The Case for a Professional Resistance
How We Build the Network to Withstand What’s Coming—Together, Across Professions, Before It’s Too Late
“Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.”
— César Chávez
“Strong people don't need strong leaders.”
— Ella Baker
A Call in the Dark
Imagine this:
It's nearly midnight. You're just about asleep when your phone lights up. A colleague — a professor, let's say — someone you've worked with for years, but haven’t heard from in a while. You see her name glowing on your screen. Instantly, something feels off. Your chest tightens.
Her voice is shaky. She’s afraid. She just learned she's being investigated by the university’s new MAGA-aligned administration — some vague accusation about "indoctrination" in her lectures. She fears losing her job, her income, her reputation. And worse, she feels utterly alone.
She reached out because she didn’t know where else to turn.
What would you say to her?
You’d reassure her that she isn't alone, wouldn’t you? But would you know how to help? Would you have resources at hand, a community ready to stand beside her?
Because the truth is, we’re not ready yet. Not fully.
But imagine if we were.
Imagine if, instead of one scared colleague making a desperate late-night call, there was an entire network already activated — a diverse web of professionals, united not by party or politics, but by a shared commitment to freedom and justice. People who are organized, prepared, and connected enough to say clearly, confidently: “We’re with you. Here’s what we’ll do.”
Right now, too many of us are isolated in our separate silos—academics over here, lawyers over there, tech workers somewhere else. We share values, we see the same threats, but we haven't truly connected. Yet.
But we can.
And now we must.
This is why I’m writing today. To start building a professional resistance network—one that's strong enough to protect each other, loud enough to break through the fear, and ready to act, together, whenever the call comes.
Because it will.
Sooner than you think.
Recognizing Our Moment: Power Lies in Our Networks
Look at just the past few weeks.
Signalgate erupts, revealing an administration running on panic and incompetence—yet willing to wield surveillance and state secrecy to crush dissent. Lawyers suddenly face threats of prosecution simply for doing their jobs, defending immigrants against the regime’s abuses. Nonprofits wake up to find their bank accounts frozen at the FBI’s request, choking off critical resources. Reporters are openly intimidated, their credibility attacked, their safety endangered. Even peaceful protests engaging in fully legal demonstrations draw threats from officials who see political opponents not as citizens exercising rights, but as enemies who must be silenced.
At first glance, these seem like separate incidents, unconnected targets scattered across our communities. And that’s exactly how authoritarian regimes want us to see it: fragmented, confused, feeling isolated and powerless.
Because isolation is their strongest weapon. It thrives on our fear. It depends on each professional group — each individual — believing they’re alone, uniquely vulnerable, and unable to fight back.
But step back a moment. Take in the full picture.
What happens when a lawyer under threat is backed up not just by other lawyers, but also by journalists ready to investigate the prosecutors, tech workers prepared to expose surveillance abuses, and educators willing to speak out publicly about ethics and justice?
What happens when a public health official refuses to endorse an unproven treatment being pushed by the regime? What if she’s suddenly labeled a traitor to her profession, her license threatened, her accounts flagged for investigation? And what if she’s not left to fight it alone — but backed by journalists exposing the pressure campaign, doctors standing up for science, lawyers ready to defend her rights, and engineers protecting her data from surveillance? That’s what we mean by professional resistance. That’s the power we build — together.
The regime’s strategy crumbles.
These attacks can only succeed in darkness, isolation, and silence. Their power depends on us forgetting one critical fact: We already hold the greatest possible tool against authoritarianism — solidarity. Strategic, committed, deliberate solidarity that crosses professional boundaries and defies efforts to isolate us.
That’s our moment right now.
We see the attacks. We understand their game. And we know exactly how to beat it.
We beat it by recognizing that none of us stands alone. And then — by organizing together.
Beyond Symbolic Solidarity: The Power of Professional Networks
Solidarity is powerful. But if we stop at symbolic gestures — if all we do is share hashtags or slogans — our resistance will remain scattered, reactive, and easily dismissed.
So let’s be clear about what a Professional Resistance Network really looks like. It’s concrete. It’s strategic. It’s organized.
It means lawyers who specialize in immigration law actively coordinating with tech workers who refuse to build surveillance tools for ICE, sharing detailed information to undermine systems of abuse. It means university professors advising public school teachers who are resisting censorship or anti-democratic attacks on curriculum, providing the data and testimony they need to fight back in local meetings and school board hearings. It means doctors and public health professionals quietly collaborating with investigative journalists to expose dangerous healthcare policies, backing them with data and facts that cut through government propaganda.
