Episode 53: Know Your Wirth
Guest: Cinde Wirth (D) - Candidate for US House of Representative (IN-06)
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Last week I had a fantastic conversation with State Senate candidate Katrina Owens, who is running to - sorry, going to - unseat repeat villain, incumbent Senator and Ray Skillman-puppet Aaron Freeman in District 32 this November. Let’s start this week by re-introducing another recurring heel in the HoosLeft extended universe: Jefferson Shreve, last year’s Republican nominee for mayor of Indianapolis, storage unit tycoon, and one of the wealthiest men in the state - with a net worth over half a billion dollars.
I ranted about this guy in January while spending entirely too much time at IU Health Bloomington Hospital:
Countless times I entered and exited through the Shreve Atrium and walked past a plaque commemorating his “generosity” and “commit[ment] to the health and well-being of Hoosiers in south-central Indiana.” And while I don’t doubt the sincerity of his philanthropy, former President Teddy Roosevelt knew, more than a century ago, the inherently antidemocratic, paternalistic, and amateuristic nature of relying on the benevolence of plutocrats to perform what should be essential government functions, stating, “no amount of charities in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them.”
I concluded that article thusly,
If our propertied overlords were really “committed to [our] health and well-being,” they’d advocate not just for universal, government-run health insurance, like every other developed nation in the world, but for all of the other things that contribute to human wellness - clean air and water, affordable fresh food, well-paying jobs, quality education, safe people-centered communities - you know, everything Republicans stand against. They’d lobby popularly-elected representatives from fairly-drawn districts to fund these priorities, get out of the way so an efficient bureaucracy, staffed by experts in their fields and subject to democratic oversight, could implement such a system in a just, equitable fashion - and they’d happily PAY THEIR FUCKING TAXES to make it happen.
Instead, they pay to put their names on things.
By all accounts, Jefferson Shreve is an incredibly nice guy. To your face. But I don’t think it’s very nice to support policies that force thousands of Hoosiers into medical bankruptcy, flood our streets with guns, reinforce old class and race hierarchies, persecute the LGBTQ community, and let women die in hospital parking lots for lack of necessary medical care.
Now thankfully, even after spending $13.5 million of his fortune and carpet-bombing Central Indiana with radio, television, and podcast ads, he was defeated soundly last November (not that the guy who beat him is doing such a bang-up job), but like herpes, Shreve just won’t go away. He’s back for another run at elected office in 2024, this time for Congress in Indiana’s 6th district - where Greg, the lesser Pence, is retiring after this term- perhaps to spend more time hanging with his brother.
So, when it comes to governing, Shreve is guilty of the worst kind of simplistic thinking - that wealth equals competence in all areas and rich men should run things - another tired episode of Dollar Knows Best. Well, you don’t have to be Einstein to observe that the last 40+ years of the neoliberal experiment disproves the hypothesis.
My guest today, his opponent, was however, awarded an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship and spent almost a year on Capitol Hill with a select group of K-12 STEM teachers, helping craft national education policy.
Cinde Wirth is a teacher, scientist, and entrepreneur. She’s also a regular person who knows to make a tight budget last ‘til the end of the month, and not AN OUT OF TOUCH SEMI-BILLIONAIRE WITH ENOUGH MONEY LYING AROUND TO BUY THINGS LIKE, OH I DON’T KNOW, OUR GOVERNMENT!
In the following interview, we will talk about all of those different roles she’s played, and how they’ve uniquely prepared her for a role in Washington as Indiana’s 6th District Representative. We’ll also talk about the economy, healthcare, abortion rights, immigration, social security & medicare, and gun control. She’ll also tell us about the the mood of the people she’s been speaking with and the challenges of running against a candidate with unlimited resources.
In the interview:
Quick primer on systems thinking: https://democracyfund.org/who-we-are/systems-thinking/
Importance of career civil servants: https://protectdemocracy.org/work/the-civil-service-explained/
Government should not be run like a business: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2012/10/05/government-vs-business/
Nearly half of Americans have no retirement savings: https://usafacts.org/data-projects/retirement-savings
Harris small business proposal: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-proposes-50000-tax-break-for-small-businesses/
Capitalism is bad for families: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/nancy-fraser-interview-capitalism-crisis-of-care/
Kamala Medicare for All flip-flop: https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/14/politics/kamala-harris-medicare-for-all/index.html
Why healthcare is tied employment: https://www.vox.com/23890764/healthcare-insurance-marketplace-open-enrollment-employer-sponsored-united-blue-cross-shield-aetna
If men got pregnant: https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/if-men-got-pregnant
Trump blew up bipartisan immigration bill: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/25/politics/gop-senators-angry-trump-immigration-deal/index.html
Project 2025’s plans for Social Security and Medicare.
