American Ground Radio

Welcome to Day Two of American Ground Radio's 10th Annual Fourth of July Special — What Makes America Great — with Stephen Parr and Louis R. Avallone. We're continuing our celebration of America's 250th birthday with some of the most compelling voices in the country.

We open with Kirk Cameron, who escaped California for Tennessee and is spending the Fourth leading See You at the Library events in all 50 states — reading books of virtue to children as an answer to the drag queen storytime movement that swept public libraries during COVID. Kirk shares the Alexis de Tocqueville quote that he says captures everything: I searched America's harbors and rivers and farmlands and halls of Congress for the secret to her genius and power, and it wasn't until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness that I found it. America is great because she is good. And if she ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great. He also tells us about the National Monument to the Forefathers in Plymouth, Massachusetts — hidden in a residential neighborhood, unknown to most Americans — and the documentary he made about it called Monumental.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise joins us from Louisiana — and when we ask him when he first realized this country was exceptional, he tells us about lying in a hospital bed for three and a half months after being shot on a baseball field by a man who came to kill every Republican present. He talks about receiving calls from Benjamin Netanyahu and the King of Jordan — not because he was the president, but because they understood that an assassination attempt on a member of Congress was a threat to democracy itself. And he talks about returning to the House floor to a standing ovation from both sides of the aisle — and what that moment told him about what this country still is.

Navy SEAL and New York Times number one bestselling author Jack Carr — creator of The Terminal List, now in its seventh book with Red Sky Morning — talks about winning the lottery the moment you're born in this country, about taking his daughter to Normandy to sit across the table from D-Day veterans before it's too late, and about why the main difference between his generation and today's is a small device in a pocket that creates addiction with very few benefits. His prescription: read books, get outside, talk to people, and do exactly what he did in fifth grade when his parents took him to Revolutionary War battlefields.

Tommy Lahren of Fox News and OutKick tells us she was in fourth grade in South Dakota on September 11th — New York City felt like another world — and it was watching the country come together in the aftermath that first showed her there was something genuinely exceptional about being an American. She says September 12th, as horrible as its predecessor was, was one of the most beautiful days in American history. She also makes the case she's dedicated her career to — free speech absolutism — arguing that if you need to cancel someone else's voice to win the argument, your argument probably isn't very good.

Eric Metaxas joins us with his brand new book Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World — and delivers what may be the most historically grounded answer we've ever gotten on this show. He takes us back to Samuel Adams addressing Congress on August 1st, 1776 — the day before they signed the official copy of the Declaration — saying, we have this day restored the Sovereign. Capital S. Not King George III. The actual King. God. Metaxas explains that what the founders were doing was unprecedented in all of world history — reaching back to the Sinai covenant where the Israelites said they could govern themselves without a king — and that this is why America succeeded where the French Revolution collapsed into terror and dictatorship. His mother grew up in Nazi Germany. His father grew up in Greece. He was raised knowing this country is not normal.

Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee — now running for governor — shares the lesson that stuck with her from selling books door to door for 80 hours a week on straight commission in college: the harder and smarter you work, the more successful you will be. She connects faith directly to the founding documents — the Declaration's reference to a Creator as the source of unalienable rights is not incidental, she says. It is the whole point.

And for the first time in the history of this special, we welcome a former member of the British Parliament — Douglas Carswell, now president of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy — who moved from Britain to Mississippi in his late 40s and felt, in his words, like he was coming home for the first time in his life. He describes attending his first Friday Night Lights game in a small Mississippi town and watching every kid in school — athletes and non-athletes alike — playing some role in the evening, and seeing in that moment exactly what de Tocqueville saw: a society of many parts coming together to solve problems without direction from government. His answer to what makes America great — you look to each other to fix your problems. Not to government. That's why Elon Musk could only have happened here.

We close by reflecting on the two days of conversations, the idea of America as a nation founded not just on laws but on self-evident truths, and the core principle that runs through every interview in this special — America doesn't promise equal outcomes. It promises equal dignity, the freedom to pursue your own dreams, and the chance for ordinary people to discover the extraordinary greatness that God placed inside them. The greatness of America comes from the greatness within you. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

Welcome to Day 1 of American Ground Radio's 10th Annual Fourth of July Special — What Makes America Great — with Stephen Parr and Louis R. Avallone. We're celebrating America's 250th birthday with some of the most inspiring voices in the country. 

We kick things off with country music legend Clint Black, who calls the Constitution America's greatest gift — not because it created a perfect nation, but because the framers built in the wisdom to know they weren't perfect and gave the people the tools to correct course. He reflects on John Adams making those horseback rides from Boston to Philadelphia at an age Clint was when he was reading about it — knowing the punishment for failure was death — and what that kind of courage means to the rest of us.

Then Joe Piscopo — Frank Sinatra's vice chairman of the board — joins us from New Jersey, talking about his grandfather's manifest on the German freighter that brought him to Ellis Island, his father fighting for the United States Army Air Corps in World War II, and why every morning on the radio he feels like he's on a mission in their name to keep the legacy of this country alive.

Singer-songwriter Don McLean, author of American Pie, tells us about falling in love with an Israeli woman, living outside Tel Aviv while he could hear the Iran-Iraq War a hundred miles away, and coming home to America thinking — we have no idea how safe we are here. He also tells us about a new documentary on the making of American Pie and his brand new album American Boys.

Mattress Mack — Jim McIngvale of Gallery Furniture in Houston — gives us the three-word formula he's lived by his whole life: late to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise. He talks about opening his furniture store as a shelter during Houston floods and hurricanes, about a man who spent six years in Angola Penitentiary and is now one of his best employees, and about why the Judeo-Christian work ethic is the foundation of everything he's built. He also shares that in 1900, the average American household had 10.5 people. Today it's under two. And one, he says, is the loneliest number.

Gary Sinise — Lieutenant Dan himself, founder of the Gary Sinise Foundation, author of Grateful American — talks about standing at the DMZ between North and South Korea and staring into the eyes of a North Korean guard who has never known freedom, and what that does to your appreciation for everything the men and women who serve under our flag have given us. He also shares that the 30th anniversary of Forrest Gump is coming up on July 6th.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson join us to talk about their 23rd annual Fourth of July family gathering — a tradition they started as young newlyweds so their children would always have a reason to come home — and what it means now that those children have children of their own. Teri talks about the new urgency she feels as a patriot, the sense that this 250-year experiment is teetering, and why that makes the celebration more important, not less.

Pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas opens with the observation that Benjamin Franklin — a deist who didn't believe God intervened in human affairs — stood at the Constitutional Convention and said, the longer I live, the more I'm convinced God governs the affairs of men. He also makes a sober point that America has no biblical promise of eternal endurance the way Israel does — and that our future depends entirely on our response to God's call to repentance.

And Dr. Carol Swain — one of 12 children who grew up in poverty in the rural South, dropped out of school after eighth grade, and went on to earn a Ph.D. and become a university professor — says it was the people who made her great, many of them white men who saw something in her worth believing in. She says the most positive indoctrination in the world is being told you live in the greatest country on earth and that hard work will get you somewhere — and she credits not being exposed to critical race theory and victimology as part of why she was able to succeed.

Throughout the special, we return to the central truth that runs through every one of these interviews — America doesn't manufacture greatness. It unleashes it. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 30, 2026.

We open with the fight over the SAVE America Act on Capitol Hill, where House Republicans blocked not just the bill, but Speaker Mike Johnson's plan to advance it. Representative Anna Paulina Luna argued Johnson's strategy of pairing the election bill with the National Defense Authorization Act would allow the Senate to strip out the election language. We explain why we think Johnson's approach is the only one that forces the Senate to take a vote—because a bill that never leaves the House can't become law.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, we break down three major court rulings. The Supreme Court struck down President Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship, upheld state laws barring biological males from competing in women's sports, and the Colorado Supreme Court rejected two ballot measures that would have redrawn congressional districts mid-cycle.

Our American Mama, Teri Netterville, reacts to the women's sports decision, reflecting on the athletes whose stories helped shape the national debate and why she believes the ruling marks an important step toward restoring fairness in women's athletics.

We also discuss the launch of Donald Trump Jr.'s new MAGA club in Georgetown, complete with a reported $500,000 annual membership and America 250 celebration. While there's nothing illegal about it, we ask whether the optics fit the America First message.

In our Digging Deep segment, we examine a new Economist/YouGov poll showing a sharp partisan divide in how Americans view their country. We explore the difference between criticizing America's shortcomings and rejecting the country altogether—and what that says about the current political climate.

For our Bright Spot, a CBS poll asked Americans what they believe is the best thing about the United States, producing some encouraging answers about the people, the land, and the ideals that continue to define the country. We also discuss Senator John Fetterman's criticism of the far left and close with memorable reflections on American exceptionalism from Paul Tsongas, Bill Clinton, Rand Paul, and Ronald Reagan.

May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 29, 2026.

