Among our current crises: a new Red Scare—targeted, calculated, and accelerating fast.
In the past few months, the Trump Administration has been working hard to strip federally-funding from research on racism, gender, and environmental justice and gut expertise from state environmental agencies, targeting what it calls “anti-American” ideology, which, in practice, seems to include everything from environmental justice and critical race theory to “cultural Marxism” and anticolonial critique. Major universities are being punished for allowing student activists to demonstrate on their campuses. Proponents of justice for Palestine are being detained by ICE, stripped of their visa statuses, and deported.
But this crackdown isn’t entirely new. Last week, we were joined by members of the first cohort of Red Natural History Fellows to trace the long arc that brought us here, asking where the 21st century Red Scare came from—and what we can do about it.
Watch the video recording and check out some resources below.
What’s new about the new Red Scare, and what is as old as the United States itself? Why is the Trump Administration targeting institutions of science, history and heritage? And what does this targeting means for scholars and scientists who are committed to what we have been calling “Red Natural History”—a tradition of natural history that, at its broadest, serves as a challenge to the capitalist imperatives of extraction and enclosure that are the bread and butter of the Trump Administration’s American dream?
Featuring Rosalyn LaPier, Andrew Curley, and Kai Bosworth, three of our inaugural cohort of Red Natural History Fellows, with the NHM’s Beka Economopoulos, this lively roundtable engaged these and other questions—from the histories of state repression that led to the current crisis, to what’s at stake for the Trump Administration, to the strategies people are developing to resist the current crackdown on dissident research and action.
We covered a lot of ground over the course of an hour and a half—exploring everything from what Lenape scholar Joanne Barker calls “the original Red Scare” of Indigenous erasure and cultural genocide, to 21st century anti-terrorism policies. Time and again, we returned to the question of history: not only how the Trump Administration is wiping histories of resistance from the official record and replacing them with a “new narrative” grounded in a “white supremacist view of American First,” as Roz put it, but also how the very histories that are under threat might serve us today.
As Kai beautifully explained in his closing remarks, whatever can be said of the past, our collective future depends, fundamentally, on the collectivities we build now:
“This is neither a new beginning nor a new ending of what is a long struggle. There is a lot more coming down that we can’t can’t anticipate. Figuring out how we can prepare for things we can’t anticipate is best done with other people, so find some more people.”
This was the seventh event in our ongoing programming series, Natural History for a World in Crisis, curated by the 2023–2025 cohort of Red Natural History Fellows. Visit our blog to check out highlights and video recordings from each of the events to learn what “red natural history” looks like in practice.
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