American Ground Radio

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

We open with a story that should trigger Logan Act investigations — Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch has revealed that New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani attempted to arrange a secret meeting with the Iranian government while the United States is actively engaged in military operations against Iran. We walk through the constitutional principle at stake: the United States speaks with one voice in foreign affairs, that voice belongs to the federal government, and a city mayor has no more authority to conduct foreign policy than he has to declare war. We also connect it to a pattern — from Obama's hot mic moment with Medvedev to John Kerry's shadow diplomacy during Trump's first term — of people who want the power of the presidency without the accountability of holding it.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, the U.S. launched strikes against Iran for the sixth consecutive day — targeting air defenses, rocket and drone facilities, and ports, with reports of 35 killed and 300 wounded in Iran, and a blockade-running ship disabled after repeated warnings. Then President Trump fired a newly appointed federal prosecutor in Seattle less than an hour into his first day on the job — a position filled by federal judges after Democrat Senate obstruction left the slot unconfirmed for more than 120 days. And a former Marine and congressional candidate in Florida was arrested for posting videos to social media calling for the murder of President Trump, describing him as the Antichrist, and advising what weapons and shooting patterns should be used — the latest of more than 20 documented assassination plots against the president, by far the most in American history.

We also cover the Trump administration restoring the public charge rule — requiring that applicants for lawful permanent residence demonstrate they can support themselves without depending on government assistance. We explain why this was standard immigration practice throughout most of American history, why it is the policy of virtually every developed nation on earth, and why the most compassionate thing you can say to someone who wants to become an American is that we believe you can make it here on your own.

Our American Mama Teri Netterville responds to a podcast host who said she doesn't trust any mother who wants to be with her children all day — and that homeschooling is weird. Teri's answer is simple and devastating: children are not a burden. They are a reward from God, an inheritance, arrows that parents are called to form and launch into the world for impact. The proof showed up at a stoplight on the way to the studio — Psalm 127, in a bumper sticker, on a car Teri had never seen before, minutes before a segment she didn't know she'd be having. She calls it a God thing. We do too.

We dig deep into Senator Elissa Slotkin's remarks at a Michigan town hall — where she explained her opposition to the SAVE Act by saying it would make it impossible for any Democrat to win any election anywhere. We play the clip. We let her words sit. And we point out that if requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote is what makes Democrats lose elections, Senator Slotkin has just told you everything you need to know about who has been voting in Democratic primaries. The SAVE Act doesn't prevent anyone who is legally entitled to vote from voting. It just makes sure people who aren't legally entitled to vote don't get to cancel out the votes of those who are.

We also cover Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego and reports that he had relationships with multiple congressional staffers before his marriage — and use it to return to the core principle that power causes brain damage. The part of the brain that processes empathy is measurably suppressed in people who accumulate power and believe they deserve it. The only people largely immune to this effect are those who genuinely believe they don't deserve the power they have. Public office is a public trust — and the people underneath you in that office are not perks of the position.

We also cover a White House teleprompter technician who allegedly fed Trump's speech content into prediction markets before the speeches were delivered — trading on insider access to profit from words she was trusted to keep confidential. Every position of trust comes with an obligation of restraint. Some people just haven't figured that out yet.

For our Bright Spot, the New York Times ran a piece headlined Mom, Dad, I Want to Be a Welder — following young Americans in their twenties who had the grades for college, chose trade school instead, and are thriving. Trade school enrollment is up nearly 20% since 2020. Starting salaries for skilled tradespeople now beat many college-educated entry-level positions. And a 23-year-old welder from Arkansas named LaDonna Glass said it best — she felt like if she didn't go to college she would be a failure. She isn't. We close with Earl Nightingale's definition of success — the progressive realization of a worthy goal — and note that success begins the moment you commit to something worthy of your time, your talents, and your character.

And we close with a 2007 photograph taken at a Barcelona charity raffle — a baby boy named Lamin Yamal posing with a young Argentine footballer named Lionel Messi. Eighteen years later, Lamin Yamal is on the Spanish World Cup team and Messi is considered the greatest of all time — and the two people in that photo are about to face each other in the World Cup final. 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 Stephen Parr and Louis R. Avallone. This is the full show for July 15, 2026.

