Thousands of demonstrators rally against the Trump administration in Chicago, Illinois, on April 19, 2025. (Photo: Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“When any of our organizations are unjustly targeted, we will stand as a unified coalition,” the groups said. “An attack on one is an attack on all.”
A coalition of 75 civil rights groups on Monday responded to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “escalating threats and actions” targeting nonprofit organizations by launching “The Pact: A Civil Rights Coalition Unity Commitment.”
Led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the groups represent “millions of people of every background in every ZIP code across America, exist to serve our communities, protect rights, and advance opportunity for all,” the pact explains. “Today we face a campaign by the government to silence and isolate us, stop us from doing our jobs, and hurt the people we serve.”
“The administration has made clear it will attack organizations that speak truth to power, defend the vulnerable, petition and sue the government, preserve and share knowledge, and fight for our freedoms,” notes the statement, which came amid rumors of an attack on climate groups’ tax-exempt status and after a GOP-led effort in Congress attacking anti-genocide campaigners. “They want us to fight alone, hoping we’ll stay silent as others are targeted. Not us.”
“The administration has made clear it will attack organizations that speak truth to power, defend the vulnerable, petition and sue the government, preserve and share knowledge, and fight for our freedoms.”
“Today, we commit to stay united in our shared vision for opportunity, prosperity, dignity, belonging, and for the rights and justice necessary to ensure them,” the coalition declared. “We represent people who are Black, White, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous, from cities, suburbs, and rural communities, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, workers, women, immigrants, and people of all ethnicities, faiths, ages, and backgrounds.”
Signatories are focused on issues including quality healthcare, fair wages and working conditions, “freedom to learn our full history and celebrate our cultures,” quality education, affordable housing, a just justice system, clean air and water, voting rights, discrimination protection, family care, hunger prevention, reproductive freedom, and privacy.
The coalition includes the American Federation of Teachers, Arab American Institute, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Lambda Legal, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, League of United Latin American Citizens, National Women’s Law Center, Oxfam America, Public Citizen, Reproductive Freedom for All, and others.
“The government is targeting organizations that help people assert their rights and access basic services,” the pact states. “They want to operate without oversight or consequences as they dismantle and privatize public services, attack government workers, and concentrate even more profit and power in the hands of the wealthy.”
“We have witnessed outrageous attacks on our work,” the statement continues, citing investigations of nonprofits, terminated grants, law firms fearing retribution, threats to revoke tax-exempt status, and the weaponization of civil rights laws. “We will not be divided. We will not be intimidated into silence or abandoning our communities.”
The coalition members pledged:
When any of our organizations are unjustly targeted, we will stand as a unified coalition. An attack on one is an attack on all.
We will share knowledge, resources, and support with any organization threatened by abuses of power.
We will not abandon our missions or self-censor out of fear. The people we serve depend on us now more than ever.
In addition to the pact, the groups shared a pledge that supporters can sign, a mobilization calendar, and an open letter to the American people, which says that “the Trump administration is intentionally attacking any business; law firm; college, university, or school; and organization or government watchdog that disagrees with its policies or challenges its abuses and corruption. And it is scaring into silence legitimate, lawful demands and legal challenges, which are fundamental to our civil rights and our democracy.”
“Throughout our history, Americans have resisted power grabs that threaten our rights and freedoms,” the letter stresses. “Today, we must resist again—together.”
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
A demonstrator holds a sign after a rally against U.S. President Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 17, 2025. (Photo: Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)
“Indiscriminately slashing medical, scientific, and technological research undermines the nation’s ability to save American lives, foster American success, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”
Harvard University sued multiple federal agencies and members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Cabinet on Monday over a $2.2 billion funding “freeze” and reported plans to cut off another $1 billion, implemented in response to the nation’s oldest higher education institution rejecting the administration’s escalating demands.
In addition to the funding cuts, the Trump administration has “initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status,” said Alan Garber, the university’s president, in a statement. “These actions have stark real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world.”
“Research that the government has put in jeopardy includes efforts to improve the prospects of children who survive cancer.”
“The consequences of the government’s overreach will be severe and long-lasting,” Garber explained. “Research that the government has put in jeopardy includes efforts to improve the prospects of children who survive cancer, to understand at the molecular level how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield.”