We open with the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling — authored by Amy Coney Barrett — upholding Mississippi's law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted up to five days after Election Day as long as they're postmarked by Election Day. We explain why Justice Alito's dissent gets it right, ask the question Barrett's majority doesn't answer — if five days is fine, what about thirty, what about Washington State's weeks-long window — and connect it to the simplest proof that this is a choice, not a necessity: in 1948, with no computers, America knew who won the presidency by the next morning. We also call out the Republican senators blocking the Save America Act that would fix much of this.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, Iran violated the ceasefire by launching four drones at cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz, with the U.S. Navy shooting down three and Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner heading to Doha to discuss Iran's breach of the agreement. Then the Supreme Court's mail-in ballot ruling lands in the context of a midterm election four months away. And the Court declined to hear President Trump's appeal of the E. Jean Carroll verdict — meaning the $5 million sexual assault finding stands despite a jury that rejected the rape claim entirely.

We're heading to Washington D.C. this week for the Great American Fair — and we push back on the outlet that ran a piece called "I went to the fair so you don't have to." The families, veterans, farmers, and World Cup tourists actually there weren't thinking about politics at all. The Mall belongs to the American people. And only 8% of Democrats think America is the greatest country on earth — a number worth sitting with.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson answer the question of how to raise kids who don't fight — and admit immediately that their own absolutely did, including a legendary Spinks sisters showdown on a Mississippi school bus so bad the principal-slash-bus-driver had to pull over and remind them they had both just been elected to the homecoming court. The real lessons: make siblings do things together until they laugh, enforce the no-friends rule until harmony is restored, and require both an apology and a forgiveness before anyone moves on.

In our Digging Deep segment, a new Voters Voice poll finds that 86% of registered voters — crossing all party lines — say they support America's founding ideals: life, liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, equal treatment under law, and government by consent of the governed. But only 31% think the country is living up to them. We dig into why those two numbers can coexist — and the answer is that we agree on the words but not the meanings. When the left says freedom of speech, they mean speech that isn't offensive. When they say the right to bear arms, they mean weapons that can't hurt anyone. The words are the same. The definitions have been gutted. Words have meaning, and when we stop defending the meanings, we lose the ideals.

We also cover naked participants at Seattle's Pride parade exposing themselves to children — while the state of Washington treats parents who refuse to transition their children as abusive. We make the same point about a Pride parade in Los Angeles where someone responded to the nudity by shooting participants with a BB gun — that is wrong, full stop. Conservatives who rightly condemn violence against pregnancy resource centers and Trump rallies must apply the same standard here. Violence is not how we settle disagreements in America, regardless of how offensive the behavior being protested.

For our Bright Spot, Bill Maher sat down with J.D. Vance and said on air that if the Democratic Party keeps heading toward democratic socialism, anti-Israel politics, and rejection of capitalism, his vote is in play in 2028 — and that he could see voting for either Vance or Rubio. Bill Maher has never endorsed a Republican for president across three Trump elections. We make the case he's not alone — there are a lot of people who feel the same way and just haven't said it on television yet.

And we close with Officer Sean Revy, the school resource officer at Greenway Middle School in Arizona, who found out the school couldn't afford the $2,000 needed to take 144 seventh and eighth graders — some of whom had never been to a movie theater — on their annual field trip. He bought all 144 tickets himself. You can't break a promise to a child. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 26, 2026.

We open with a story that should make New York City very nervous — Dallas, Texas is making a serious play for the title of financial capital of the world. The city council has approved an $18.5 million incentive package to lure Morgan Stanley, there are already more people working in finance in Dallas than in New York, Dallas is home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other American city, and the New York Stock Exchange itself has set up a satellite exchange in Texas called NYSC-TX. Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson is leading a business delegation to Manhattan to promote what he's calling Yall Street. We connect it to the bigger story — when your city elects socialists who call capitalism evil, eventually the capital leaves. New York is proving that in real time.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, former National Security Advisor John Bolton pled guilty to mishandling classified information — keeping thousands of pages of classified notes from his time in the Trump administration, sending them to a relative, and planning to use them for a book critical of Trump. The man who called for prosecuting Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents has now pled guilty to the exact same charge. Then an illegal alien from Honduras was sentenced to eight years for running an $89 million payroll fraud scheme — creating shell companies that allowed subcontractors to hire illegal aliens without the federal government knowing, while avoiding $89 million in payroll taxes. And New York State has ordered a new election after the district clerk of a Long Island school board was caught smuggling ballots out of her office and destroying them to help an incumbent school board member who goes by the name DJ Vic Lover.

We also cover the mother of a California transgender track athlete — a biological male competing in women's events — who complained that the new rule giving first-place honors to the top biological female finisher has somehow diminished her son's achievement. We ask whether the girls who finished behind him also trained. We also point out that track is a team sport, and supporting your teammates means recognizing when something is fundamentally unfair to them.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson discuss the Love Island contestant pulled from the show for a years-old video of her lip syncing to a song containing the N-word — and Teri shares a devastating personal story about a senior volleyball player at Arizona State who was kicked off her team for the exact same thing, for something she did before she ever set foot on that campus, by a coach who called her a year later to admit he knew it was wrong when it was happening. We connect it to the broader COVID-era mob mentality — the mandates, the pronoun enforcement, the careers destroyed — and the fact that nobody who drove those campaigns has ever come back and said they were wrong.

We dig into a Florida tattoo shop that publicly announced it will refuse service to active duty military and veterans — calling them war criminals. We point out the obvious — there would be no tattoo shops in America without the military, tattoos became popular specifically because sailors and soldiers brought them back from overseas service, and the current beard trend exists because special forces soldiers grew beards in Afghanistan and brought them home. Shameful doesn't cover it.

In our Digging Deep segment, Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin released a report this week on COVID vaccine injuries — calling it the biggest government scandal of his lifetime — based on data that HHS had been hiding and that RFK Jr. released to Congress after Trump was reelected. The report reveals that in March 2021, senior FDA officials were briefed that the algorithm they were using to analyze vaccine adverse events was actually masking safety signals. Twenty-six days later, using an updated algorithm, officials were shown 25 safety signals including sudden cardiac death, stroke, and Bell's palsy — and instead of warning the public, they ordered analysts to cease and desist and told Americans no safety signals were being detected. The report also shows that 23 patients being treated for serious COVID injection injuries at NIH were told not to talk about the study. VAERS now shows 1,676,100 cumulative adverse events and nearly 40,000 deaths associated with COVID vaccines — with 24% of the deaths occurring within 48 hours of injection. We also note that the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox Digital all refused to publish or cover Senator Johnson's report. We ask which is worse — the government's cover-up of the vaccine deaths or the media's cover-up of the government's cover-up.

Then it's Fake News Friday — including whether the New York Times published an article on Father's Day about how women can become dads, whether the TSA told European travelers not to pack ranch dressing in their carry-ons, whether Canada has eliminated religious freedom as a defense against hate speech charges, whether a Democrat socialist backed by Mamdani said 9/11 was the result of white supremacy, whether there's a new musical about Luigi Mangione, whether a DC judge ruled that removing non-citizens from voter rolls constitutes purging voter rolls, and whether Kamala Harris is now in second place for the 2028 Democratic nomination behind the reflecting pool algae.

We also cover Paris banning outdoor alcohol consumption during a brutal summer heat wave — while 94% of Parisians have no air conditioning — and make the connection between a city that banned air conditioning in the name of climate change and a city government now banning wine to appease a Muslim immigrant population that has refused to assimilate. What is more French than wine? Apparently the city of Paris no longer knows.

Tom Holman announced the hiring of 10,000 additional immigration agents nationwide following a record year of deportations — the same Tom Holman who received a major award from Barack Obama for immigration enforcement. We call it exactly what it is — the voters sent these people to do a job and they're doing it.

And we close at Adams Place senior living center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where the local fire department lays down a massive tarp every year, hooks up the fire hoses, blows up inner tubes, and Middle Tennessee State University football players grab the straps and run the length of the slip-and-slide with seniors sitting on the floaties. One player said it's a blessing just to make people's day. Never too old to have some fun. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 25, 2026.

We open with the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling clearing the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian nationals — and we explain why this ruling is exactly right and why it took this long to get here. The T in TPS stands for temporary. It always did. The left shortened it to the acronym specifically so they wouldn't have to say the word. We connect it to Samuel Adams' warning that the tools of a tyrant pervert the plain meaning of words — and explain why a humanitarian program that has lasted 15 years and spawned a shadow immigration system was never what the law intended.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, the U.S. Senate passed a war powers resolution demanding the U.S. cease military engagement with Iran — then President Trump called out specific Republican senators by name at a White House lunch, and the Senate voted on the exact same resolution again, with Rand Paul and Bill Cassidy flipping their votes. Then the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a sweep of major wins — ending asylum claims from those who haven't yet crossed the border, upholding the end of temporary protected status, striking down Hawaii's concealed carry ban as unconstitutional, and ruling in favor of Monsanto over claims that Roundup causes cancer. And a series of massive earthquakes — a 7.1 followed by a 7.5 — struck Venezuela, with President Trump immediately offering USAID and instructing all agencies to move quickly to help the country the U.S. now considers a new and great friend.