We open with the biggest election integrity news in years — the House passed the SAVE Act as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, 217 to 209, with Speaker Mike Johnson delivering exactly what he promised us two weeks ago when he sat down with American Ground Radio. We explain what the SAVE Act actually does — and what it doesn't. It doesn't change who is eligible to vote. It doesn't alter the Constitution. It simply requires documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections. We point out that we verify identity to board a plane, open a bank account, and buy a beer — and that the only people who benefit from not verifying citizenship at voter registration are people who aren't citizens. We also note that Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin's claim that no Democrat will ever win again if the SAVE Act passes raises an obvious question about how many non-citizens have been voting for her party. The bill now goes to the Senate, where John Thune needs to do his job — or be voted out at the first opportunity.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch testified before the Senate in his confirmation hearing — telling senators that his client is not the president but the American people, while more than 1,200 former DOJ employees signed a letter opposing his confirmation, which may be the best endorsement he could have received. Then the House passed a bill to make daylight saving time permanent year-round — meaning darker mornings in winter and lighter evenings, with states currently on permanent standard time allowed to stay there. And Senate Democrats boycotted a hearing on government fraud, with only one Democrat showing up before leaving after his opening statement — even as investigative journalists Nick Shirley, James O'Keefe, and Dylan Heder-Gaudette presented documented findings on billions in fraudulent benefits claims. As Nick Shirley said, no dollar says Republican or Democrat on it.

We also tackle the question of whether a New Hampshire state representative can drive 102 miles per hour on her way to the legislature and claim constitutional immunity from arrest under a provision dating back to the era of kings arresting parliamentarians on their way to inconvenient votes. We acknowledge the historical purpose of the law. We reject the application of it to someone who simply didn't plan her schedule well enough. Rules for thee but not for me is not a constitutional principle — and if you don't care about the safety of the people on the road, why would you care about the safety of the people you represent?

Our American Mama Teri Netterville weighs in on the Emmy nominations — and the conversation becomes a broader indictment of an awards system that has completely lost touch with what Americans are actually watching. Greg Gutfeld hosts the number one late night show in the country. Not nominated. Taylor Sheridan has produced Yellowstone, Landman, 1923, and The Madison — all massive hits with critics and audiences alike. Not nominated. Meghan Markle's show As Ever received a 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, was called the sweet spot between irrelevant and intolerable by the Times of London, and was canceled. Emmy nominated. The awards don't reflect excellence anymore. They reflect ideology.

In our Digging Deep segment, U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll announced that the Army has already met its 2026 recruiting goals — with 61,500 new recruits — eight and a half months before the year ends. Compare that to 2022, when the military missed its goals by 25%, and 2023, when it missed by 10%. Nothing changed except the administration and with it the clarity of purpose. We play Simon Sinek's story about a Marine recruiter who told a high school auditorium full of teenagers that not a single one of them was good enough to be a Marine — and walked out with the longest line of any recruiter in the room. People don't want to be told service is easy. They want to be challenged to be worthy of it. Trump and Hegseth figured that out. The numbers prove it.

We also cover France's assisted suicide legislation — which has passed the lower house and would allow physicians and nurses to end the lives of patients who cannot do so themselves. The Catholic Church in France has threatened excommunication for any legislator who votes for it, and Pope Francis personally asked Macron not to sign it. We make the pro-life case plainly — compassion means walking with those who suffer, not eliminating the one who is suffering. A society's worth is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable, not by how conveniently it removes them.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has now threatened to shut down all Middle Eastern oil exports if Iran cannot export its own — using energy as a weapon exactly as both Iran and Iraq did during the 1980s war. We note that this is exactly why the Iraq oil pipeline deal through Turkey matters, why the Strait of Hormuz matters, and why at some point the president may have to say what needs to be said about ground troops.

For our Bright Spot, a Spanish conservation group called El Burrito Feliz — the Happy Little Donkey — has deployed 18 donkeys around Doñana National Park on Spain's Atlantic coast, an area with the same fire-prone Mediterranean climate as Southern California. Since the donkeys were introduced, there has not been a single wildfire in the park in nine years. The donkeys eat the dry scrub and tall grasses that fuel fires, reach terrain that vehicles cannot, and cost a fraction of what California spends on fire suppression after the fact. We suggest California try it. What have they got to lose?

And we close with Jenny Stepien, who walked down the aisle on her wedding day wishing her father could be there. Her father Michael had passed away ten years earlier — but he was an organ donor, and his heart had saved the life of a man named Tom Thomas, who became Jenny's pen pal out of gratitude. On her wedding day, Tom was there in person for the first time — to walk her down the aisle in her father's place. At the end of the aisle, Jenny placed her hand on Tom's chest and felt her father's heart beating one more time, just before she said I do. 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 Stephen Parr and Louis R. Avallone. This is the full show for July 14, 2026.