“As opportunities to reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease are on the horizon, the government is slamming on the brakes,” he continued. “The victims will be future patients and their loved ones who will suffer the heartbreak of illnesses that might have been prevented or treated more effectively. Indiscriminately slashing medical, scientific, and technological research undermines the nation’s ability to save American lives, foster American success, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”
Noting the Trump administration’s attempt to justify funding cuts by citing Harvard’s response to discrimiation against Jewish people, Garber said that “as a Jew and as an American, I know very well that there are valid concerns about rising antisemitism,” and pledged to “fight hate with the urgency it demands as we fully comply with our obligations under the law.” He also promised to soon release task force reports about combating antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus.
Right on. Give them no quarter. They’re attempting to destroy Harvard. https://t.co/JZ36PeRoXz
The university president’s lengthy message included a link to the 51-page complaint, filed in a federal court in Boston, Massachusetts. The defendants are the General Services Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and the departments of Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, and Justice, along with the leaders of those agencies.
Like Garber’s statement, the complaint highlights the sweeping impacts of “the government’s efforts to use the withholding of federal funding as leverage to gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard” and other higher education institutions.
“Defendants’ actions threaten Harvard’s academic independence and place at risk critical lifesaving and pathbreaking research that occurs on its campus,” the filing states. “And they are part of a broader effort by the government to punish Harvard for protecting its constitutional rights.”
“The government’s actions flout not just the First Amendment, but also federal laws and regulations,” the complaint argues, asking the court “to enjoin defendants from exceeding the bounds of their legal authority and to protect Harvard’s constitutional rights.”
The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper, noted that the university “will be represented by Robert K. Hur ’95 and William A. Burck, both lawyers with deep ties to President Donald Trump. Hur was appointed to the United States Department of Justice by Trump in his first term, and Burck has served as counsel for the Trump Organization. Lawyers affiliated with law firms Ropes & Gray and Lehtosky Keller Cohn will also represent Harvard, according to the lawsuit.”
The Ivy League university’s suit was filed the same day that a coalition of 75 groups, led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, responded to Trump’s attacks on nonprofits by launching “The Pact: A Civil Rights Coalition Unity Commitment.”
“We have witnessed outrageous attacks on our work,” the coalition’s pact states, citing investigations of nonprofits, terminated grants, law firms fearing retribution, threats to revoke tax-exempt status, and the weaponization of civil rights laws. “We will not be divided. We will not be intimidated into silence or abandoning our communities.”
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Climate activists and supporters displayed placards during a global climate strike rally, part of the Fridays for Future movement, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 11, 2025. (Photo: Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“If, in fact, a majority of people in your community care about climate change, and yet elected officials aren’t responding to that, that’s a deficit in democracy,” one of the project’s organizers said.
According to a global survey, 89% of people worldwide want their government to do more to address the climate crisis, yet current national policies put the world on track for 3.1°C of warming.
To explore this disconnect, Covering Climate Now (CCNow) launched the 89% Project on Monday to encourage coverage of “climate change’s silent majority” and ask some key questions.
“If, in fact, a majority of people in your community care about climate change, and yet elected officials aren’t responding to that, that’s a deficit in democracy,” CCNow co-founder Kyle Pope told Common Dreams. “Why is that? What’s to be done about it? Where do we go from here?”
‘A Media Problem’
The 89% Project is designed as a yearlong initiative that kicks off with a joint week of coverage coinciding with Earth Day. Another week of coverage will take place in the fall in the leadup to the United Nations climate conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil. In between, CCNow will host webinars and gatherings, promote the project on social media, and analyze the coverage to see what newsrooms are focusing on and what support they may need to continue telling climate stories going forward.
Already, major media outlets have signed on to participate, with The Guardian and Agence France-Presse acting as lead partners. Other core partners include The Nation, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, TIME, Canada’s National Observer, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, and Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. However, media outlets don’t need to sign up ahead of time in order to participate. They simply need to publish a story related to the 89% theme during the coverage week, include a logo and tagline with their article, and email their coverage to editors@coveringclimatenow.org.
CCNow encourages stories “focused on the people who comprise the 89%: Who are they? How do their numbers vary across countries, genders, and ages? What kinds of climate action do they want governments to take, and what are the main obstacles to such action?” its website explains.
