Episode 94: You Can't Just Look Away

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Episode 94: You Can't Just Look Away

Guest: Brad Meyer - Candidate for US House of Representative (D-IN09)

Scott Aaron Rogers

Sep 11, 2025

Transcript

Episode 94: You Can’t Just Look Away

Guest: Brad Meyer - Candidate for US House of Representative (D-IN09)

https://hoosleft.us

https://bradmeyer.org/

Welcome to the HoosLeft Podcast, a show about Indiana politics, history, and culture from an unapologetically leftist perspective. My name is Scott Aaron Rogers, and I’m recording from Bloomington, a distant northwestern outpost of Southeastern Indiana’s gerrymandered 9th Congressional District.

For 17 terms from the 1960s through the 1990s, the Ninth was admirably represented by stalwart Democrat Lee Hamilton. During Hamilton’s decades in Congress, Bloomington was drawn into a Southwestern Indiana district with Evansville - called the “Bloody Eighth” for its reputation as a swing district known for close races and frequent turnover. Still, former B-Town Democratic Mayor Frank McCloskey represented the area side-by-side with Hamilton for six terms.

After the Hoosier State lost a seat to redistricting following the 2000 Census, a 9th District that now included Bloomington was still relatively capably represented by Blue Dog Democrat Baron Hill for five nonconsecutive terms. But, as we’ve spoken about repeatedly in this space, the red wave Tea Party election of 2010 and subsequent ‘gerrymandering on steroids’ undertaken by Republicans in statehouses across the country drastically reshaped the political terrain in ways we’re still just beginning to comprehend.

Since then, the Ninth has been shaped into a consistently red district, with a Cook rating of R+16. Representatives have included now-Senator Todd Young for three terms, Tennessee millionaire nepo-baby carpetbagger Trey Hollingsworth for three, and now Salem’s Erin Houchin for two. I would nickname her the Salem witch, but will refrain out of respect to both actual witches and victims of the Salem, Massachusetts violent religious frenzy of 1692.

Anyway, Democrats have been running uphill for a decade and a half at this point, unable to overcome the myriad built-in advantages Republicans enjoy. In 2024, Dr. Tim Peck, who we hosted on this program (and, in the spirit of full disclosure, is the co-founder of Project Next Media, which hosts my Sunday morning program. We have no financial arrangements) ran a hell of a campaign, yet still fell short by over 30 points. With the experience of one campaign under his belt, Dr. Peck is giving it another go in 2026, but he is not the only Democrat in the race.

Brad Meyer is a seventh-generation Hoosier, born in Indianapolis, raised in Brownsburg, and educated at Purdue. He spent a 35-year career in business and technology - 20 of those leading manufacturing teams in small-town southern Indiana. He spent the last nine years as a U.S. Navy civilian engineer working on incoming missile and drone defense, leaving the Navy just months before early retirement to run for Congress because he couldn’t just -in his own words - “keep [his] head down and shut up.”

Meyer is my guest today and, in the following conversation, we’ll discuss his motivation for making such a life-altering decision, how he intends to overcome the built-in Republican advantage in our district, and what’s wrong with the Democratic brand. We’ll talk about the dying American dream and how Democrats can’t be afraid to go big once in power because that’s what it’ll take to restore the social contract.

Real quick before we get to the interview, please consider supporting HoosLeft with a paid subscription. This is an independent media project; I don’t paywall content; and I don’t rely on advertising. Only individuals like you keep this thing going. I refuse to gatekeep valuable information in the middle of a political crisis, even to my financial detriment. So please, if you find value in this work, go to HoosLeft.us and subscribe at the paid level - it’s only $5 a month, or $50 a year, to help me write more, research more, and organize more. Not ready for long-term commitment? You can make a one-time contribution on Cash App or Venmo. Links are in the show notes. Me, and my old body, would like to spend less time on construction, and more time constructing a better future for Indiana, but I need your financial support to do so.

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Now, here is my conversation with Brad Meyer.