We open with the Democratic Socialists of America's national co-chair going on record calling for the abolition of the United States Senate — and we explain why this isn't a fringe idea anymore. The DSA wants to replace the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court with a single legislative body allocated purely by population, rename it the People's Bureau, and hand it public ownership of the nation's largest corporations. We walk through what that actually means — that seven or eight major cities could effectively govern the entire country, that the constitutional protections for smaller states would vanish, and that the structure they're proposing is the same one that produced the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, and Communist China. We also note that 51% of the DSA's National Policy Committee openly identifies with communism, Marxism, or Marxist-Leninism — not according to conservative critics, but according to a report cited by the former Democratic chief counsel for the House Judiciary Committee. The Democratic Party needs to decide whether it is going to continue letting these people run under its banner.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, President Trump formally notified Congress that hostilities with Iran have resumed — opening a new 60-day window under the War Powers Act after Iran repeatedly violated the ceasefire and continued attacking civilian shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Then inflation dropped from 4.2% to 3.5% last month — the largest single-month decrease in four years — driven largely by falling gas prices during the ceasefire, with core inflation down to 2.6%. And Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett testified jointly before Congress requesting increased security funding — with Barrett revealing that six weeks ago her teenage son opened the front door to find their street filled with police cars responding to a swatting attack on their home.

We also weigh in on President Trump's signature appearing on the new $100 bill as part of America's 250th anniversary commemoration — and we have a genuine disagreement about it. It's a milestone that comes once in a nation's history and deserves recognition. But putting a sitting president's name on currency in circulation is outside American tradition, starts to look like the kind of thing emperors and monarchs do, and gives his critics an easy target that's hard to defend.

Our American Mama Teri Netterville makes the case that moms are still better matchmakers than any dating app ever invented — and backs it up with evidence. Three couples she personally set up are now married, including her own daughter Summer and Louisiana Tech baseball captain Phillip Matulia, whom Teri identified as the right match before her daughter was even willing to consider it. She also shares the story of Andrea Swift — Taylor's mother — who heard that Travis Kelce loves his mother, said ding ding ding, and the rest is history. Terry's conclusion: we know our children. Apps know your data. There's a difference.

In our Digging Deep segment, a Fort Worth police officer threatened street preachers Richard Pankoski and David Grisham with disorderly conduct citations at a Pride parade — telling them directly that if someone is offended by their talking, that constitutes a problem warranting a citation. We explain why this is not a close constitutional question. The First Amendment does not exist to protect popular speech. It exists precisely to protect the kind of speech that offends people. The Fort Worth police chief acknowledged the officers were wrong — but we push back on his framing. They weren't wrong in the manner they addressed it. They were wrong to address it at all. Religious speech enjoys the same constitutional protection as secular speech. If marchers get to publicly celebrate what scripture calls sin, preachers get to publicly call it sin.

We then turn to Zoran Mamdani's New York City — where Manhattan's average one-bedroom rent has hit an all-time high of nearly $5,500 a month and Brooklyn is setting its own records, with critics calling the housing situation DEFCON 1. We connect it directly to Mamdani's rent freeze threats, which gave every landlord in the city a powerful incentive to raise rents before the freeze could take effect, and to congestion pricing, which is now making it financially attractive to live inside Manhattan rather than commute — driving up rents from the demand side. The left created this crisis with its own policies and is now running on those same policies as the solution.

For our Bright Spot, President Trump and Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi announced that U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by September 30th — ending a 23-year military presence that peaked at 170,000 troops and is now down to roughly 2,000. We also cover Iraq signing new oil deals with Chevron and other American companies to build pipelines running from Iraq through Turkey to Europe — bypassing the Strait of Hormuz entirely — which would permanently reduce Iranian leverage over global energy markets.

And we close with 28-year-old Rishi Sharma, who at 18 became curious about World War II, interviewed one veteran, then another, then another, until curiosity became an obsession — and he has now spent every single day of the last ten years interviewing veterans of the Greatest Generation, preserving 3,000 firsthand accounts of American history on hard drives and SD cards before those voices are gone forever. 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 Stephen Parr and Louis R. Avallone. This is the full show for July 13, 2026.

We open with a story New York City's leadership refuses to learn from — a new report showing the city's share of America's million-dollar earners collapsed from 12.7% in 2010 to 8.7% in 2022, dropping New York from second to fourth in the national rankings as California, Florida, and Texas all dramatically grew their millionaire populations. We explain the core economic truth the left keeps getting wrong — affordability and willingness are two entirely different questions. Wealthy residents can afford to pay more. They are simply not willing to. And unlike ordinary citizens, they have the means to act on that decision immediately. When New York voters hired Zoran Mamdani to demand even more from the people already leaving, they didn't change the math. They accelerated it.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, Senator Lindsey Graham passed away suddenly over the weekend from an aortic dissection — a tear in the aorta that is often fatal before help can arrive. President Trump ordered flags lowered to half-staff and posted a tribute calling Graham a dear friend and a truly great man. Then South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster named Graham's sister, Darlene Graham Nord, to fill the remainder of his Senate term — with a special Republican primary scheduled for August 11th to select the party's nominee for the fall race. And the U.S. and Iran exchanged another round of fire over the weekend, with Iran firing missiles and drones at U.S. bases across the Middle East and the U.S. responding with strikes on Iranian military installations — including the first-ever use of unmanned naval drones against an Iranian port used to repair submarines.