We cover Rosie O'Donnell telling Jim Acosta's internet show that she doesn't think Trump's 2024 victory really happened and that she believes Kamala won — with no evidence, just the emotional need to reject a result that offended her politics. We note that Donald Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, that Kamala Harris doesn't even think Kamala won, and that the left's habit of calling Republicans election deniers while doing exactly that themselves is the purest form of projection.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson debate whether party games kill the vibe or enhance it — and the answer, it turns out, depends entirely on timing. Throwing out Uno mid-conversation is a vibe killer. Showing up to a designated game night is a completely different experience. We also hear about a competitive grandmother who never let anyone win, a son-in-law who travels with board games, and the Parr family's ongoing Dungeons and Dragons campaign that has been running for a year and a half with six-hour sessions.

In our Digging Deep segment, we read the Democratic Socialists of America's actual platform — all of it, including the pictures — and what we find is nothing short of a blueprint for revolution. They explicitly call for a new democratic constitution that would replace the current government with a single legislative branch — no Senate, no executive, no judiciary — with representation limited to workers, powerful labor unions, and social movements. This is not a party that wants to amend the Constitution. This is a party that wants to abolish it. We ask why the Democratic Party is allowing a party with a completely different platform to run its candidates in Democratic primaries — and we call the DSA exactly what it is: a parasite inside the Democratic Party whose first objective is to destroy its host.

We also cover Letitia James publicly expressing unhappiness with Mamdani's primary wins — and we notice that her complaint, stripped of the language, is essentially that the new wave of progressive candidates don't look like the old wave of progressive candidates. When diversity reaches positions of power that threaten your own position of power, suddenly it becomes complicated.

We note — with some genuine surprise — that Mayor Mamdani has added 580 new police officers to the NYPD, triggering protests from the very Democratic Socialists of America activists who helped elect him, who are now protesting outside City Hall because they feel he has abandoned the cause of defunding the police.

For our Bright Spot, Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion in the asylum case is a masterclass in the plain meaning of words — ruling that a person who has not crossed the border has not arrived in the United States, and therefore cannot claim asylum under a law that only applies to those who have arrived in the United States. He quotes the American Heritage Dictionary. He gives everyday examples. He is doing what every judge should do — letting words mean what they say. We call this a genuine bright spot.

Joy Reid says no Black person is really excited about the 4th of July because it's a symbol of slavery. We remind her that the Declaration of Independence — written during the era of slavery — declared it a self-evident truth that all men are created equal, and that statement was used to justify abolition. The United States was the first nation to ban the transatlantic slave trade, six months before Britain. That's what the Fourth of July represents.

And we close with the discovery that the Lincoln Memorial has a 15,000 square foot basement — called the Lincoln Memorial Undercroft — that has existed since the building was constructed in 1922 and is now open to the public for the first time, featuring a signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation and graffiti left on the walls by the workers who built it.

May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 24, 2026.

We open with the results of New York City's Democratic primaries — and what they mean for the entire country. Nine incumbent Democrats were voted out across New York State in favor of more radical candidates, with Mamdani-backed democratic socialists winning clean sweeps in three congressional districts. Claire Valdez, who wants to abolish ICE, demilitarize police, end the Israeli military occupation of Gaza, and impose a wealth tax, won the 7th Congressional District. Brad Lander beat a two-term congressman in the 10th. Daria Laza Avila Chevalier — who once posted that America is an effing disgrace and wiped her hands on the flag instead of getting a napkin — won the 13th. We make the case this is not a fringe movement anymore. The Democratic Socialists of America are doubling their block in Congress, they have labelled the Democratic Party itself as center-right, and New York Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox said it plainly — the DSA is no longer a faction within the Democrat Party. It is the Democrat Party in New York.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, the DOJ announced the largest combined federal and state healthcare fraud enforcement action in U.S. history — 455 people charged across 45 states for $6.5 billion in false claims submitted to Medicare, Medicaid, and other healthcare programs. Then Mamdani's three hand-picked candidates swept the New York City congressional primaries — with President Trump congratulating Mamdani in a move we explain was pure trolling, tying together the rise of the communist left and the media that celebrates it in a single sarcastic statement. And the gunman who opened fire on an ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas last Fourth of July was sentenced to 100 years in prison, with his accomplices receiving 30 to 70 years — which is exactly how you deal with terrorism.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson take on the question of whether toxic men or toxic women are doing more damage to the country right now — prompted by a viral psychiatrist who went on record saying women are destroying America. Teri and Kimberly push back on the broadness of that claim while acknowledging the phenomenon of toxic femininity — the unrelenting rage they see at protests, on social media, and in the halls of Congress — and the faux feminists who scream about the MeToo movement right up until the Democrat Senate candidate with the SS tattoo needs their support.

We cover British World Cup fans going viral with apologies to America — one fan posting that his country owes America a huge apology because America is nothing like the media told them. We note that the U.S. built zero new stadiums for this World Cup because we already had them — unlike Qatar, Brazil, South Africa, and Russia who built new stadiums. We connect it to the broader point: there is an entire ecosystem internationally and domestically that profits from portraying America in the worst possible light, because if people actually saw what capitalism produces, they would reject the socialism being sold to them.

In our Digging Deep segment, it turns out the Biden administration ran its own version of Fast and Furious — not with guns this time, but with fentanyl. DEA Special Agent David Howell, a 14-year agency veteran, has filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that the DEA and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Albuquerque deliberately allowed more than one million fentanyl pills to flow onto the streets of New Mexico — including individual shipments of 150,000 and 50,000 pills — in hopes of making bigger arrests that never came. When Howell blew the whistle, the Biden DOJ sidelined him and barred him from testifying in any cases. We ask the obvious question — doesn't a government that breaks the law, gets people killed, then silences the patriots who call it out sound exactly like a communist government?

We also cover the Department of Justice threatening to sue California over its planned July 1st ban on Glock handguns, with Assistant AG for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon telling Governor Newsom and AG Rob Bonta to drop the unconstitutional restriction or face federal litigation. We explain why the Second Amendment is not a suggestion and why the courts have been moving toward stricter enforcement of Second Amendment protections in recent years.

For our Bright Spot, Kansas City, Missouri had to cancel its free bus program after six years because it ran out of money — with costs nearly doubling from the projected $8.8 million to over $15 million annually, while riders and drivers described the buses as unreliable, filthy, rolling homeless shelters. We call the failure a bright spot — because if any other city in America looks at this story and decides not to try it, including New York City where Mamdani has promised free buses for every New Yorker, then this expensive lesson will have saved someone else from an even more expensive one. That's what socialism always does — increases costs, increases misery, and eventually runs out of money.

We also note that President Trump's approval rating has spiked to 47% in the latest Daily Mail poll — driven largely by his push toward de-escalation and agreement with Iran — and discuss what comes next.

And we close with Dylan Munaki, who was diagnosed with stage four kidney cancer at 14 and given eight months to live. His doctor, Dr. Mary Austin, promised that if he beat his cancer, she would come to his graduation. After 52 weeks of chemotherapy, Dylan was declared cancer-free. Dr. Austin took a job 1,500 miles away in Seattle. She kept her promise.

May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 23, 2026.

We're broadcasting live from Times Square in New York City — on primary day, as Mayor Zoran Mamdani attempts something far larger than winning a few congressional primaries. We explain why what Mamdani is trying to do is bigger than New York — he's attempting to remake the entire Democratic Party in the image of democratic socialism, purging what's left of moderate Democrats and replacing them with Democratic Socialists of America candidates. We ask the question nobody on the left seems willing to answer — name one socialist experiment anywhere in the world you would describe as compassionate. Venezuela? Cuba? China? The Soviet Union? If your ideology has no successful historical examples, what exactly are you basing it on?

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, the U.S. is allowing Iran to sell oil in U.S. dollars through August 21st — within the 60-day window of the initial peace agreement — with Vice President Vance making clear that everything goes back on if Iran doesn't deliver. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is actually increasing. Then three non-citizens — from Brazil, Haiti, and Cuba — pleaded guilty to voting in U.S. federal elections in both 2020 and 2024, had their residency status revoked, and reminded everyone that the most secure election in history apparently had at least some fraud in it. And the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District resigned this week following FBI raids on his home, office, and Miami property earlier this year — with scuttlebutt about potential kickbacks tied to an educational software program he was promoting.

We also cover a federal judge blocking the Trump administration's use of the SAVE database — a system the government already has — to allow states to cross-reference their voter rolls against citizenship and immigration records. We explain why this ruling is breathtaking in its logic: the government cannot share data it already has with another part of the government to verify data it already has. We ask why this is even controversial.

Our American Mamas Terri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson discuss a Dallas case where a 75-year-old man named Chung Kim shot and killed his upstairs neighbors after they repeatedly dropped dog waste and dirty diapers onto his balcony, documented everything, went to management repeatedly, and got no help. We explore the line between a system that fails its citizens and the moment someone takes matters into their own hands — and connect it to John Adams' warning that our government is only suitable for a moral and religious people. 

We dig into Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner — George Soros' most famous district attorney — and a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that found Krasner's office committed a pattern of misleading and mendacious filings, withheld material evidence, submitted a false stipulation of fact, misstated facts in filings, and opposed required evidentiary hearings — all in service of helping convicted murderers and rapists avoid prison through fraudulent post-conviction relief claims. We ask the obvious question — if the state Supreme Court found all of this, why isn't Larry Krasner in jail?

