What We’re Doing Here

Who we are, why we’re doing this, and what ten minutes of your week could accomplish.

We are nobodies, really.

One person writes much of this - fifty years out from service as an O-3 in the Navy, with no particular claim to authority beyond having taken an oath once and never having found a reason to consider it rescinded. Others contribute - some veterans, some not. None of us are journalists, analysts, or political professionals. We have engaged in no other activism.

We have read some history, watched the news with growing alarm, and decided that doing nothing felt worse than doing something.

We built quislings.info as a reference archive last year. This Substack is where some deeper thought and analysis happens - where we try to connect the dots between individual decisions and systemic consequences, between what people said before and what they are doing now, between the historical record and the present moment.

We have now published more than forty posts. It seems like a reasonable time to explain what we are actually trying to do.

Why “Quislings”

Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian military officer who collaborated with the Nazi occupation of his country, providing political cover and administrative function to a regime that could not have operated as smoothly without him. His name became a common noun: a quisling is someone who enables illegitimate power from a position of apparent legitimacy.

We are not calling anyone a Nazi. We are using the word in its precise sense: people in positions of constitutional authority who have chosen, for reasons of ambition, fear, or ideology, to provide cover and function to the concentration of power rather than to check it.

We start from a principle we believe is genuinely non-partisan: that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” is a truth that does not care whom you voted for. No matter what politics brought you here, history suggests that unchecked power and blind loyalty are primary hazards to a healthy democracy. The quislings we document are not enemies of one party. They are failures of the institutional system that protects everyone.

We can hope that maybe the unusual term will cause some of them to think about the oath they took - to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We took that same oath decades ago. It remains binding.

What Makes Us Different

We are not regurgitating the news cycle. There are plenty of outlets doing that, and doing it well.

Our focus is the enablers - the people who had the power, the information, and the constitutional authority to object, and who chose not to. The senator who says “I am concerned” and then confirms. The general who pulls his punches. The cabinet secretary who calls a policy “unsustainable” in private and “strategic uncertainty” in public. The intelligence director who fires analysts for producing accurate assessments that contradict the president’s narrative.

We work to document what they said before and what they are doing now. We attempt to follow the money, the votes, and the consequences. We try to be specific - not “democracy is at risk” but “$160 billion collected from American consumers under a legal theory three courts rejected” and “a $500 million radar destroyed by a $40,000 drone because the people who would have objected had already been fired.”

We write for two audiences. For progressives who are already alarmed, we want to give you something precise and documented to share - something that goes beyond outrage and into evidence. For moderates who voted for change and are now watching the consequences arrive, we are not asking you to change your politics. We are asking you to look at the receipts.

Our specific hope is that with enough distribution, some of the not-totally-gone members of Congress and the administration will encounter the word “quisling” attached to their names - look it up - and begin to think about how history will record their compliance. We are not naïve about this. But we have seen careers end but reputations survive based on a single decision made at the right moment. We are in the business of making that moment harder to avoid.

What We’re Asking

Ten minutes a week.

Not money. Not activism. Not changing your life. Ten minutes once a week to go back through our posts, pick one that stuck with you and forward it to someone who is genuinely uncertain - the family member who is troubled but hasn’t connected the dots, the colleague who felt the tariff increase but hasn’t seen it named and documented, the veteran who is uncomfortable with what’s happening to the military but hasn’t found a way to articulate why.

One reader who didn’t know is worth more to this project than ten who already did. The people who most need to read this are the ones least likely to find it on their own. You are the distribution network.

If you find this Substack useful, subscribe so you don’t miss posts. Visit us at quislings.info. And if we get something wrong - as we occasionally do - tell us. A reader’s correction recently improved one of our most important posts. We would rather be corrected than wrong.

History will record what happened in these years. It will record what the people in power did and what the people with the authority to check them chose instead.

It will also record what the rest of us did while it was happening.

We are trying to make sure that record is specific, documented, and hard to ignore.

That is all we are doing. We are glad you are here.

Share this and other posts with those who are still making up their minds. That’s the whole ask.