Our American Mama Teri Netterville reflects on the life of Lindsey Graham — and what she didn't know about him until he was gone. That his mother died at 53, his father sixteen months later, and that a 22-year-old Lindsey Graham adopted his 13-year-old sister so she could receive military benefits. That the same man who was Trump's fiercest critic in the first term became one of his closest allies and friends. That Democrats who disagreed with him on nearly everything counted him as a genuine friend. And that his finest hour may have been the Kavanaugh hearings — when Graham stood up among colleagues he called friends and said plainly what millions of Americans were thinking: what you are doing to this man is wrong.

We also cover an 84-year-old Florida man suing Waffle House because a sign advertising their strawberry shortcake waffle caught his attention while he was walking and he tripped over a curb. We wish him a full recovery. We also note that attracting attention is the entire point of advertising, that curbs have been stationary obstacles since the invention of sidewalks, and that if noticing something relieves you of the obligation to watch where you're going, America is going to need an attorney on every corner. Some of them will have billboards.

In our Digging Deep segment, CNBC released its annual ranking of the worst states to live in — and all ten are red states, every single one of which gained population from other states in 2024. Texas led the country with 72,000 net new residents. Tennessee gained 36,000. Oklahoma gained 34,000. Meanwhile, CNBC's ten best states include Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts — half of which are losing population to other states, with New Jersey alone shedding 64,000 residents in 2024. We examine CNBC's methodology — which rewards states for high minimum wages, mandatory union participation, gender ideology in law, abortion access, and no voter ID requirements — and conclude that CNBC has produced not a quality of life ranking but a Democratic National Committee platform checklist. The American people are voting with their feet, and the scoreboard is not close.

We also cover ICE's latest weekend sweep — dozens of arrests including individuals convicted of murder, manslaughter, child sexual abuse, and drug trafficking — and ask the only question that matters: how is any reasonable person opposed to removing violent criminal offenders from the country? The answer, we conclude, is that the people most loudly opposed are not being reasonable. They are making an emotional leap to an accusation nobody actually made.

For our Bright Spot, a new study projects that a one-gigawatt data center campus in northwest Indiana would generate $16.1 billion in regional economic output over 20 years, support nearly 15,000 construction jobs, and create $176 million in annual earnings once operational. We connect it to the Meta data center being built in northeast Louisiana — not yet complete, but already doubling teacher salaries in the surrounding community purely from tax revenue. Data centers are the railroads of the 21st century. If your community gets one, you are in tall cotton.

President Trump is also planning a direct address to the American people on Thursday night about Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and the safety of global shipping — because in an era of constant rumor and social media speculation, there is no substitute for the president going directly to the people and telling them what's what.

And we close with four-year-old Roman Butzlaff, who really wanted a friend. His family had split up, his grandparents were far away, and his new neighborhood didn't have many kids. So every morning he went outside, sat in a chair in the front yard, and waved at everyone who walked by. One neighbor crossed the street to introduce himself. Then another came. Then another. Before long, Roman had turned a street full of strangers into a community — and they came to his birthday parties, his soccer games, and his preschool open house. People like connecting. At a human level, not just behind a screen. 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 Stephen Parr and Louis R. Avallone. This is the full show for July 10, 2026.

We open with a Senate map conversation nobody on the left wants to have — Democrats need to win every single toss-up race in November to take control of the chamber, while Republicans need only one. We walk through the Cook Political Report and Sabato's Crystal Ball projections, the four toss-up races that will decide everything — Alaska, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and North Carolina — and why Republican overconfidence is still premature even with the structural advantage. We also explain why Graham Plattner's implosion in Maine may not be the gift Republicans assumed it was, why Roy Cooper is very likely to pick up North Carolina, and why Ken Paxton is making a race in Texas far closer than it has any business being. 

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, President Trump refused to sign the bipartisan housing bill — saying he won't put pen to paper until Congress passes the SAVE Act — but the bill will become law without his signature anyway, and House Republicans plan to celebrate its passage regardless. Then Trump fired the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, citing the Seila Law decision as precedent and issuing a statement that the president reserves the right to remove individuals not fully aligned with the task of securing America's elections. And eight men from across the country — Ohio, Nebraska, Missouri, Washington, California, and West Virginia — have been indicted for plotting a drone and sniper attack on the UFC fight at the White House lawn, with all eight now arrested and facing life in prison.

