What The Scopes Trial Was Really About
18th December 2025
This is the centennial year for the Scopes “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, 1925’s “trial of the century”. In the dock was John Scopes, a substitute high school teacher who was accused of violating the state’s recently passed Butler Act, which prohibited any state school from teaching any theory of the origin of man that contradicted the account in Genesis. Scopes’ conviction was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court on a technicality.
By any objective measure, the Scopes trial should arouse no greater attention in 2025 than Dayton’s 1925 Strawberry Festival. It set no legal precedent, led to no repeal of the Butler Act, and everyone involved just got on with their lives. Yet here we are, still talking about it a hundred years later, in commemorative conferences, in high profile commentaries, on podcasts, and even a documentary (full disclosure, produced by me).
Interest in the Scopes trial has been kept alive by a prevailing narrative that has built up over the last century: of two titans of 1920s America, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, squaring off in an epic courtroom confrontation of science versus religion [still a big talking point with the Left], evolution versus creation [an argument as dead as Hitler and Mussolini], academic freedom versus state control of education [which proglodytes have been inverting for the last fifty years].
We have known for some time that little of this narrative is true. The Scopes trial was a put-up job, instigated by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Dayton town luminaries who wanted to bring commerce and publicity to their small town and its sluggish economy. The “epic confrontation” was more performative than substantive, with drama provided by the defense’s claim that evolutionism and Darwinism were crystalline scientific truths, and that any contrary claims, particularly when the doubts were religiously-motivated, posed a threat to civilization itself. Ever since 1925, scientists generally have bought into the Scopes defense’s narrative. But just how strong was their case?
The Scopes trial is kept alive by the same spirit that keeps alive the lynching of Emmet Till, the Ku Klux Klan, the 1619 Project, “reparations”, and all of the other decomposing relics of the past that proglodytes depend on in order to keep their troops in line and de-humanize those who don’t accept the Narrative. It’s why they jump to call everybody they dislike Nazis and Fascists. It’s the Hunt for Heretics and Sinners that keeps their creaking wagon train in motion.