We also revisit the Fauci documents dumped by Tulsi Gabbard on her way out as DNI — and ask the question plainly. If Fauci used USAID through back channels to fund research that created the COVID-19 virus, which killed 7.1 million people internationally — and did nothing wrong — why did he lie to Congress? And why did Joe Biden issue a preemptive pardon for crimes nobody had formally accused him of yet?

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has expanded his trans-femicide state of emergency — focused on a statistically tiny number of transgender murder victims — while nearly 200 people have been killed in Chicago already this year by conventional violence. We explain why dividing crime victims into political categories is not just morally wrong but strategically stupid — if you actually enforce the law against everyone, everyone is protected.

For our Bright Spot, we work through the five most visited landmarks in New York City — Central Park, Times Square, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and the 9/11 Memorial — and find a deeper American story in each one. The conservationist tradition. The triumph of capitalism. Industrial ambition. A monument from France to American liberty. And a reminder that there are people in the world who want to tear down everything on that list.

And one of Mamdani's congressional candidates — Dira Liza Avila Chevalier — posted in 2021 that America is an effing disgrace and that when she needed a napkin for barbecue, she just wiped her hands on the American flag instead of getting up to get one. She has since deleted the post. Mamdani still supports her. We note that men and women have bled for that flag.

We close with the passing of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan at 100 years old — who served under four consecutive presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush — and the John McCain quote that may be the best tribute anyone ever paid him. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 19, 2026.

We open with Tulsi Gabbard's parting shot as Director of National Intelligence — a new batch of declassified COVID origin documents that are now sitting on an official government website, fully indexed, available for any American to read. What they show, according to Gabbard, is that Dr. Anthony Fauci worked with politicized intelligence community leadership to suppress evidence of the lab leak theory, influence intelligence assessments, and mislead the very investigators who were asking him about research he himself was funding. We note the stunning circular logic — the intelligence community went to the man who funded the Wuhan lab and asked him whether the virus came from the lab he funded. He said no. They believed him. We also ask the question that still demands an answer — why did Joe Biden issue a sweeping preemptive pardon for a man who hadn't been charged with anything?

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, first-time unemployment claims fell to 226,000, hovering near all-time lows, while gas prices dropped below $4 a gallon nationwide for the first time since the Iran conflict began — none of the economic doom the left predicted has come to pass. Then RFK Jr. announced that obesity rates in the United States have dropped for the first time in 50 years, down 2.5% since the start of Trump's second term — in a country where 48 cents of every federal tax dollar now goes to healthcare, with 90% of that spent on chronic disease. And Tulsi Gabbard's final official act was releasing files accusing Fauci of lying to Congress, lying to intelligence investigators, and covering up gain-of-function research — with Biden's preemptive pardon standing between accountability and the documents now in public view.

We also cover a federal judge clearing the way for the release of hours of Biden audio recordings — conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer in which Biden allegedly disclosed classified information, and the special counsel interview that led Robert Herr to say he wouldn't prosecute because Biden was too elderly and sympathetic a figure for any jury to convict. The same man who was still the sitting president of the United States at the time.

Our American Mama Terui Netterville joins the conversation on the World Cup tourists going viral across America — and she has been watching. Thousands of videos from visitors across Europe, Asia, and beyond who drove through the South, stopped at Buc-ee's and Waffle House, discovered free public restrooms and free water and air conditioning in stadiums, and posted online that everything they had been told about America was wrong. One visitor put it perfectly — if you want to hate the U.S., just listen to the media. If you want to love the U.S., just drive across it.

The Los Angeles City Council voted 10-5 to place a measure on the ballot that would allow non-citizens — including those in the country illegally — to vote in local elections and school board races. We ask what citizenship means if residency is sufficient, where the line stops once you detach voting from legal status, and what the Declaration of Independence says about who gets to institute a government and for whom.

In our Digging Deep segment, CNN conducted a poll asking Americans which source they trust most for political news. The number one answer was Fox News — at 5%. CNN came in second in its own survey at 2%. NPR and local news also came in at 2%. CBS was less than 1%. One man — Joe Rogan — was trusted by more people than the entire CBS News organization. We examine what this means: not just that big media is struggling, but that the organizations that used to capture 90% of the television audience in the 1950s through 1970s are now irrelevant because they stopped serving their audiences — and the audience went looking for something they could actually trust.

We also cover the Mexican president pushing back on President Trump's claim that the cartels control Mexico — and we point out that any politician who speaks out against the cartels in Mexico tends to end up hanging from a bridge. We hold up Nayib Bukele's El Salvador as the model — went medieval on the gangs, jailed everyone with a gang tattoo, and turned El Salvador into the safest nation in Central America.

Then it's Fake News Friday — including whether Joe Biden was left alone on stage at the Obama Presidential Library opening and had to be retrieved by Jill, whether Barack Obama played air guitar at his own library dedication, whether one of the UFC fight plotters was someone Barack Obama had allowed to remain in the country, whether SpaceX has now launched more satellites than the rest of the world combined, whether Artemis 2 got to the moon and back faster than California counted its votes, and whether GLAD says AI isn't gay enough.

We also cover the immunity deal granted to Tyler Robinson's boyfriend in connection with the Charlie Kirk murder case — and explain why, while the conspiracy theories won't die regardless of what testimony emerges, the grant of immunity to a key witness should eventually put some of the internet speculation to rest.

And we close with the unveiling of the new Air Force One — a 747-8 gifted to the U.S. by Qatar and extensively upgraded, featuring a dark blue bottom, red stripe, and white top with gold accents, chosen personally by President Trump. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 18, 2026.

We open with a California bill moving through the legislature that would allow minors in residential treatment facilities to trigger state investigations of their own parents — and we explain why this isn't about protecting children from genuine abuse. It's about a state that has spent years operating from the assumption that parents are wrong and government is right. We walk through the mechanism — buried inside dry juvenile dependency language is a process by which a child who disagrees with their court-ordered treatment can initiate a legal review that effectively places their parents under state investigation. We connect it to a pattern the left has run for years — driving a wedge between children and the parents who are trying to save them, and then letting the state step in as the replacement parent. And we warn parents outside California that bad ideas rarely stay behind state lines.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, the United States and Iran signed a Memorandum of Understanding — covering the five key pillars, with a 60-day negotiating window to reach a final deal and reconstruction funds from regional partners available if Iran follows through. Then D.C. Democrat primary winner Janice Lewis George is heading toward the general election, with President Trump already promising to take back D.C. if a socialist wins the mayor's race. And the Coast Guard intercepted a speedboat off the coast of Florida carrying 25 Chinese nationals attempting to enter the country illegally — firing on the engines to disable the vessel after repeated warnings went ignored. We note that we have never in our lifetimes heard of the U.S. government disabling boats trying to enter illegally — and call it exactly what it is: a closed border.

We sit down with Dr. Peter Earle of the American Institute for Economic Research to take the actual temperature of the U.S. economy — separate from the media's doom-and-gloom narrative. Dr. Earle's assessment: the hard data still describe an expansion, but forward-looking indicators are more cautious. Consumer spending remains positive, corporate earnings are holding up, and there are no overall recessionary conditions — but elevated interest rates, housing affordability, and the national debt are real concerns. He also explains why gas prices won't drop overnight even with the Iran deal — the research shows it takes about 22 weeks for oil price reductions to fully pass through to consumers, meaning relief at the pump is more likely late summer or early fall. And he explains why Elon Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire is less about personal wealth and more about what it will cost to turn SpaceX into the Amtrak of space travel over the next several decades.

Barack and Michelle Obama appeared on Good Morning America to promote the opening of the Obama Presidential Center — and Barack said he wants visitors to walk through and think, what's possible? We take him at his word and answer the question. We also note that many of the subcontractors who built the nearly billion-dollar complex — which ran nearly $300 million over budget — have reportedly not been paid.

Our American Mama Teri Netterville responds to the San Francisco Giants story — where pitchers were warned by MLB after writing Bible verses on their caps during Pride Night. A San Francisco player spoke beautifully about why the rainbow holds deep biblical meaning for Christians as the sign of God's Noahic covenant — and why writing Genesis 9:12-16 on a hat is not anti-anything. It's pro-something. Teri says she supports marriage equality — and still thinks forcing players to celebrate someone else's sexuality on their uniforms is wrong, performative, and is actually pushing people away from the very acceptance the movement says it wants.

We also cover the New York Knicks' White House visit — and their championship celebration at City Hall, where Mayor Mamdani delivered a 10-minute speech before anyone from the actual championship team could speak. Knicks owner James Dolan stepped to the mic and said simply — I don't need your vote. I don't need to quote you. If you're a real Knicks fan, you already know. Nobody needed a program to figure out who that was aimed at.

For our Bright Spot, a new American Enterprise Institute poll on civic values finds that 82% of Americans believe in equal opportunity regardless of race, religion, or gender, 79% say everyone has the right to their religious beliefs, 72% still believe hard work can lead to prosperity, and 66% believe people can criticize the government without fear of punishment. We call this exactly what it is — evidence that the American idea is still alive in the hearts of most Americans — and note that 75% say the Declaration of Independence should be taught in high school, even though only 29% have actually read it. It's two pages, folks.