Imagine this scenario:
A group of immigration attorneys learns that one of their colleagues is being targeted — threatened with prosecution simply for defending detained immigrants. Instead of scrambling alone, they immediately activate their network: tech specialists strengthen digital security so attorney-client conversations remain private, public health experts document abuses in detention centers to build an irrefutable record of wrongdoing, journalists amplify the story to alert the public, and legal academics quickly draft friend-of-the-court briefs that turn intimidation into a courtroom showdown.
Suddenly, the government isn’t facing a lone lawyer. It’s facing an entire coalition of professionals with deep expertise and resources, coordinated and ready.
When power targets one profession, it always counts on the others to remain silent. To keep their heads down. To assume, falsely, that the threat won't reach them.
Imagine what changes if that calculation fails. Imagine what happens if, instead, we show up for each other — across industries, across boundaries, and across every line the regime wants to draw between us.
We don’t have to imagine it. We can build it.
History Teaches Us to Resist Professionally
We are not the first generation to face a government that wants professionals silent.
In apartheid-era South Africa, it wasn’t just the students in the streets or the activists in prison who brought down the regime’s legitimacy — it was the professors who organized international boycotts, the lawyers who defended prisoners of conscience, the doctors who documented torture, and the teachers who secretly taught truth in defiance of state textbooks. Their resistance was quiet, professional, and relentless. And it worked.
In Pinochet’s Chile, the streets were filled with fear. But underground, networks formed. Journalists passed tips to teachers. Doctors hid and treated protesters. Legal professionals found creative ways to shield the vulnerable. The state controlled the airwaves — but it couldn’t control the networks. Those networks became the scaffolding of survival. And eventually, they became the infrastructure of accountability.
Here in the U.S., during the civil rights movement, lawyers from New York worked side-by-side with doctors from Chicago and pastors from Mississippi. When one profession was targeted, the others stepped in. When schoolteachers were fired for teaching equality, legal defense funds were mobilized. When medical care was denied to Black patients, local clinics sprang up — staffed by volunteers from around the country. The professional solidarity of that era didn’t just offer protection. It gave the movement its power, its backbone, and its staying power.
The lesson is clear: professional resistance is not some abstract idea. It’s a proven model.
Authoritarian regimes always count on professionals to self-censor. To protect their licenses, their careers, their security. And many do. That’s what gives repression its cover — what makes it seem acceptable, even inevitable.
But when professionals resist together—across industries, across geography, across lines of privilege and discipline — authoritarianism loses its mask. It becomes visible. Vulnerable. And beatable.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We need to pick it up and roll it forward. Together.
The Firewall Strategy: How Our Professional Resistance Network Can Work
We don’t need to wait for someone else to build this. We already have the tools. We already have each other.
The Firewall was never meant to be just a newsletter. It was always a blueprint for something bigger — something rooted in the simple idea that professionals across every field have more power when we act together.
So how do we turn that idea into something real?
It starts with connection. Over the next two weeks, we’re hosting our first organizing calls with Firewall subscribers who are ready to step into this work. We’ll begin mapping our skills, our needs, and our opportunities. We’ll hear what’s already happening in our workplaces, and where we need backup.
We’re setting up secure communication channels for sharing strategies across sectors — especially when someone is targeted. Because whether it’s a teacher suspended for refusing to erase queer authors from their syllabus, a nonprofit attorney threatened with disbarment, or a data scientist pressured to manipulate statistics, no one should face this alone.
We’ll build and share concise, accessible resources tailored to your profession: how to recognize creeping repression, what protections exist, how to document retaliation, when and how to go public, and what solidarity looks like from your peers.
We’ll use Substack and social media not just to publish — but to mobilize. When one of us is attacked, we’ll know how to respond. When someone blows the whistle, we’ll make sure it’s heard.
And we’ll build bridges—with legal defense groups, privacy advocates, watchdog journalists, mental health allies, and the people doing work in their own corners who’ve been waiting for something more connected. Something more intentional. Something like this.
The goal isn’t to create a new organization that competes with others. It’s to build a living, breathing network of people who see what’s coming — and who refuse to be isolated in the fight.
Because when you speak up alone, you risk everything. But when we speak together — when institutions hear from five, ten, fifty people at once — the calculation shifts. Power starts to rebalance.