Things We Talked About:

Trump takes over Kennedy Center board: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/12/donald-trump-kennedy-center-00203910

Corporation for Public Broadcasting gutted: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/01/nx-s1-5489808/cpb-shut-down-public-broadcasting-trump

Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner fired: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/sep/04/trump-bureau-labor-statistics-chief

Administration torches climate monitoring satellites: https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/13/climate/nasa-satellites-trump-budget-cuts-weather

Top military, intelligence officials purged: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/latest-purge-hegseth-removes-head-pentagon-intelligence-agency-other-senior-2025-08-22/

Bush-era “bad intelligence?” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/the-iraq-invasion-20-years-later-it-was-indeed-a-big-lie-that-launched-the-catastrophic-war/

Liberal nostalgia for Bush: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/20/george-w-bush-hamas-analysis-00122516

Colin Powell’s centrifuge tubes: https://www.ucs.org/resources/attacks-on-science/evidence-iraqs-aluminum-tubes-misrepresented

Unitary Executive Theory and the George W. Bush presidency: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/cheney/themes/legacy.html

Trump’s approval ratings: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-reveals-latest-shift-trump-143725004.html

Great quote, but not by Werner Herzog: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jul/26/viral-image/no-werner-herzog-didnt-say-about-america-and-germa/

May refer to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-third_hypothesis

Redistricting in Indiana: https://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/columnists/2025/09/05/indiana-redistricting-gerrymandering-history-repeats/85978925007/

Sanders won Indiana in 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/03/bernie-sanders-wins-indiana-democratic-primary

Democratic Party popularity in the tank: https://www.newsweek.com/democrat-net-favorability-plunges-near-three-decade-low-poll-shows-2110513

Bernie most popular politician in the country: https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/who-is-the-most-popular-us-elected

The Sanders→Trump voter: https://gvwire.com/2024/12/09/how-some-voters-moved-from-bernie-sanders-to-donald-trump/

The Astroturfed Tea Party movement: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/final-proof-the-tea-party_b_4136722

Upward mobility higher in Europe than America: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/13/american-dream-broken-upward-mobility-us

Decline of the US middle class since 1980: https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/busting-myth-economy-middle-class-trump-trade-rcna227343

The collapse of neoliberalism: https://newrepublic.com/article/155970/collapse-neoliberalism

Neofeudalism: https://prospect.org/economy/rise-of-neo-feudalism/

Declining mobility for the next generation: https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/the-fading-american-dream/

Stephanie Kelton & MMT: https://stephaniekelton.com/book/

Passive income taxed lower than high wages: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-code-favors-wealth-workers/

Republicans run up the most debt: https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-control-debt-not-bug-100000630.html

Eurozone debt crisis: https://www.britannica.com/money/euro-zone-debt-crisis

Defense ramifications of US debt: https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/05/the-implications-of-a-us-debt-default-on-national-security/

Even DoD recognized climate risks: https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-s-defense-chief-cites-climate-change-national-security-challenge

US owes most of its debt to Americans: https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-federal-government-has-borrowed-trillions-but-who-owns-all-that-debt/

Employers rarely face consequences for illegal hiring: https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/5451538-employers-hiring-illegal-workers/

Once again, that was Brad Meyer, candidate for the Democratic nomination to challenge Republican incumbent Congresswoman Erin Houchin in 2026.

We barely scratched the surface and I’ll have Brad back in the coming weeks to dive into his platform. First - immigration. Look out for that soon.

But for now, thanks for listening. I’ll be live at 10:30am on Project Next Media network’s YouTube, FaceBook Live, and Twitch streams, where I host HoosLeft This Week, Indiana’s most thorough Sunday morning news and politics talk show. Check it out live if you get a chance - it’s a lot of fun, if you can call following the news in this timeline fun. I bring together a diverse group of panelists from the democratic socialist left to never-Trump conservatives and we look at the week’s headlines from around Indiana and beyond. We’ll also take time to examine one big thing, a different deep dive every week. I hope to see you there in the comments, but if you can’t make it live, the program will be available as a podcast Sunday afternoon.

Thanks again to Brad for making that leap and running for office, and for sharing his time with us. If you can, consider sharing some funds with his campaign - the ActBlue link is in the show notes. And if you’re feeling extra generous, also consider sharing some funds with with me via a paid subscription at HoosLeft.US, where you’ll find my entire archive. I rely solely on the generosity of kind patrons like you to make this information available for free to everybody. In addition to the website, you can find me on Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads at HoosLeft.US and on Facebook, X, TikTok, Mastodon, and YouTube at HoosLeft. Direct message me at any of those sites with feedback, tips, ideas, and concern or email me at scott@hoosleft.us. While you’ve got the old email machine out, please forward the show to a friend and have them pass it on, too. Let’s keep building this project - and a truly democratic state - one conversation at a time. Until the next one, this has been the HoosLeft podcast. I’m Scott Aaron Rogers. Love each other, Indiana.