We also cover a Trump-appointed federal judge who ordered ICE to release a Palestinian green card holder convicted of throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli armed forces — a man the U.S. government has known about for 25 years. We ask the more important question — why did we let him in in the first place?

And we close with Alyssa Goralnik, who published a children's vocabulary book called Weighty Words in 1985 and never made a dime. Forty years later, an author named Eli McCann posted a video about the book on social media. Within weeks it hit the top of Amazon's bestseller charts and publishers rushed a second printing — not bad for a book written 20 years before Amazon existed. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 17, 2026.

We open with the growing influence of New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani and the rise of democratic socialism in America. Mamdani is backing congressional candidate Darya Avila Chevalier, who argues that all deportations are wrong — even for illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes. We examine what that position means for immigration policy, public safety, and whether some politicians have abandoned the most basic responsibilities of government.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, we break down the latest election results in Georgia and Alabama, including where President Trump's endorsements helped and where they fell short. We also discuss the shocking legal strategy being used by the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, whose attorneys are preparing an "extreme emotional disturbance" defense.

American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson tackle a surprising study on which professions have the highest divorce rates, leading to a candid conversation about marriage, social influence, friendship, and why some couples survive difficult seasons while others walk away.

In Digging Deep, we expose a troubling pattern in government spending. A new report shows America's largest cities increased spending by 18% over the past decade with little measurable improvement in homelessness, violent crime, affordability, or income inequality. We also examine a massive fraud scheme in Minnesota involving 7,700 fake college students, stolen identities, and more than $12 million in taxpayer-funded financial aid.

We also cover subcontractors who say they are still fighting to get paid for work performed on Barack Obama's $1 billion Presidential Center, the celebrity lineup celebrating the grand opening, and the double standard surrounding patriotism, politics, and public performances.

For our Bright Spot, Scottish World Cup fans leave a lasting impact on New England by donating thousands of dollars to local charities, and a determined New York detective spends months tracking down a stolen wedding ring for a dementia patient — reuniting her with a treasured piece of her family's history.

May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 16, 2026.

We open with Hollywood's next election cycle project — Sean Penn and Warner Brothers are producing a film about January 6th from the perspective of an anti-Trump police officer, described as based on a real person but fictionalized. We discuss what an honest January 6th film would actually require — including the FBI coming clean about how many informants were in that crowd, whether they incited the violence, and why that information has been withheld from both Congress and defendants. We also note that the FBI agent who ran the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping sting — which a Michigan appeals court just threw out — was the head FBI agent in Washington D.C. on January 6th. Do we trust Sean Penn to tell that story? We already know the answer.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, the FBI disrupted a terrorist plot to attack the UFC fight on the White House lawn — suspects planned to use explosive-laden drones to drive survivors into sniper fire, with 23 people named as suspects arrested across Ohio, California, Missouri, and Nebraska. Then President Trump arrived in France for the G7 summit, where topics include the Iran peace deal, Russia-Ukraine, and energy security — with French President Macron already looking for alternative routes to move Middle Eastern oil that don't depend on the Strait of Hormuz. And 15 Antifa members were arrested in Minnesota and charged with conspiracy to injure federal law enforcement officers after attempting to block immigration enforcement operations earlier this year.

We also cover James Carville's latest prediction that President Trump will resign by Easter of 2027 — bored, tired, distracted, and facing political collapse. We point out that Carville appears to be describing his own audience, not the man who negotiated an Iran peace deal, hosted a UFC fight on the White House lawn, and is still running laps around every critic who has ever declared him finished.

Our American Mama Teri Netterville responds to the competing events on the same weekend as the UFC fight — the anti-Trump Hollywood rally featuring Bette Midler, Robert De Niro, Jane Fonda, and Julia Roberts telling the crowd to breathe in the love and breathe out the fear. Teri asks where this outrage was when men with surgical implants were flashing the White House lawn on Easter during the Biden administration. She researched the cultural events Obama hosted at the White House — and says she's glad he did them. Her only point is that if a white president had done the same things specifically for white audiences, the left would have called it a scandal. The hypocrisy is the story.

We also cover Major League Baseball warning San Francisco Giants pitchers for displaying Bible verses on their caps during Pride Night — and connect it to a broader question about whose expression gets protected and whose gets punished — including the founding principle that rights come from the Creator, not from government, and why that matters the moment you try to elect someone who doesn't believe in a Creator at all.

In our Digging Deep segment, we document the cascading consequences of the FDA's Biden-era decision to allow abortion pills to be shipped through the mail without an in-person doctor visit. We walk through a documented series of cases — a woman trying to secretly give her ex-boyfriend's girlfriend an abortion pill, a man who pretended to be a woman online to obtain the pills and then told his pregnant girlfriend they were supplements, a doctor who tried to feed the pills to his sleeping mistress, and a DOJ employee accused of baking the pills into cookies for his girlfriend. Her baby died two days later. We make the case that in their zeal to make abortion as easy as possible, the left has created a system that makes it easier to force abortions on women who don't want them — which is a direct contradiction of every argument they've ever made.

We also cover a Cornell University student who refused a job interview and then told the employer he wasn't interested in working for a Jew — then doubled down when given a chance to walk it back. A crowdfunding campaign raised over $13,000 to reward him. We note that the Maine Democratic Party just nominated a man with an SS tattoo for Senate, endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and connect the dots on where mainstreaming anti-Semitism leads.

For our Bright Spot, a high school junior in Charlotte painted Live Like Kirk and a Bible verse on her school's spirit rock with prior permission — and was then treated like a criminal, forced out of class, and made to surrender her phone logs. The Alliance Defending Freedom took the case. The school board adopted a new speech policy, issued a public statement exonerating the student, and paid $95,000 in damages and fees. The Alliance Defending Freedom wins again.

And we close with Jim Freeman, a fourth grade teacher at Tully Elementary in Louisville, who isn't even Ryan Neighbors' teacher — but when he heard that Ryan, who has spina bifida and uses a wheelchair, would have to miss the school field trip to the Falls of the Ohio State Park, he bought a specialized backpack and carried her through the park himself. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 15, 2026.

We open with a major Supreme Court immigration case heading into the next term — the question of whether non-citizens with serious criminal convictions can be held in detention during deportation proceedings without bond hearings. We explain why this isn't a simple bumper sticker case, why the flight risk argument for criminal aliens is fundamentally different from that of U.S. citizens with community roots, and why the ruling could become one of the most consequential immigration decisions of the new term — directly testing how much process is due before temporary custody starts looking like indefinite imprisonment.

We also get into President Trump's peace deal with Iran, and why Barack Obama's claim that this is essentially the same deal he negotiated is not just wrong but precisely backwards. Obama's deal had a time limit on nuclear development — legally allowing Iran to have a bomb by 2030. Trump's deal requires Iran to destroy its highly enriched uranium, pledge never to obtain nuclear weapons, stop funding Hezbollah and Hamas, and open the Strait of Hormuz immediately upon signing — with economic relief only after the first two conditions are fully met. No cash on the runway. No expiration date. Not the same deal.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, President Trump announced a peace agreement with Iran over the weekend — covering the five key points — with a final signing expected in Switzerland on Friday. Then a B-52 Stratofortress crashed in Southern California after taking off from Edwards Air Force Base, with military officials saying the crash was unsurvivable — we offer our prayers and gratitude to the crew. And President Trump endorsed Congressman Mike Collins in the Georgia Senate Republican runoff against Derek Dooley, a former football coach who admits he didn't vote in either 2016 or 2020.

We walk through the five pillars of the Iran deal in detail — destruction of highly enriched uranium, a permanent pledge never to obtain nuclear weapons, ending the naval blockade only after the first two steps are complete, immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz upon signing, and a requirement that Iran stop funding all terrorist proxies including Hezbollah and Hamas. We note what makes this deal structurally different from every previous Iran negotiation — enforcement is built into the sequencing, not assumed as an afterthought.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson discuss whether women should still take their husband's last name when they marry — prompted by viral videos of couples doing rock-paper-scissors and tug-of-war at their own weddings to decide whose name to use. The Spinks Sisters kept their maiden names as middle names, missed them immediately, and are pretty clear on where they stand. We also explore what it signals about a marriage when a woman doesn't take her husband's name — and why in Washington especially, different last names make it a lot harder to spot the conflicts of interest.

In our Digging Deep segment, we take on the left's use of adjectives to alter meaning and control thought — starting with the phrase progressive Christianity versus Christian right. We work through why these two constructions mean completely different things, why the need for the adjective tells you the noun isn't what's being advertised, and how a pastor writing in Salon Magazine misquotes Jesus — changing blessed are the poor in spirit to blessed are the poor — to make Christ's words align with progressive ideology. We connect it to George Orwell's observation that whoever controls the language controls the masses, and explain why this linguistic sleight of hand is one of the left's most effective political tools.

