Forward Nebraska

I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today.

🚨🚨 THE DEMOCRACY FILES / ILLEGITIMACY PLAYBOOK, PART 11: NOT-SO-INDEPENDENT SENATE CAMPAIGNS OF DAN OSBORN (NE) AND BRIAN BENGS (SD) 🚨 Two Senate candidates running as independents have ties to Renew American Democracy, the project ran by ex-USAID workers to restructure American governance. And one of them admits on video they've been "coordinating." According to the polls, "independent" Dan Osborn is in a toss-up race with Ricketts in Nebraska. Emerson has South Dakota "independent" Brian Bengs within single digits of Mike Rounds. The strategy is to elect enough independents to deny either party a governing majority—and use their votes as leverage for structural reforms. Osborn's 2024 field director, Austen Campbell, laid out the plan: "We have a goal for 2026 to run a slate of independents and deny both political parties the majority in the House of Representatives in hopes of getting an independent speaker." Bengs said echoed that on a September 2026 Renew to Thrive call: "We don't need to get 50 or 51 to change things. We just need a handful." In their words, this handful is to do "arm-twisting" to get the structural reforms they want. ➡️ Paul Zeitz's May 2026 Concept Note: open primaries, ranked-choice voting, and "independent" redistricting. ➡️ RAD's Constitution Emergency Response draft: an Article V convention with amendments on "campaign finance and voting rights restoration, healthcare, education, and economic security, and ecological rights and climate accountability." The draft calls that the MODERATE strategy. And the political objective extends beyond reforming elections. In 2023, Walt Roberts told the man who now runs the Independent National Convention that stopping the MAGA GOP was "job one." As for ending the two-party duopoly? "That's very secondary right now." Put those statements together. A plan to deny both parties a majority. Candidates running as independents. A small voting bloc positioned to extract concessions. A documented list of proposed constitutional and electoral changes. And a stated priority of stopping the MAGA GOP. The question for Nebraska and South Dakota voters is whether they know what these candidates' political allies have been planning... and whether Osborn and Bengs share those objectives.

I used AI to create this short film. America, you’ve been warned.

An Open Concern About Appearances: The Catholic Church and the Midterms I am Catholic. I say the rosary. I go to Mass. Nothing in what follows is an accusation against the Church, the Pope, or any bishop. It is a concern about how things look from the outside, and how that appearance is landing with millions of Americans right now. This administration created a Justice Department task force on anti-Christian bias, pardoned twenty-three pro-life prisoners, stood up a White House Faith Office and a Religious Liberty Commission, designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern over the killing of Christians, and cut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood. For a Catholic writer, that record is not nothing. It is, on its face, one of the most tangible pro-life and pro-faith agendas in modern presidential history. In January 2025, the same administration suspended the refugee and migrant service contracts that had funded the USCCB and Catholic Charities for decades. Over one hundred million dollars a year. More than ninety-five percent of some program budgets. By spring, staff were laid off. By summer, agencies were closing programs. The money did not come back. Institutions that lose their largest funding stream tend to find their moral vocabulary sharpening in the same direction as their budgets. I am not saying that is what happened. I am saying that is what it looks like, and that appearance is not going unnoticed. Fourteen months later, in April 2026, the public statements from the Vatican and from American bishops toward this administration grew noticeably louder and more pointed than anything seen during the first term. Catholics see it. Non-Catholics see it. And when a bishop speaks out days before a national election against one party’s immigration positions—which are prudential disagreements open to debate—while remaining silent on the other’s platform positions that contradict settled Church teaching on life, on the body, on marriage, the imbalance is impossible to miss. I am not suggesting the Church holds a grudge, or that its silence on one side was bought. I am saying that is the appearance, and appearances are what most Americans, Catholic and not, actually see. When the institution that spent a year without its largest funding stream then directs its public voice at one party near an election—the very party that delivered more concrete protections for Christian life and religious liberty than perhaps any administration in living memory—the appearance is not of a shepherd. It is of a stakeholder. That is the embarrassment I cannot unsee. -- Joseph Fosco October 27, 2026