“It’s also for newsrooms to internalize and newsrooms to say, OK, our audience really cares about this. We can’t silo it. We can’t get distracted by other things.”
The project builds on the work CCNow has been doing since it first broke onto the scene five years ago with a week of climate-focused coverage in September 2019 that generated some 3,400 pieces from over 300 partners. CCNow’s emergence coincided with the apex of Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strike movement and a growing awareness globally of the climate crisis and its stakes.
In the five years since, Pope said there has been a decline in outright “climate silence” from newsrooms, as well as “both-sidsing” the issue despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that the Earth is heating due to human activity. However, he has noticed a persistent pattern of “leaving climate out of stories where it should be.” For example, the bulk of coverage of January’s catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires did not mention climate.
The impetus for the 89% Project grew partly from frustration over hearing the same refrain from newsrooms.
“They kept telling us, oh, well, this is a topic that’s really divisive. This is a topic that most people want to avoid. This is a topic that is very politically split. And then when we looked at data, surveys from all over the world, we kept seeing that that wasn’t true, that in fact, a majority of the people on the planet care about this,” he told Common Dreams.
The project was also inspired by a “confluence” of studies that emerged in 2024 finding that an “overwhelming majority” of people worldwide wanted climate action. These included the study that the 89% figure is drawn from, which was published in Nature Climate Change in February of 2024 and was based off of a Global Climate Change Survey included in the 2021-22 Gallup World Poll, which was administered to 129,902 people in 125 countries.
Another example CCNow held up was a U.S.-based survey, published in late January by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and conducted after the November 2024 election, which found that more than 70% of registered U.S. voters favored climate policies such as regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, staying in the Paris agreement, and increasing solar and wind energy.
CCNow first began to discuss the 89% Project in the fall of 2024 and announced it publicly in late January.
The primary goal, according to Pope, is to encourage the mainstream newsrooms to change their thinking around whether or not their audience wants to hear climate stories.
“Our orientation is, we look at everything from a media point of view, and we sort of saw it as a media problem,” Pope said.
He hopes newsrooms will learn the importance of maintaining climate coverage even as other breaking stories demand their attention.
“It’s also for newsrooms to internalize and newsrooms to say, OK, our audience really cares about this. We can’t silo it. We can’t get distracted by other things,” he explained.
Pluralistic Ignorance
While the 89% Project is aimed at convincing media organizations that their audiences want climate coverage, another goal is to make those audiences aware of each other.
“One of the really remarkable things about this polling is the 89% doesn’t think they’re in the majority,” Pope said. “They think that their concern about climate makes them an outlier. That’s not true. You’re not an outlier. You’re just like most people in your community.”
For example, the 89% study also found that 69% of people would be willing to give 1% of their monthly household income to help combat climate change, yet they only thought 43% of their fellow citizens would be willing to do the same.
“Almost everybody dramatically underestimates the level of concern and support for action on climate change.”
Anthony Leiserowitz, who directs the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told Common Dreams that the academic term for this is “pluralistic ignorance.”
“It basically refers to the fact that most of us don’t know what’s in other people’s heads,” he said, whether this is family members, strangers we’ve just met, or the larger groups of people with whom we share a country and planet.
“What we see consistently,” he continued, “and this is true across the board, of the general public as well as people in Congress, and news editors, and corporate leaders, and on and on, is that almost everybody dramatically underestimates the level of concern and support for action on climate change.”
What the 89% Project has the chance to do, Leiserowitz said, “‘is to actually help hold a mirror up to society and help them see themselves.”
In a way, the project is fulfilling a hope laid out by the paper’s authors.
“Importantly, these systematic perception gaps can form an obstacle to climate action,” the study authors wrote. “The prevailing pessimism regarding others’ support for climate action can deter individuals from engaging in climate action, thereby confirming the negative beliefs held by others. Therefore, our results suggest a potentially powerful intervention, that is, a concerted political and communicative effort to correct these misperceptions.”
And Leiserowitz said he thought it was important that the media step up to make this effort.
“The media is one of the primary ways that anybody who knows about, learns about, becomes engaged with this issue,” he said. “Most people are not going out and reading the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report on their own or conducting climate science experiments in their backyard. That’s not how they’re going to learn about it.”