We also cover Joy Behar warning that President Trump is practically destroying democracy — and we note that the one place in America where a democratic election result was genuinely made null and void was the 2024 Democratic presidential primary, where Kamala Harris never won a single vote outside the convention floor. The Democrat Party is the party of projection. Whatever they accuse you of doing, they have already done.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson answer a listener question about Type 1 and Type 2 fun — and the conversation becomes a beautiful tribute to feral childhood. Type 1 fun is a roller coaster — thrilling in the moment, forgotten by morning. Type 2 fun is hiking in sleet, throwing rocks at alligators on the bayou, going off into the woods alone for hours while your parents had absolutely no idea where you were. The kind of fun that shapes you, scares you, and becomes the story you're still telling at 50. Teri and Kimberly worry that today's children — tracked by phones, sheltered from consequence, raised on Dateline — are growing up on Type 1 fun and missing the Type 2 experiences that built the people they became.

We dig deep into California's 2022 decision to decriminalize loitering with intent to commit prostitution — signed by Governor Newsom on the grounds that 56% of those arrested were Black women, making it, in his telling, a racist law. The results, documented by City Journal and investigative journalist Abigail Schreier, are exactly what common sense predicted. Prostitution spiked immediately. Human trafficking followed. LAPD officers at the 77th Street Station rescued 123 children in 2024 — nearly eight times the number rescued in 2022, the year before the law took effect. Police now report seeing 14-year-old girls in G-strings on Los Angeles streets and having no legal authority to intervene. We make the case plainly: the left is not trying to reduce crime. It is trying to reduce the number of people arrested for crime. Those are not the same thing — and the difference is being paid for by the most vulnerable people on the streets.

We also revisit a 1950 speech by Joseph McCarthy — and note that whatever his excesses, his core distinction holds up: there have always been two kinds of Democrats, the millions of loyal Americans who vote the ticket and want safe neighborhoods and stable jobs, and a small activist class that has been dragging the party toward something that looks less like democratic socialism and more like the thing McCarthy was warning about. The question in 2026 is whether that activist class is still the minority.

Then it's Fake News Friday — including a California HOA fining residents for flying the American flag, activists pushing schools to teach Black English and girl math, Adam Sandler officiating Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding, a BB gun attack on a mosque that turned out to be carried out by a Muslim man, Iran threatening to kill President Trump at Khomeini's funeral, a new Broadway musical called Dolly about Dolly Parton, and CNN airing a quote from a fake congressman who runs a parody account. Justin Trudeau is now a backup dancer in a Katy Perry video. Spoilet Alert: that one's real.

For our Bright Spot, weekly unemployment claims came in at 215,000 — with the January through July average of 213,000 representing the lowest sustained jobless claim numbers since 1968 and 1969, when the country had a third fewer people and the Vietnam draft was pulling hundreds of thousands of men out of the civilian workforce. We call it what it is — a labor market that is outperforming history in a country that was told it couldn't.

And we close with words of wisdom on patriotism — from Calvin Coolidge, Edward Abbey, Adlai Stevenson, and Charles de Gaulle. You've got to love your country enough to tell the truth about it, defend it when it's right, and fight to make it better. 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 Stephen Parr and Louis R. Avallone. This is the full show for July 9, 2026.

We open with Mayor Zoran Mamdani's map of immigrant neighborhoods in New York City — and a glaring omission that Louis takes personally. Little Italy isn't on it. Neither are the Irish neighborhoods or the Jewish neighborhoods. What is on it? Little Palestine, Little Pakistan, Little Odessa, and 27 other enclaves — a deliberate cartography of division that tells certain communities where they belong and erases the immigrant story that built New York in the first place. We make the distinction between a melting pot — where you bring your culture and become American — and a mixing bowl, where a city planner plants a flag and tells you to stay in your lane. Put Little Italy on the map. Put the whole beautiful, messy, glorious immigration story on the map. That is New York. That is America.

In our Top 3 Things You need to Know, fresh explosions hit southern Iran — but CENTCOM says the U.S. was not behind them, and Israel said the same, as Iranians buried their former Ayatollah Khomeini for the first time since his death in March, having been too afraid to hold the funeral until now. Then Graham Plattner dropped out of the Maine Senate race after a fourth woman came forward with sexual assault allegations — with the Maine Democratic Party now scrambling to name a replacement by June 27th, having defended Plattner right up until the moment the polls shifted against him. The Democrats didn't discover morality. They discovered math. And an illegal alien from Slovakia was arrested in New Jersey for registering to vote and casting a ballot in the 2022 elections — proof once again that the thing that never happens keeps happening, and that the Save America Act cannot wait.