We also note that Bill Maher is endorsing Graham Plattner — the Maine Democratic Senate candidate with the SS tattoo and the predator website — and explain that this isn't about principle. It's about keeping Susan Collins out of the Senate. Power, not values.

We also push back on Robert De Niro's claim that loving America today is like an abused spouse loving an abuser — and point out that conservatives who disagreed with everything Obama and Biden did never stopped saying they loved their country. Disagreeing with your leaders and loving your country are not the same thing. They never have been.

For our Bright Spot, the U.S. Men's National Team beat Paraguay 4-1 in the World Cup — the most goals the U.S. has ever scored in a World Cup match, with Florian Balogun scoring two in the first half. But the moment that mattered most came after the final whistle, when the entire team circled up in the middle of the field and prayed. Defender Mark McKenzie, whom teammates call pastor, led the prayer. On the biggest stage in the world, the U.S. team's first instinct was gratitude. We contrast that with Diego Maradona, who scored a goal with his hand and called himself a god. We'll take our team.

And we close with Emily Matijovic, a 16-year-old from Michigan who passed away in December and whose family chose to donate her organs. This spring — the spring she was supposed to graduate — her family threw her a graduation party. Four-year-old Ripley Farrell came from West Virginia. She received one of Emily's kidneys. Teenager Landon Coleman came from Virginia. He received Emily's heart. He told her family it lets him do things he couldn't do before. It is in giving that we receive. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 12, 2026.

We open with a question that gets at something deeper than any single news story — what's the difference between conspiracy theory and reality? We argue the answer is evidence, and we got a lot of it this week. We connect this to a Florida governor's race story — the presumptive Democratic nominee David Jolly is arguing illegal immigrants should be granted driver's licenses for the safety of all Floridians. We walk through why this argument requires you to accept that citizenship means nothing, that legal and illegal immigration are the same thing, and that the solution to someone breaking federal law is to hand them a state credential rather than send them home.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Now, SpaceX completed its initial public offering, opening at $150 a share and closing the day up 19% at $160.95 — the largest IPO in world history, making Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire and creating 4,400 millionaire employees in a single day. Then President Trump nominated Jay Clayton, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to be the permanent Director of National Intelligence after Tulsi Gabbard's resignation — a pick that's already won the support of Senate Majority Leader John Thune. And the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 to uphold a lower court's ban on nitrogen asphyxiation as a method of execution in Alabama, with Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma also having authorized but not yet used the method.

We also cover the United States becoming India's top supplier of liquefied natural gas — a development President Trump predicted, and one we frame as more than an economic story. It's about whether the world's largest democracy depends on energy from a stable rule-of-law nation or from regimes that use energy as a geopolitical weapon.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson discuss whether a single two-week vacation or multiple three-day getaways make for better family trips — and the consensus is clear. Long weekends create harmony, give everyone a job, and end before anyone's feelings get hurt. Teri shares the trick for getting grown children to join family trips — tell them you'll cover everything and all they have to do is show up.

In our Digging Deep segment, outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a bombshell report revealing that the U.S. government has secretly funded more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries — including roughly 40 in Ukraine, a war zone, storing pathogens like anthrax, Ebola, and SARS. We explain gain-of-function research — modifying viruses to make them more dangerous — and connect it to Senator Rand Paul's documented evidence that the U.S. funded this kind of research in Wuhan despite repeated denials from Dr. Fauci and Biden administration officials. We also discuss a deeply troubling story out of Carencro, Louisiana, where a father is accused of secretly giving abortion pills to his 17-year-old pregnant daughter without her knowledge, causing a medical emergency and premature delivery — and we connect it to the broader debate over telehealth abortion pill prescriptions, which the data shows send one in ten women to the emergency room.

We also cover Democrats publicly calling for the demolition of the White House ballroom construction project if they regain power — and reflect on how dramatically the rhetoric around government buildings and symbolism has shifted over the decades.

Then it's our 10th year of Fake News Friday — covering whether more people attended the congressional baseball game than a typical Washington Nationals game, whether SpaceX is now worth more than the entire nation of Canada, whether two children running a lemonade stand in South Boston were robbed at gunpoint, whether a Pakistani immigrant running for mayor in Texas pled guilty to over 100 counts of voter fraud, and whether Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett claimed the knife used to murder Austin Metcalf wasn't a deadly weapon.

We also discuss the defacing of the National Mall with anti-Trump messaging carved into the grass — and make the point that the National Mall belongs to the American people, not to any politician or party, regardless of who's in office.

And we close with the story of Margaret Kerry, the human model and inspiration for Disney's Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, who passed away this past week at age 97. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 11, 2026.

We open with one of the most disturbing stories we've covered — federal officials have located 146,000 unaccompanied migrant children who entered the country during the Biden administration and disappeared into a broken government tracking system. Nearly half a million unaccompanied children were transferred into federal custody between 2019 and 2023, and the government lost track of three out of every four of them. Over 32,000 failed to appear for immigration court hearings — children who legally don't even have the capacity to be responsible for that. We point out that some sponsors used the same addresses and names over and over to claim multiple children — a hallmark of trafficking networks — and that acting Attorney General Todd Blanch confirmed this program was exploited for sexual assault and trafficking. We make the case that this level of failure isn't incompetence. It's a feature, not a bug, of an administration that prioritized volume over accountability — and we ask where these children go to get their childhoods back.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, President Trump paused another round of attacks on Iran after announcing a breakthrough in negotiations, with a final deal expected to be signed in Europe as early as this weekend — including guarantees Iran will never possess a nuclear weapon and that the Strait of Hormuz will reopen to shipping without Iranian tolls. Then the CEO of ActBlue refused to answer questions during a congressional hearing, repeatedly citing attorney-client privilege and Fifth Amendment protections amid allegations of fraudulent campaign donations including foreign contributions. And a Michigan court overturned the conviction of one of the men accused of plotting to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, ruling that kidnapping isn't a violent felony under Michigan's terrorism statute — we revisit the role the FBI itself played in organizing that plot.

We also cover New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani attending the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden with a roughly $1,000 standing-room ticket — despite running a campaign built on taxing the wealthy and claiming he'd have to move back in with his parents due to financial strain. We make the broader point about socialism and its leaders — the people at the top always seem to find their way to the good seats while telling everyone else to live within their needs.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson tackle the question of whether MAGA is dead, as several prominent former Trump-aligned commentators have recently suggested. They point to Trump-endorsed candidates sweeping primaries in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Texas as evidence the movement is alive and well, and discuss the pattern of high-profile pundits — Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens — making abrupt reversals after years of consistency, while Trump's messaging has remained the same. They draw a comparison to Ann Coulter's earlier break with Trump over the border wall timeline, suggesting some of these breaks come from single-issue voters whose patience ran out on one specific promise.

We dig into the controversy over whether ICE enforcement should pause during the World Cup — with activists arguing that immigration enforcement makes undocumented immigrants feel unsafe attending games. We point out the absurdity by comparison — nobody argues pickpocketing laws should be suspended during the Super Bowl. In our Digging Deep segment, we cover the case of a Somali World Cup referee who was denied entry into the United States after Customs and Border Protection flagged his connections to Al-Shabaab, an Al-Qaeda affiliate — and his own social media posts containing antisemitic statements. We walk through why this isn't about ethnicity, despite Al-Shabaab itself issuing a statement calling it racial discrimination, and why a country has every right to keep people connected to designated terrorist organizations out, regardless of their profession.

We also cover the first arrest from a new federal fraud task force's top-10 most-wanted list — a $100 million bank fraud case in Orange County involving falsified title insurance documents and altered digital metadata.

For our Bright Spot, a new study out of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and published in the Annals of Family Medicine found that patients who received five minutes of intercessory prayer — including the laying on of hands — experienced significantly greater pain and anxiety reduction than those who listened to faith music or meditation, with benefits lasting up to six weeks. Remarkably, the results held regardless of whether the patient receiving prayer was a believer — what mattered was the faith of the person doing the praying. We connect it to the biblical example of the centurion asking Jesus to heal his servant, and note that researchers are now suggesting intercessory prayer become standard medical practice.

And we close with Jimmy Kimmel mocking Spencer Pratt over losing his home in the LA wildfires by renting him a U-Haul — which we call exactly what it is, shameful — and the congressional baseball game, where Republicans beat Democrats 11-2, with Florida Rep. Greg Steube striking out five batters and Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt named MVP for a diving catch that left him bloodied. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 10, 2026.

We open with a deep dive into the Iran negotiations — and the fundamental question that no amount of dealmaking experience can easily solve. President Trump is the greatest negotiator of his generation, but every negotiation assumes both parties want a mutually beneficial outcome. The Iranian regime wakes up every morning chanting death to America and death to Israel. Where is the common ground with people who want you dead? We trace the Iranian Revolution back to its founding act — not signing a constitution, not declaring independence, but taking Americans hostage — and explain why a regime defined by its opposition to America may never be capable of the kind of deal Trump has made in every other negotiation of his life.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, the U.S. and Iran exchanged fire again this week following Iran's shooting down of an American Apache helicopter — the U.S. launched fighter jet strikes on Iranian air defenses, Iran fired missiles at U.S. bases in Bahrain, Jordan, and Kuwait, and the U.S. launched a second wave of strikes Wednesday evening. President Trump said Iran was taking too long and would now have to pay the price. Then Democrats in Maine voted overwhelmingly to nominate Graham Plattner — the man with the SS tattoo, the predator website, and the endorsements of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — as their Senate candidate against Susan Collins. And Carmelo Anthony was convicted of murdering 17-year-old Austin Metcalf and sentenced to 35 years in prison — a jury that took just three hours to convict and another three hours to sentence, while protesters outside claimed the verdict was racist despite multiple Black teammates of Metcalf testifying that Anthony committed the crime.