The Firewall is where that shift begins.
We already have enough fear. What we need now is courage. Organized, strategic, and shared.
Imagine if the Firewall Network Already Existed
Earlier this year, several nonprofit organizations — including Habitat for Humanity, DC Green Bank, and United Way — had their bank accounts frozen after the FBI issued requests based on vague and undisclosed allegations. These freezes disrupted payroll, halted services, and blindsided entire teams. No prior notice. No chance to prepare.
One senior federal prosecutor, Denise Cheung, resigned in protest rather than ask a judge to approve a freeze she believed was legally indefensible. According to her account, the judge later refused the same request when it came from someone else, reportedly saying there was no probable cause to proceed.
Now imagine that when the first freeze happened, a Firewall Network already existed.
Lawyers from our community could have immediately intervened—drafting motions, offering counsel, and broadcasting the legal implications far and wide. Technologists could’ve flagged disruptions to critical systems. Nonprofit professionals could have coordinated public messaging, reassuring donors and clients. Journalists would have been tipped off and ready to report before the narrative hardened into silence. Everyone would’ve moved—not in chaos, but together.
But let’s not stop there.
What if a tech worker at a federal contractor is quietly dismissed for refusing to build an AI system designed to surveil migrants or protestors? Instead of facing retaliation alone, they could tap into a Firewall support network — connecting to employment attorneys, whistleblower advocates, and sympathetic media professionals trained to shine light on these kinds of abuses. Their story could be told. Their job could be defended. Their courage could become contagious.
Or take the case of an immigrant student — lawfully in the United States—who is arrested after expressing political beliefs deemed “disloyal” to the MAGA regime. We've already seen threats like this emerge. Without The Firewall, this young person might face deportation hearings without a lawyer, their story hidden from the public, their rights trampled in silence.
But with The Firewall?
Immigration attorneys could mobilize to provide defense. Civil rights groups could rally support. Academics and students at their university could raise awareness and demand protection. Journalists in our network could cover the case and draw national attention. One arrest wouldn’t become a precedent. It would become a line in the sand.
And here’s another one:
A public school teacher is reprimanded — or fired — for refusing to enforce a new policy requiring ideological screening of lesson plans. Instead of retreating, they connect through The Firewall to educators across the country. Together, they draft model policies, launch a public campaign, and enlist legal support. They build collective strength from individual defiance.
These are not just hypotheticals. They are tomorrow’s headlines waiting for resistance.
And they underscore a simple truth: Authoritarianism doesn’t need to arrest everyone to succeed. It just needs to isolate the first few — because silence is contagious.
But so is courage.
With a network like The Firewall, no one has to stand alone. With each attack, we can respond — not just with outrage, but with action. Not just with solidarity, but with strategy.
So let’s stop imagining it. Let’s build it. Together.
Our Future Depends on What We Build Now
If you’ve made it this far, you’re already part of something. Not just a readership. Not just an audience. A network.
You’re a teacher who sees what’s coming. A nurse who knows how vulnerable patients can be when systems turn cruel. A coder, a journalist, a nonprofit staffer, a city worker, a student. You are someone with influence — right now — within a system, a community, or an institution that matters.
And that means you already hold power.
But power doesn’t become change until it connects. Until it organizes. Until it speaks not just alone, but together.
That’s what The Firewall is. Not just a newsletter. Not just analysis. But the beginning of a professional resistance network — one that stretches across law firms and universities, hospitals and school districts, startups and federal agencies. One where we defend each other. One where no one is left isolated when the heat turns up.
Our first organizing Zoom call is coming up on Monday. I want you there. Whether you’re ready to take action now or just want to listen in and find your place in the movement — we need you in the room.
If you’re a free subscriber, consider upgrading to support this work. Paid subscriptions help fund the infrastructure to make this network real. They allow us to build better tools, connect across platforms, and keep this project focused on action, not algorithms.
But more than anything, share this. With your colleagues. With your networks. With that friend who’s been scared but silent. We are more than we think, but only if we find each other in time.
Tyranny isn’t defeated by lone heroes. It’s defeated by thousands of professionals — people like you — building a firewall of resistance across every sector.
This is our moment. Let’s seize it.
In solidarity,
Jonathan
I’m only just seeing this now, and it’s early May. I’m a data analyst; how can I help?
Dude! Glad to have you here! Give 'em hell!