We also cover Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum threatening legal action against the United States after ICE officers shot a Mexican national who allegedly used his vehicle as a weapon against federal agents in Houston. We have a suggestion for President Sheinbaum — if she is genuinely concerned about how Mexican citizens are being treated during U.S. immigration enforcement operations, she could simply tell them to go home.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson answer the listener question of why it's so hard to find couple friends — and the answer turns out to be equal parts logistics, life seasons, and the quiet devastation of watching a couple you love fall apart. Teri and Kimberly talk about the friends they found through their children's sports, the couples who drifted away when the games ended, the dream scenario of children who marry each other's best friends' children, and the husband-centric theory of male friendship — guys don't have friends, they have wives, and their wives have friends, and those friends have husbands.

We enter week four of the Mitch McConnell hospital saga — still no quotes, still no specifics, still no clarity on why he's there or what his condition actually is. We contrast this with John Fetterman, who disclosed his stroke within 48 hours of it happening and his clinical depression diagnosis the day after checking himself into Walter Reed — even though depression was far more politically embarrassing than a stroke. The public doesn't need every medical detail. It needs to know which box to put its senator in. Four weeks in, we still don't know.

In our Digging Deep segment, a Real Clear Investigations report compares U.S. crime rates to Canada and Australia using victimization surveys rather than police reports — and the results demolish the international media's narrative. Overall violent crime in Canada is 295% higher than in the U.S. In Australia, assaults are 227% higher and rape is 355% higher. The reason U.S. crime statistics look worse is that Americans are far more likely to call the police when they become victims. We make the case that the anti-American crime narrative isn't about journalism — it's about political control. If Canadians and Australians found out they would be safer with guns, their governments would have a much harder time keeping them disarmed.

We also note that the conspiracy theories surrounding Charlie Kirk's assassination appear to be collapsing under the weight of Tyler Robinson's own confessions — three separate admissions that he planned and carried out the murder deliberately over a period of weeks. We say what needs to be said about the people who spent the last ten months spinning elaborate alternative theories: if you ever thought Candace Owens was onto something, you need a new way to filter your news sources.

For our Bright Spot, John Fetterman's transparency about his own medical crises — stroke disclosed in 48 hours, depression disclosed the day after hospitalization — stands as a model of what elected officials owe the people they serve. We don't have to agree with his politics to recognize that walking in integrity looks exactly like that.

And we close with words of wisdom on honesty — from Thomas Jefferson, William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Franklin, and Billy Joel. Honesty is such a lonely word. 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 Stephen Parr and Louis R. Avallone. This is the full show for July 7, 2026.

We open with a story out of Germany that hits uncomfortably close to home — the German defense minister is publicly discussing whether a conservative party that finishes first in national polling should be denied access to classified information if it wins power. We explain why this isn't just a European problem: it's exactly what James Clapper attempted with Donald Trump in 2016, what the FBI did to the Tea Party under Obama, and what the DOJ did to pro-life Catholics under Biden. When a government starts treating political opponents as security threats, the next steps — denied clearances, restricted briefings, platform pressure, donor investigations — become easier every time. Germany is showing us where that road ends. We'd prefer not to follow.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, President Trump declared the ceasefire over after Iran attacked three oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz — launching a second night of U.S. strikes on Iranian air defenses, fast boats, and missile launchers, and saying of negotiations, they're liars, they're cheats, they're sick people. Then Kentucky's Democratic Governor Andy Beshear formally demanded transparency from Senator Mitch McConnell's office about his medical condition — noting that while several Republican colleagues claim to have spoken with him at length, not one of them has quoted a single word he actually said. And a 51-year-old Australian citizen living in Franklinton, Louisiana was arrested and charged by the DOJ for registering to vote by falsely claiming American citizenship and casting ballots in both 2022 and 2024 — which is exactly why the Save America Act exists and exactly why the Senate needs to pass it.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson get into the financial realities facing young families today — the near impossibility of one parent staying home, the role grandparents and extended family play in filling the gap, and why the bonds forged through that kind of mutual help are often the strongest ones families have. Teri shares how she told her daughter-in-law directly that private school for the grandchildren is something she and her husband are prepared to help with — because that's what family does when it can.

We dig into the Supreme Court's birthright citizenship ruling — and the Texas hospital advertising birth packages in Mexico for $4,000 natural or $5,500 for a C-section, with the implied promise that the baby goes home as an American citizen. Governor Greg Abbott has ordered an immediate investigation of Mission Regional Medical Center. We also cover Chinese birth tourism to American Samoa — where more Chinese babies are now born than American babies — with those children raised under the Communist Party before returning to the United States as adult citizens with full legal access. We make the case that the 14th Amendment's original meaning of subject to the jurisdiction thereof meant complete political allegiance — not one foot on American soil — and that Congress must act before birth tourism becomes the dominant business model along our southern border.