Therefore, he said, CCNow’s effort to “really encourage and build a community of practice around reporting on climate change is super, super important. The world cannot deal with this issue unless we’re talking about it.”
Democracy Deficit
Another potential consequence of making the 89% aware of each other is making them aware of the extent to which their political leaders are failing to represent them.
Pope anticipated the coverage might prompt readers to think: “Maybe we should all start questioning our elected officials more. Why aren’t you taking climate into account? If we all believe in this, why aren’t you doing this?”
The 89% Project is global in scope—and Pope said it was not motivated by the victory of climate-denying President Donald Trump in the November 2024 U.S. election.
“Americans have been growing increasingly concerned and even alarmed about climate change over the past decade. So nobody was voting for this.”
However, Pope said, the project did become “more urgent as this new administration has taken a hold and has really gone on the attack on climate policy.”
One thing coverage may bring out is the gap between U.S. public opinion and Trump actions such as withdrawing from the Paris agreement, declaring an energy emergency to encourage more oil and gas drilling, gutting environmental regulations, and defunding climate science.
Pointing to Yale’s post-election survey cited by CCNow, Leiserowitz said, “This is not what people want.”
“It’s pretty clear this election was not a referendum on climate change,” he added. “Americans have been growing increasingly concerned and even alarmed about climate change over the past decade. So nobody was voting for this.”
While Pope acknowledged that “U.S. politics right now toward climate are particularly odious,” about half CCNow’s collaborators are based in other countries, and they also report a false assumption that climate action is more controversial than the data suggests.
“This general idea that this is a divisive issue, that it’s a hot-button topic, that it’s something that our audience finds political, those themes you see over and over again,” he said.
In the U.S. under Trump, but in other countries as well, the democracy deficit between public opinion and government action goes hand-in-hand with a government attack on democratic freedoms to call for climate action. Trump has also targeted members of the press for their reporting decisions, such as banningThe Associated Press from White House briefings over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in its style guide.
Pope said that running joint coverage weeks was a good way to encourage newsroom collaboration amid tight resources. Could there also be safety in numbers against government repression?
Pope said that a unified front was harder to attack, though he noted that climate journalists have faced threats and social media trolling for years, and that the Trump administration was likely to continue those attacks regardless. However, he urged against panic.
“I think one of the reasons that the 89% framing is appealing to us is it’s not a fear-based idea,” he said. “In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s like we’re all in this together, and a lot of us, not just people in the climate movement, not just people who work in this area, but a lot of just our neighbors really care about this. So let’s not cower.”
This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Yemenis crowd at Farwah popular market, which Houthis said was struck by U.S. airstrikes, in Sanaa, Yemen, April 21, 2025
THE latest US air attacks on the Yemeni capital Sanaa killed 12 people and wounded 30, the Houthi-led government said today.
This followed the news that US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth had shared a second Signal chat in which he gave details of an earlier strike on Yemen.
The Houthis said the latest strike had hit the Farwa neighbourhood market in Sanaa’s Shuub district.Footage screened on the al-Masirah satellite television channel showed damage to vehicles and buildings in the area, with screaming onlookers holding what appeared to be a dead child. Strikes overnight into today also hit other areas of the country, including the Amran, Hodeida, Marib and Saada governorates.Last week, US air attacks on the Ras Isa fuel port killed at least 74 people.
The US is targeting the Houthis in response to their attacks on Israeli and US shipping in the Red Sea.
Staff working at Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land (RBSL) in Telford, Shropshire, March 24, 2025
LABOUR faced calls to focus its efforts on peace-building today after it emerged Britain is set to ramp up weapons production.
British war profiteer BAE Systems is erecting shipping container units across the country to produce RDX explosives, used in 155mm artillery rounds.
The rounds are among the ammunition that Britain has supplied to Ukraine.Each shipping container will produce up to 100 tonnes each year, according to a Times report.BAE Systems’ Maritime and Land Defence Solutions business development director Steve Cardew told the paper: “The whole challenge for our industry is around production scale-up and creating enough industrial capacity to effectively match Russia and other hostile nations.”According to the report, BAE’s production of 155mm rounds will have increased 16-fold over the last two years once its explosives filling facility at Glascoed becomes operational this summer.
Yemenis crowd at Farwah popular market, which Houthis said was struck by U.S. airstrikes, in Sanaa, Yemen, April 21, 2025