We dig into the aftermath of the Anthony verdict — specifically a petition circulating on Change.org calling for the arrest of Austin Metcalf's surviving twin brother Hunter, claiming his alleged behavior contributed to the murder. Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson respond to the mother outside the courthouse who asked what she should tell her five sons after the verdict. The answer, says Teri, is simple — don't stab people. We also discuss the race-baiting that surrounded the trial from the beginning, the GoFundMe that raised millions for Anthony's defense, the impact statements from the Metcalf family in the courtroom, and why Carmelo Anthony's parents walked out rather than listen to Austin Metcalf's father speak.

We also cover President Trump bringing the workers who restored the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into the Oval Office — giving them presidential challenge coins and publicly honoring the people who actually did the work rather than the politicians who show up for the gold-plated shovel photo op. We call it exactly what it is — a reminder that America was built by people in tool belts, not people at podiums.

In our Digging Deep segment, a new Signal poll heading into the midterms shows that swing voters — the ones who actually decide elections — believe Democrats are more focused on hating Donald Trump than solving problems by a margin of 23 points. We also note that only 58% of Americans say they are extremely or very proud to be American, including only 28% of voters under 30, and that 30% of Democrats say they are not at all proud of their country. We make the case that if you can't tell the American people what you love about this country or offer them solutions that have actually worked somewhere on earth, running on hatred of one man is not a winning message.

We also weigh in on Graham Plattner's victory speech — in which he said it was his job to earn the trust of disappointed voters. We point out that trust is not the starting point. Vision is. And we ask the question JFK would have asked — what can you do for your country — and wonder how well his 1961 inaugural address would play at a 2026 Democrat rally.

For our Bright Spot, the World Cup kicks off Thursday in the United States, Canada, and Mexico — and European fans traveling across America to follow their teams are going viral for the most American reasons imaginable. A German man driving from Georgia through Mississippi to Texas ate Waffle House at 1 a.m., stopped at Buc-ee's, and attended a practice match at Auburn Stadium where he posted that his European mind could not comprehend what he was seeing. A Swedish woman who flew into Indianapolis posted from a flight over Colorado that she had faster Wi-Fi than at home and that the United States had completely radicalized her within 48 hours. We call it what it is — the American dream, visible to everyone who arrives here with open eyes.

And we close with the Chicago Bears officially heading to Hammond, Indiana — after Governor Pritzker couldn't offer them what they needed. They weren't asking for a bailout. They were willing to invest $2 billion of their own money. All they wanted was tax stability. A government that has no stability itself cannot give stability to anyone else. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 9, 2026.

We open with President Trump's declaration that the U.S. will achieve total victory over Iran within two weeks — and we dig into what that actually means. Iran just shot down a U.S. Apache helicopter over the Strait of Hormuz. Both pilots survived and were rescued by an unmanned drone in the first such rescue of U.S. service members in history. We work through the tensions in Trump's statements — between declaring victory in two weeks and talking about trillions of dollars in infrastructure reconstruction — and ask whether those two things can both be true at the same time.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, Iran shot down a U.S. Apache helicopter over the Strait of Hormuz — both pilots bailed out safely and were rescued by an unmanned drone in a historic first. Then Vice President J.D. Vance sent a criminal referral to the DOJ urging prosecution of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for covering up Medicaid fraud, intimidating whistleblowers, and directing state employees to stop investigating fraud in Somali immigrant communities to avoid accusations of racism. And Carmelo Anthony has been convicted of murdering high school track star Austin Metcalf — who was stabbed in the heart with a knife Anthony had hidden in his backpack at a Texas track meet after refusing to leave a rival school's tent when asked.

We get Dr. John Eastman — former attorney for President Trump and former California attorney general candidate — on the phone to explain why Spencer Pratt was eliminated from the Los Angeles mayor's race after holding second place on Election Day. Eastman explains California's universal mail-in ballot system, the notoriously dirty voter rolls full of dead people and illegal immigrants, the practice of runners harvesting ballots from apartment mailboxes, and the statistical impossibility of a ballot batch update in which 24,000 votes were counted and zero — literally zero — went to a candidate who had been pulling about 30% throughout the count. He also explains why the courts in California refuse to accept statistical anomalies as evidence of fraud and why the system has been deliberately designed to make post-election proof nearly impossible to obtain. And he connects it all back to the founding principle — the only legitimate government is one based on the consent of the governed, and consent can only be given through free and fair elections.

We also cover new information from Jim Jordan's congressional hearings showing that the Biden Justice Department met with the Southern Poverty Law Center on a quarterly basis, treated them as a credible source, and used their designations — which labeled the Family Research Council, Moms for Liberty, and the Alliance Defending Freedom as hate groups — to inform federal law enforcement decisions. The Richmond FBI memo suggesting pro-life Catholics could be linked to extremism? The sourcing came from the SPLC. We explain why this matters to everyone regardless of party — because when a government starts investigating viewpoints instead of crimes, nobody is safe.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson tackle the question of whether someone with an OnlyFans page can ever expect to get a husband — prompted by the news that Denise Richards joined OnlyFans after her own daughter did. We get into why the platform combines the two things people most want — money and fame — while delivering neither happiness nor lasting value, and why the basketball player's wife who kept her page secret for five years until her husband found out and divorced her is the most honest version of where that road ends.

We dig into Washington D.C. public school sex education — which has apparently stopped using the terms male and female to describe human biology in order to avoid conflicting with gender ideology. We note that this is being done in what some consider the most educated city in America, and compare it to trying to teach geography without using the words continent or ocean.

For our Bright Spot, Meta has announced America's Workforce Academy — a cost-free, five-week training program with an initial $115 million investment that will train fiber technicians, welders, plumbers, electricians, and other skilled trade workers and guarantee jobs for all graduates. Mike Rowe calls it an important step in the right direction. We call it exactly what it is — a private company solving a public problem without waiting for the government to screw it up first.

And we close with the crew of Artemis 3 — Colonel Randy Bresnik, Colonel Frank Rubio, Commander Andre Douglas, and Italian astronaut Colonel Luca Parmitano — announced by NASA this week for the upcoming lunar landing mission expected to launch in late 2027. And an Air Canada pilot who flew commercially for 17 years without a valid pilot's license — proof that AI isn't the original scam. People have been fooling each other since the beginning of civilization. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 8, 2026.

We open with Border Czar Tom Holman's revelation that the protesters outside the Delaney Hall ICE detention center in Newark are not grassroots New Jersey residents — they are professional travel protesters identified by facial recognition as having shown up at ICE facilities across the country, many from Portland and Minnesota. We explain why this isn't surprising, why Nancy Pelosi herself coined the term astroturf back in 2010 to describe the exact same tactic, and why the left's first instinct is always to accuse their opponents of the strategies they're already executing. We also ask the question nobody in the media is asking — who is funding this, and why haven't the organizers been charged under the RICO Act for coordinating criminal activity across state lines?

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, Spencer Pratt has apparently been eliminated from the Los Angeles mayor's race — after holding a clear second place on Election Day, his vote share in ballots arriving after Election Day collapsed from 28% to 19%, while Democratic socialist Nithya Raman went from third place to first, gaining 17 percentage points in post-Election Day ballots to overtake both Pratt and Karen Bass. The DOJ is in California investigating the election. Then a 200-page House Oversight Committee report accuses Minnesota Governor Tim Walz of covering up massive Medicaid fraud in his state — including ordering employees to stop investigating fraud in Somali immigrant communities to avoid appearing racist, and then turning the investigative apparatus against the whistleblowers themselves, photographing their cars, monitoring their phones and computers, and finding out where their children went to school. And a nonprofit filed a lawsuit to stop the UFC fight on the White House lawn, claiming it violates federal law and an environmental impact study wasn't conducted before the temporary stadium was built.

We discuss President Trump walking out of his interview with Kristen Welker — and our American Mama Teri Netterville says what millions of Americans were thinking when they watched it. We talk about the growing gap between what the media is willing to report on Republicans versus Democrats, how the same anchor who challenges Trump's claim that Capitol Police let protesters into the Capitol has shown that footage on her own broadcast, and why after years of being asked to sit down with people who are going to misrepresent everything he says, the president finally said enough.

We also weigh in on Steven Spielberg's new movie Disclosure Day, in which he says he believes aliens have been here, that they are here, and that his film will leave Christians questioning their faith in God. We respectfully decline. We also note that he seems considerably less eager to challenge the faith of groups that don't respond with patience.