We then cover Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Plattner — who still hasn't dropped out as of broadcast but faces a Monday deadline — and the stunning reversal from a Democratic Party that was fully behind him while he was ahead in the polls and is now trying to deny him any role in choosing his replacement. We note that the only Democrat who called Plattner out while he was still leading was John Fetterman — who this week demanded that every Democrat who championed Plattner publicly apologize to the voters of Maine. A party willing to undo its own nomination process when the polls turn is a party that has made clear the democratic process is a means to an end, not a principle.

For our Bright Spot, firearms manufacturer CMMG has announced it will only sell to state and local government agencies the same configurations it is allowed to sell to that state's citizens. If a state bans AR-15 style rifles for civilians, CMMG will not sell AR-15 style rifles to that state's law enforcement. Their statement says it plainly — we do not have two classes of citizenry in this country. We are all subject to the Constitution. A government that doesn't trust its citizens cannot be trusted by its citizens. We call it exactly what it is — a principled stand worth celebrating and worth other manufacturers following.

And we close with Jordan Rosenberg, who married Max Creamer this summer after knowing him for about ten years. At the wedding reception, Jordan's parents played a home video of four-year-old Jordan describing her future wedding — naming the friends who would be there, all of whom were present as adults. And when asked who her husband would be, four-year-old Jordan said the name Max. She spoke it into existence. 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 Stephen Parr and Louis R. Avallone. This is the full show for July 7, 2026.

We open with a story that's more than just an economic migration — it's a cultural sorting happening across America in real time. Conservatives are leaving blue states for red states chasing economic freedom, while nonprofits in Seattle are reporting they've helped more than 1,500 transgender people relocate there since the 2024 election — more than 20 times the number they helped before it. We make the distinction: conservatives making the move don't need charities to pay for it, they just do it. And we connect both migrations to the same underlying truth — people are voting with their feet, and they're moving toward communities that reflect how they want to live and away from places that make them feel legally, culturally, or politically out of place.

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, the U.S. relaunched strikes against Iran after Iran attacked three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz — with a Pentagon spokesperson telling CNN simply, this is punishment, it won't be over for a bit. Iran then had the audacity to call the reimposition of oil sanctions a violation of the ceasefire agreement — the same ceasefire they violated by setting three ships on fire. Then former Tallahassee mayor and 2018 Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum — who nearly beat Ron DeSantis by less than half a point — was arrested in Daphne, Alabama after being spotted driving erratically, with officers finding marijuana and methamphetamine in his vehicle. And the former mayor of Jackson, Mississippi pled guilty to bribery — this from a mayor who presided over a city that went without water for at least one full month every year of his tenure.

We also address Marjorie Taylor Greene's suggestion that the multiple sexual assault allegations against Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Plattner — the man with the Nazi SS tattoo — might be a political hit job. We make the distinction between the timing of Politico's publication, which may have been orchestrated around the July 13th ballot deadline, and the underlying allegations themselves, which were there long before anyone ran a story. Not every damaging allegation is a political hit job. Sometimes people just do bad things.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson share what liberal friends actually say about 2028 when nobody's performing for a crowd. Teri's Danish-American friend in Wyoming — who can't stand Trump — says when asked who she'd want as next president, the answer wasn't AOC, wasn't Gavin Newsom, and definitely wasn't Kamala Harris. It was Marco Rubio. And she says all her liberal friends feel the same way — presidential, articulate, someone who could actually bring people together. We discuss what a Trump-Vance-Rubio sequential presidency could mean historically, and compare it to Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe's consecutive terms that effectively ended the Federalist Party.

We discuss whether Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito should consider strategic retirements before President Trump leaves office to lock in conservative influence on the Supreme Court for the next four decades — and we make the case that while winning elections is the cleaner solution, two and a half years is not a long runway if something changes in November.

In our Digging Deep segment, we run through a YouGov poll on flag favorability by party — and the results are genuinely stunning. For Republicans, the American flag comes in at a net positive of 97%, followed by the Betsy Ross flag, the Trump flag, the thin blue line flag, and the Israeli flag. For Democrats, the most popular flag is the Black Lives Matter flag at plus 69% — beating the American flag at plus 62%. Democrats also rate the flags of Ukraine and Mexico more favorably than the Betsy Ross flag — the very first symbol of this nation. We connect it to Sunny Hostin's claim that seeing an American flag in a neighborhood makes her feel unsafe — and to the FEMA report that Biden administration workers were instructed to skip homes flying American flags because they were likely Trump supporters.

We also cover an ICE officer who shot and killed an illegal alien in Houston who allegedly used his vehicle as a weapon against federal agents during a targeted enforcement operation — and we make the only point that needs to be made: if you try to run over a law enforcement officer with a two-ton vehicle, the officer has the right to defend his life. The left will ask whether the officer should have been there in the first place. They won't ask whether the illegal alien should have been here in the first place.