Social Security tax limit: https://smartasset.com/retirement/social-security-tax-limit
Number of Americans living on Social Security: https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/basicfact-alt.pdf
Firms buying up single family homes: https://jacobin.com/2024/05/single-family-homes-rentals-wall-street
Worst. Congress. Ever. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/118th-congress-track-become-productive-us-history/story?id=106254012
Even gun owners favor more gun control: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/19/gun-owners-support-safety-policies-00062335
Once again, Cinde Wirth, Democratic candidate for the US House of Representatives in Indiana’s 6th district, located in the central and eastern parts of the state - including Columbus, Richmond, some of Cincinnati's Indiana suburbs, most of Indianapolis' south suburbs, and the southern third of Indianapolis itself.
What seems like a lifetime ago, way back in only the second episode of this podcast, I spoke with Purdue biology professor and West Lafayette City Councilman, Dr. David Sanders:
He said something that sticks with me to this day. Since the far-right Reagan faction took over the GOP in the late 1970’s, and increasingly since then, Republicans have governed by anecdote. Not by data, but by cherry-picked individual data points. They latch onto an outlier case that matches their confirmation bias, craft a narrative around it - usually one that elicits fear or anger - and repeat it again, and again, and again, until a large subset of the public believes that the exception is, in fact, the rule. From one lifelong con artist “welfare queen” driving a Cadillac in 1974 to a rumor about a missing cat in Springfield, Ohio fifty years later, the right have used salacious stories, non-representative data points, to mislead and distract while plutocrats (like Jefferson Shreve) run off with all the money.
It is ironic that the left are decried as “bleeding-heart liberals” - guided by emotion, while conservatives are considered rational and businesslike. In fact, the opposite is quite true. Republicans are afraid of everything and need ancient superstitions and authoritarian strongmen to protect them. Sean Hannity was on Fox News the other night talking about a study showing that, in conservatives, some parts of their brain are bigger than those of liberals. Not the win you think it is, champ, because the part in question - the amygdala - is responsible for perceiving threat. They are literally hard-wired for fear.
Liberal democracy, on the other hand - when it works correctly, when it isn’t sabotaged by power, panic and paranoia - is like the scientific method in that ideas are brought forward, tested, and debated transparently. You see what works, what doesn’t, you make adjustments and keep trying to improve.
Congress is full of smooth-brained dum-dums like Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, James Comer, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and Markwayne Mullin. They’re good at poking one’s amygdala, but not good at governing. That’s why we need more people like Cinde Wirth in halls of power - educators, scholars, scientists - people who know that feedback loops aren’t a breakfast cereal.
In an article by Michael Goodman, an internationally-recognized leader in organizational learning, he says “systems thinking often involves moving from observing events or data, to identifying patterns of behavior over time, to surfacing the underlying structures that drive those events and patterns.”
The federal government; geopolitics; migration; the climate the economy; the healthcare, education, and prison regimes - these are all incredibly complex and intertwined systems that have evolved over hundreds, thousands, even billions of years. Like a butterfly flapping its wings in the distant past, or a single pea under twenty mattresses, changing one variable anywhere can have ripple effects in unexpected places. I want people with science in their minds and compassion in their hearts representing the people in Washington, thinking about these things, “surfacing the underlying structures.”
Now, I’m not saying Jefferson Shreve isn’t an intelligent individual (unlike Boebert, Comer, and MTG - I am calling them dumb). Quite the contrary. Success as an entrepreneur requires a distinct kind of intelligence, but in the end only one number matters - profit. And Shreve is smart enough to know damn well that “surfacing the underlying structures” of this country’s problems- capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy - and addressing them, threatens his bottom line.
What I am saying is that Cinde Wirth is an entrepreneur AND educator AND scientist AND exactly the kind of person we need more of in Congress.
Thank you for listening and thanks again to Cinde for a great conversation. Find out more about her campaign at wirth4congress.com [SPELL]. Please help out in whatever way you can. Volunteer. Donate. I’ll link her ActBlue in the show notes. After visiting there, head on over to scottaaronrogers.substack.com and help support this project with a paid subscription. Thats’s where you’ll find everything I publish; you can also find me on Facebook, Bluesky, YouTube and TikTok at hoosleft and on most other social media sites at scottrog78. My DMs are open for feedback, tips, ideas, and concerns. You can also email me at scottrog78@gmail.com. Forward the show to a friend and have them to forward it to another friend. Let’s keep building this project - and more democratic Indiana. Until next time, this has been the HoosLeft podcast. I’m Scott Aaron Rogers. Love each other, Indiana.
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Episode 53: Know Your Wirth