In our Digging Deep segment, Scott Pelley went to the New York Times after being fired from CBS and complained that his new boss suggested the public thinks CBS is biased — and Pelley demanded to know what evidence exists for that claim. We provide the evidence. Gallup's 2024 poll showed only 31% of Americans had any trust in mass media — the lowest since 1972. In 2025 it dropped to 28%. An Emerson College poll from 2025 found only 18% of Americans have a great deal of trust in national news organizations. Half of Americans believe news organizations deliberately mislead them. AllSides rates CBS with the same left-leaning bias as CNN, the New York Times, NPR, and the Washington Post. All of this was available on the first page of a single search engine query. We say if Pelley couldn't find it, he should have been fired for incompetence, not just insubordination.

We cover WNBA player Breonna Turner's objection to the USA 250 anniversary patch on WNBA jerseys — because, she says, none of the players would have been free 250 years ago. We note that basketball wasn't invented until 1891, and more importantly, that America's 250th anniversary is a celebration not of perfection but of the principles in the Declaration of Independence that Martin Luther King himself called a promissory note — the promise that made her freedom possible.

For our Bright Spot, the Department of Energy announced last week that a new nuclear reactor reached zero power fueled criticality at a lab in Idaho — the first reactor in 40 years to reach criticality in the United States — a month ahead of President Trump's July 4th deadline that most experts said was impossible. We explain what zero power criticality means, why micro-reactors are a game changer for energy independence, why the U.S. Navy has operated nuclear reactors on submarines and aircraft carriers since the 1950s with zero accidents, and why the future belongs to nations with abundant, affordable, and reliable energy.

And we close with Hakeem Jeffries apparently trying to launch his own Contract with America — assembling a Democratic affordability agenda with AOC in charge of healthcare and a transgender member of Congress in charge of caregiving. We wish him luck. We also close with 1,000 avocado growers in the Mexican state of Michoacán setting a world record with 15,000 pounds of guacamole. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 5, 2026.

We open with the federal government's announcement of multiple election fraud investigations and a comprehensive audit of California's voter registration system — while California is still counting ballots days after its primary election. We make the case that this isn't just about catching cheaters after the fact — it's deterrence ahead of the midterms. The Trump administration is sending a message to every state that someone is watching, and the only way that message lands is if someone ends up in a perp walk before November. We also explain why election integrity is mathematically connected to voter turnout — because when people believe their vote might not matter, they stop showing up.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, May job numbers came in at 172,000 — more than double the economists' expectation of 80,000 — with unemployment holding at 4.3% and wages rising without a single government mandate to do it. Then Florida settled the NRA's lawsuit against its three-day gun purchase waiting period, with the attorney general agreeing the law violated the Second Amendment — a remarkable shift in a state that passed that law with 72% of voters in 1998. And Democratic Congressman Jimmy Gomez — founder of the Dads Caucus in Congress, married with a son — admitted to an extramarital affair with the 29-year-old chief of staff of fellow California Democrat Eric Swalwell. The House Ethics Committee has launched a probe as additional allegations surface.

We also have a direct conversation with the one in three working-age men who have checked out of the workforce entirely — not just temporarily unemployed, but not even looking. We say what needs to be said — the greatness God placed inside you is not going to manifest on the couch. Go get a job, start a business, join the military, farm something. Do something. Women are doing it. Your country needs you to do it.

Our American Mama Teri Netterville weighs in on Victoria's Secret's dramatic comeback — stock price up from $15 to $75 after the company abandoned its DEI era and returned to supermodels, fantasy, and the product their customers actually wanted. Teri explains why more women than men watched the Victoria's Secret runway show in its prime, why women dress for other women as much as for their partners, and why the body positivity era collapsed under the weight of its own ideology — including the irony that the women who most loudly celebrated it are now on Ozempic.

In our Digging Deep segment, a congressional candidate in Iowa published a public confession apologizing for being white, cisgender, able-bodied, middle-class, and college-educated — and we use it to explain the fundamental difference between equal opportunity and equal outcomes that is at the root of almost every major political disagreement in America today. You should not feel guilty for succeeding unless you cheated to do it. America never promised equal outcomes. It promised equal opportunity. Those are not the same thing — and confusing them is the left's most effective lie.

We then dig into the judge who just ruled that President Trump's name must be removed from the Kennedy Center by June 16th — U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, appointed by Barack Obama. Judge Cooper is married to Amy Jeffress, who is Joe Biden's personal attorney and a partner at a law firm that represented E. Jean Carroll in her lawsuit against Trump. The man who officiated their wedding was Merrick Garland. Judge Cooper did not recuse himself. We lay out every connection and ask a simple question — even if the legal ruling was technically correct, how is any of this supposed to inspire confidence in the rule of law?

The Senate passed the $70 billion reconciliation package funding ICE and Customs and Border Protection through 2029 — with only one Republican voting against it. We note it was not Susan Collins, not Bill Cassidy, not Mitch McConnell. It was Lisa Murkowski. Again.

Then it's Fake News Friday — including whether California is still counting the 1966 governor's race, whether Democrats convinced a man named Dan Sullivan to run against Senator Dan Sullivan in Alaska to confuse voters, whether Democrats want to replace the words mother and father in the law with gestating parent and non-gestating parent, whether Seattle's mayor broke her own Starbucks boycott for a blueberry muffin latte, and whether Disney is making a full-length Jar Jar Binks movie.

We also cover a House bill heading to the floor that would allow service members to buy gasoline at military exchanges without paying the federal gas tax — and we ask the only question that matters. Why shouldn't they?

And we close with words of wisdom on the 82nd anniversary of D-Day — from FDR, Ronald Reagan, General Eisenhower, and Private First Class Joseph Lesniewski of Easy Company, who said simply, I don't feel like any kind of hero. To me, the work had to be done. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 4, 2026.

We open with a conversation about Congress's seemingly unlimited capacity for symbolism and its equally limited appetite for actual governance — prompted by the bill to rename the street in front of the Chinese embassy Tiananmen Square Memorial Boulevard. We love the trolling, we love the underlying principle, and we think every Chinese diplomat should have to write that address on their stationery every day. But we also note that the SAVE Act — which 70% of Americans support, including 69% of independents and nearly half of rank-and-file Democrats — is still sitting unactioned. You cannot tell us you can walk and chew gum at the same time if you're only blowing bubbles.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, President Trump announced he wants Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch to become the permanent AG — and after overseeing the indictment of James Comey and launching the National Fraud Enforcement Division, we think he's earned it. Then the federal government cut off Hawaii from Medicaid funding after decertifying its Medicaid Fraud Control Unit — a unit that received millions of dollars to fight fraud, produced zero criminal indictments between 2022 and 2025, and watched Medicaid enrollment explode by 40% in the same period. And water began flowing again into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — restored for an estimated $13 to $20 million, which is less than half of what the Obama administration spent on a failed repair project that left the pool just as dirty six months later.

Our American Mama Teri Netterville responds to the Black Crows concert in Florida where the lead singer told a crowd chanting USA that he didn't understand why they were cheering for this country. Thousands walked out. Teri says she would have been one of them — and explains why the cultural fatigue is real and permanent now. We talk about why woke entertainment keeps failing at the box office, why Snow White bombed, why the all-lesbian Star Trek didn't survive one season, and why Americans are done pretending they'll tolerate being told their country is awful by the people it made wealthy.

We dig into the Austin Metcalf murder trial — which CBS News and most of the media are calling the Carmelo Anthony trial, burying the name of the murdered boy seven paragraphs down. We explain why the jury ended up without any Black members — and the answer, straight from CBS News itself, is not that prosecutors were racist. It's that several prospective Black jurors admitted under oath they could not vote to convict a defendant who looked like them, or who looked like a kid, regardless of the evidence. One said he would have a hard time putting a brother in jail. We ask the question nobody wants to ask — if jurors in the other direction had said the same thing in reverse, what would happen? And we ask how many juries have had people on them who felt the same way but didn't say so out loud?

The Senate voted to strip the SAVE Act from the reconciliation package — with four Republicans joining Democrats to kill it: Murkowski, McConnell, Tillis, and Collins. We explain why each of them voted the way they did, and we note that 81% of Americans support requiring voter ID and 80% want states to purge non-citizens from voter rolls. This is not a radical idea. It is the will of the American people, and four Republican senators just overruled it.

For our Bright Spot, Senator John Fetterman — standing alone again among Senate Democrats — went on record calling out Maine Democrat Senate candidate Graham Plattner over the new revelations about his explicit messaging to women on a platform known for sexual predators. Fetterman said if you've already lied about the Nazi tattoo situation, there are probably a lot more ranches you haven't seen yet. We make the comparison to Alexander Hamilton's endorsement of Thomas Jefferson — I may disagree with his principles, but at least he has them.

We also cover the Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah ceasefire framework — and explain why the big if in that deal is Hezbollah, which has never wanted peace with Israel and still doesn't.

And we close with Sterling Nassa, who was sitting in the audience at a live orchestra performance of La La Land in Sydney when the pianist came down ill at intermission. The conductor walked out and asked if anyone in the house could play. Sterling was a trained pianist and an accomplished sight reader. He walked up, sight read the second half of the concert, including a complicated piano solo, and saved the show. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!