “we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.”

This eugenic ethos, derived from natural selection, calls to mind Mickey Knox’s final prison interview: “It’s just murder, man,” he told the reporter. “All God’s creatures do it, some form or another. I mean, you look in the forest. You got species killing other species. Our species is killin’ all species, includin’ the forest—and we just call it ‘industry,’ not murder. But I know a lot of people who deserve to die.”

If natural selection is a bitch, eugenics is an abusive drunk.

Although there’s no inherent hierarchy in Darwin’s idea of evolution—no ascending chain of being—you can’t help but see it. Lions seem more noble than scavenging hyenas. Flowering trees are more majestic than slime mold. Our preferences are diverse, though, so the proper arrangement varies from one observer to another. Hence, New Yorkers seem superior to Knoxvillians—if you’re an idiot. But for Darwin, such values were mere human projections.

Biological evolution has no goal in mind, he argued, only provisional degrees of fitness. It’s a cheap trick, really. You just have to squirt out enough babies who can avoid death long enough to breed. So technically, there’s no natural ranking from rats to monkeys to men—or from men to machines, for that matter. Your kind either survives or it doesn’t.

The idea behind eugenics, formulated by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, is a bit different. Eugenics is all about human preference and artificial selection. Its efficacy is readily observed with domesticated sheep, for instance, or tame dogs. Unlike in the wild, where one’s birth is happenstance and Death strikes out blindly, human societies have some control over who is born and who gets to live (good dawgs), as well as who has to die in a cage (bad dawgs).

In the old days, the guiding social hierarchy was based on holiness and royalty. With the rise of Science™, that blueprint gave way to adaptation and fitness. Nowadays, standards have progressed—or devolved—into stock valuation and media influence. In all ages, the underlying pattern is “my people over yours.”

The long-term effect is somewhere between blind natural selection and fickle intelligent design. As the story goes, eugenic processes are why farmers outpaced the hunter-gatherers. It’s how industrious Europeans overcame savages and inferior civilizations in short order. Following this track up to our present age, it’s why that old patch of woods is now a department store, and algorithms determine your chances of getting laid.

The truth is my hometown got paved over by “progress” and eugenicized by “evolution.” I’m not sore about it. To those transhuman eyes gazing down at my kinsmen—who lay shivering under the cold light of metrics—rural whites are just one step above the Injuns.

Your Yankee ancestors laid out mechanical traps, and our Southern forebears stepped right into them. You rapidly modified our memetic code. You thinned out our accents. You gradually culled our gene pool—yet somehow missed most of the dumbasses. Then you stuffed us into cars and handed us smartphones. You fused us to machines. All the while, you harbored dreams of replacing us entirely.

Fair enough. A win is a win. But if you’re gonna keep talking shit about it, don’t act surprised when we come at you like savages. And don’t whine if one day your machines overtake you.

Joe Allen is the War Room tech editor and author of Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity.