https://progressiveindiana.net
SUMMARY:
In this first PIN Virtual Town Hall of the general election season, Scott Aaron Rogers sits down with Drew Cox, the Democratic congressional candidate in Indiana’s 4th District, who is taking a leave of absence from his position as a music history professor at Purdue University to campaign full time. Cox — a Marine Corps veteran, farmer’s son, and grassroots-only fundraiser — makes a consistent case throughout the hour that nearly every affordability problem Hoosiers face traces back to the same root causes: a Congress bought by corporate donors, a president acting without constitutional constraint, and a Supreme Court that has enabled both. The conversation covers tariffs, the war in Iran, veteran’s care, farm policy, hemp and cannabis, right to repair, FEMA and disaster response, Citizens United, Supreme Court reform, congressional stock trading, Ukraine, and single-payer health care. Viewer questions came from Witherman39 on YouTube, Darcy in Clayton, Hendricks Blue in Avon, Edward on YouTube, and Malcolm on progressiveindiana.net.
IN DEPTH:
0:00:22 - Introductions
- Scott opens the first general-election-season PIN town hall and previews upcoming appearances from Mary Allen (8th District), Cinde Wirth (6th), Kelly Thompson (3rd), and Brad Meyer (9th).
- Cox introduces himself: Tippecanoe County resident, raised in Henry County, son of a fourth-generation farmer and a 37-year elementary school educator, Marine Corps veteran, and Purdue music history professor on leave to campaign full time.
- His campaign structure is lean — he is simultaneously the candidate, the logistical manager, and the primary phone-banker, making hundreds of calls per day — funded entirely by what he calls “ethically sourced” grassroots donations.
- The goal: win in November and not return to Purdue in January.
0:05:54 - Q: Everything is getting more expensive and paychecks haven’t kept up. What are you going to do about it in Washington?
- Cox leads with tariffs: constitutionally a congressional responsibility, but the current Congress has abdicated that role entirely, allowing Trump to levy them as an emotional and political tool with costs passed directly to consumers while the Supreme Court has ruled corporations get profits back.
- The war in Iran compounds the affordability crisis directly — fertilizer and goods flow through the Strait of Hormuz, squeezing Indiana farmers, while gas prices are expected to stay above $3 for years.
- Jim Baird has voted six times in support of continued bombardment, tying him directly to those economic consequences for his own farm-heavy district.
- Cox’s confidence is in the incoming 120th Congress — he believes enough grassroots candidates will be elected to reassert congressional authority on both tariffs and war powers, and he’s prepared to push for impeachment given Trump’s violations of both emoluments clauses.
0:11:28 - Q: Would you use Congress’s power of the purse to defund the Iran war?
- Unequivocally yes — “defund the war, not defund the troops.” Cox is a Marine Corps veteran and draws a sharp distinction between supporting service members and funding a war he views as illegal and ill-conceived.
- The administration, he argues, is repeating the same pattern as the post-9/11 wars: vague goals, a fear-based justification (nuclear threat from Iran), and no honest accounting of casualties or costs.
- He notes the practical military fallout: U.S. bases throughout the region have been damaged or destroyed, limiting port-of-call options — which is exactly why the USS Abraham Lincoln went 250-plus days without resupply.
- Iran’s supposed nuclear capability was declared fully destroyed last summer, yet the war continues — Cox takes this as evidence that the stated rationale was never the real one.
0:16:20 - Q: After the war, should we rebuild those Middle East bases? Are we overextended with 70-plus countries hosting U.S. military presence?
- Cox declines to give a clean answer, arguing the question is genuinely premature — we don’t yet know the full fallout from the Iran conflict, including what long-term retaliation might look like.
- He draws on Ghost Wars by Steve Coll and Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid to contextualize the risk: the U.S. military footprint in the region after Desert Storm is what radicalized bin Laden and set 9/11 in motion, and history should inform how we think about blowback now.
- The lesson is not isolationism but humility — we don’t understand the damage we’ve caused or what long-term game adversaries may now be planning.
0:20:25 - Q: As a veteran who navigates the VA, how would you improve it?
- The biggest threat to the VA is deliberate sabotage-by-privatization: allowing vets to use private-sector doctors sounds compassionate but pushes them into a broken private system while hollowing out the VA’s funding and staff — Cox received a letter shortly after Trump’s election informing him his VA doctor had left and he’d been assigned a nurse practitioner.
- Scott draws an explicit parallel to Indiana Republicans starving public schools and then pointing to poor outcomes as justification for vouchers — the same playbook.
0:23:34 - Q: Are you a Medicare for All guy?
- Unequivocally yes — Cox argues the case on efficiency grounds: government doesn’t carry the overhead of marketing competing plans or generating profit, and Social Security’s roughly 2% overhead is the model to emulate.
- The Sanders Medicare for All Act would establish government negotiation of prescription prices and universal coverage — Cox frames the additional tax cost as far preferable to a system producing 500,000 medical bankruptcies a year.
- His personal stakes are direct: his nephew, born with a heart defect who had a transplant at age two and takes 20 pills daily, was thrown off Medicaid when Indiana got ahead of the “big, beautiful bill” cuts — as was a cousin.
- The Yale study finding that Medicare for All would save 114,000 lives and a trillion dollars annually is exactly the kind of evidence Cox says we’re conditioned to ignore — the only people who truly can’t afford it are hospital and insurance CEOs protecting their $30 million salaries.
0:28:46 - Q: What would you like Congress to do on antitrust?
- The corporate concentration problem is at the heart of the affordability crisis — from agriculture (Monsanto/Bayer’s dominance of the seed market) to media to cell phones, oligarchies and monopolies raise prices and suppress competition.
- In agriculture specifically, Cox wants to reform how subsidies are calculated — basing them on per-acre input costs rather than raw acreage, which currently rewards massive operations at the expense of small farmers already facing record bankruptcy rates this year.
- He is wary of the Bayer/Monsanto dynamic — Monsanto’s Roundup has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in massive litigation settlements, while Bayer (Monsanto’s parent company) previously marketed Aliqopa® (copanlisib), a treatment for relapsed follicular lymphoma (a form of NHL), before voluntarily withdrawing it from the U.S. market in 2023 after it failed to confirm clinical benefit in a follow-up trial — and flags the broader conflict as the kind of vertically integrated arrangement that antitrust law should scrutinize. [Cox flagged this detail as unverified at the time; the connection is substantiated but more limited than implied.]
- The structural root of all of this, in Cox’s view, is Citizens United — he points to the Thomas Massie vs. Ed Gallrein primary in Kentucky as the most expensive congressional race in history, decided largely by outside money from people who don’t even live in the district.
0:33:37 - Q (viewer, Witherman39): How would farmers being allowed to farm hemp help?
- Cox’s father would switch to hemp today if he could — the barrier is the absence of guaranteed buyers and guaranteed contracts, not the crop itself.
- Hemp is more labor-intensive than corn and beans (depending on type, combines may not be usable), so scaling it requires real infrastructure investment and government incentives that currently don’t exist.
- Hemp is, in Cox’s framing, a lobbying victim — trace amounts of THC have been weaponized to block a crop with enormous industrial, textile, and agricultural potential.
- He also supports full cannabis legalization: Indiana is hemorrhaging cultivation revenue and tax dollars to surrounding states that have legalized, and there’s no good reason to keep sending that money out of state.
0:36:46 - Q (viewer, Witherman39): Do you support right to repair?
- Yes — farmers lose approximately a billion dollars annually because they can’t access affordable parts or manuals for their own equipment without going through authorized dealers.
- John Deere’s repair-monopoly model is a direct profit extraction mechanism: denying independent repair keeps dealer revenues high and forces farmers into a pricing structure they have no leverage to negotiate.
- Right to repair hasn’t gotten much traction this election cycle, Cox notes, but it is a clear antitrust and consumer protection issue that disproportionately harms the agricultural communities he’d represent.
0:39:07 - Q (viewer, Darcy in Clayton): What would you do to help restore our disaster response?
- Fully fund and restore FEMA — the gutting of its budget was not about efficiency but about finding room for billionaire tax cuts, and the results are visible in Gary’s two-week power outage and the flood damage across Henry County, where Cox grew up.
- Indiana’s deliberate elimination of wetlands in favor of development has made flooding worse — wetlands drain water faster and more effectively than the ditches replacing them, and that policy choice needs to be reversed.
- Cox frames the Gary response as a racial and economic equity issue: people in Gary deserve the same rapid, robust disaster response as the wealthiest parts of the state, and this government’s indifference is a moral failure.
- He agrees with Scott’s point that investor-owned utilities are part of the same problem — Duke Energy’s political donations ensure that utility costs get passed to consumers while profits stay high, and utilities, like healthcare, should not be run for profit.
0:44:26 - Q: Should Congress act to restore balance on the Supreme Court — including adding justices?
- Cox supports expanding the Court to match the number of federal circuit courts — currently 13 — which would mean 13 justices rather than 9.
- The Court’s self-policing on ethics is demonstrably inadequate; lavish gifts, vacations, and financial relationships with people who have cases before the Court have gone unaddressed, and Congress has the constitutional authority to impose real oversight.
- He supports term limits for Supreme Court justices and has pledged to self-impose term limits on himself through his membership in Take BAC Congress — a commitment to serve no more than 12 years.
- Overturning Citizens United is the prerequisite for most of these reforms; without getting money out of politics, every other fix is temporary.
0:47:44 - Q (viewer, Edward on YouTube): Do you support a stock trading ban for members of Congress and their families?
- Yes, unequivocally — Cox says he’s never traded stocks and has no interest in doing so.
- He notes the issue has rare bipartisan support and mentions Todd Young’s involvement in stock-trading ban legislation, while flagging that Young’s version reportedly excludes the president — a carve-out Cox says is unacceptable.
- Trump’s trading of defense contractors and fossil fuel stocks timed to developments in the Iran war — reported just the day before the town hall — is, in Cox’s view, textbook corruption enabled by Citizens United: Jim Baird takes checks from Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin and votes against War Powers Resolutions; Elon Musk donates $300 million and receives defense contracts.
- He looks forward to holding Republicans accountable for all of this in the next Congress when they inevitably complain about far lesser things under a future Democratic president.
0:51:41 - Q (viewer, Hendricks Blue in Avon): How would you handle the situation in Ukraine?
- Cox is committed to re-engaging in support of Ukraine — the goal is to make Russia stop the war and leave, by whatever means accomplishes that, including weapons and funding.
- He is skeptical that Ukraine joining NATO is the right near-term move but believes a strong, united Europe that isn’t worried about Russian encroachment is the correct strategic objective, and Europe has stepped up during America’s absence.
- He connects the Ukraine funding debate directly to the Iran war: the hundreds of billions given to Ukraine look manageable against a defense budget heading toward $1.15 trillion for 2027, while the Iran war has consumed interceptors that could have been protecting Ukrainian cities from Russian missiles.
- Without prompting, he adds that his campaign will not give Israel any more money and considers what is happening in Gaza a genocide — he wants a simultaneous pullout from Iran and a cutoff of Israeli funding as two decisions that could be made quickly.
0:55:26 - Q (viewer, Malcolm on progressiveindiana.net): Do you support restoring and fully funding FEMA and requiring states to fund their own disaster relief?
- Yes on both counts. Cox reiterates that FEMA’s gutting was a deliberate wealth transfer — DOGE cuts exist to fund billionaire tax breaks, full stop.
- Indiana’s state disaster fund being down to roughly $2 million — not enough to cover one bridge in Carmel — is an indictment of the state’s priorities under Republican leadership.
- The National Guard being deployed for months to guard the DC reflecting pool while Gary went two weeks without power is the clearest possible illustration of how broken the government’s priorities are.
0:57:44 - Q (viewer, Witherman39): What does single-payer health care mean, and what would it mean for Hoosiers?
- Single-payer means everyone contributes a small amount and everyone is covered — the mechanism that eliminates the overhead, the competing plans, the advertising, and crucially the profit.
- For Hoosiers specifically: lower per-capita costs, no more medical bankruptcies (500,000 nationally last year), and no more people skipping doctor visits out of fear of the bill.
- Cox recommends Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide, co-authored by Abdul El-Sayed, as the definitive accessible explanation of the policy and the political obstacles blocking it.
- The obstacles are purely political and financial: profit-seeking hospitals, insurers, and their purchased politicians are the only entities that “can’t afford” Medicare for All — everyone else would come out ahead.
0:59:54 - Closing / Where to find Drew Cox
- Cox directs viewers to drewcox.org for donations, volunteer sign-up (door-knocking is the primary activity, with thousands of doors targeted per week through November 3rd), and his schedule of live in-person town halls — 15 more planned, all open to Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike. Jim Baird has been invited to all of them and has yet to attend.
- The campaign does not accept money from AIPAC, CUFI, or corporate PACs — grassroots personal donations only.
- Scott closes by promoting tomorrow night’s HoosLeft episode on democratic socialism, 7 p.m.
Thanks again to Drew for joining us. For more information and to get involved, visit his campaign website at https://drewcox.org. You can also find him on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