For our Bright Spot, a left-leaning author in a left-leaning publication — Washington Monthly — writes that despite his deep opposition to Donald Trump, he is still hopeful about America because of how far the country has come since the Bicentennial in 1976. Life expectancy is up six and a half years. Heart disease deaths are down nearly 60%. Cancer deaths are down more than a third. The air is dramatically cleaner. The Chicago River — which hospitalized his sister after she fell in during 1972 — now has people swimming in it on the Fourth of July. Car crash fatalities have been cut in half. Even the murder rate is down 50% over 50 years. We take it as a bright spot — not because we needed to be convinced, but because a leftist went looking for objective evidence and found it anyway.

And we close with Andres Robles, who turned eight years old and celebrated at Disneyland — where he was greeted at the train platform on Main Street USA as the one billionth visitor to enter the park since it opened on July 17th, 1955. His family unveiled an updated sign reading population one billion and received a VIP tour. 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 Stephen Parr and Louis R. Avallone. This is the full show for July 6, 2026.

We open with reports from investigative journalist Laura Loomer that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — who was hospitalized on June 14th after EMS had to restart his heart at his home — has not left the hospital and may not recover. We discuss the lack of transparency from his staff, the separate story of his wife Elaine Chao traveling to Beijing to meet with the Chinese Vice President three days after her husband's cardiac emergency, and the broader question of McConnell's legacy — a man who served as Republican Senate leader longer than anyone in American history while half the national debt was added on his watch, Obamacare was never repealed, and regular order budgets were never passed. 

In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, Washington D.C. held the largest fireworks display in American history over the Fourth of July weekend — more than 850,000 fireworks launched in close to an hour, massive crowds, and only four total arrests. Most local D.C. media chose to lead with air quality warnings. Then Graham Plattner, the Maine Democratic Senate nominee who has already survived scandals involving a Nazi SS tattoo, alleged spousal abuse, and sexual messages to women on a predator website, now faces a new allegation from a woman who says he entered her home drunk and forced himself on her in 2021. And Paul Pelosi — husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — has been charged with hit and run after allegedly crashing into a parked car in Napa County and driving away even as his car became inoperable from the damage. This is his second major driving incident in four years.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson recap the Spinks Sisters' 24th annual Fourth of July party — 100 people, a prayer circle, volleyball, a slip and slide, and scenes that made them want to stop and freeze the moment in their memories. They also discuss the contrast between what they saw at the party and what they saw in CNN's coverage of the historic Washington D.C. fireworks show, and reflect on World Cup tourists from around the world going viral saying they had never experienced this level of patriotism in their lives and that they were sorry for believing what their home country media told them about America.

We cover a guest on Joy Reid's podcast actively rooting for the U.S. to lose in the World Cup — not because of any team loyalty, but because a U.S. victory would benefit President Trump. We also note that Arizona Senator Mark Kelly spent the Fourth of July in a Mexico jersey at a World Cup watch party — and while anyone can cheer for whoever they want, doing it on America's 250th Independence Day as a sitting U.S. senator is a choice worth commenting on.

In our Digging Deep segment, a White House report on the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History finds that the museum has been ideologically captured — with its director on record saying her job is to problematize the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, to move attention away from what she calls an Anglo-centric focus on the American founding, and to use the museum's collection as a tool of social justice and activism. The report concludes the museum no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance but as a political instrument to divide and dispirit American citizens. We make the broader point that a museum which teaches only celebration is propaganda — but a museum that teaches only shame is propaganda too. And we return to a point worth making again: separating Black history into its own building while calling Black history absent from the National Museum of American History is not representation. It's segregation.

We also cover Sunny Hostin of The View saying that seeing an American flag in a neighborhood makes her feel unsafe as a Black woman — and we connect it to the report that FEMA workers under the Biden administration were instructed to pass over homes flying American flags because they were likely Trump supporters. We make the case clearly: the American flag is not a symbol of white supremacy. It is the flag of the Republic. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail — and if the only lens you have is racism, you will find racism in every American flag.

For our Bright Spot, President Trump officially launched Trump Accounts — ringing a bell in the Oval Office that simultaneously opened trading on both the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq for the first time in history from the White House. More than 6 million accounts have been opened for children under 18, with 1.4 million receiving a $1,000 federal pilot contribution at an annual management fee capped by law at 0.1%. Michael and Susan Dell donated more than $6 billion to the program. We call it what it is — teaching children to bet on America, building financial confidence, and giving kids a real starting point for wealth that no government program has ever offered at this scale.

And we close with 32-year-old Kelsey Findler, who spent 43 days alone in the Pacific Ocean rowing from Monterey, California to Hawaii — 2,400 miles with nothing but her boat and two oars — arriving at the Hawaii Yacht Club on July 3rd to become not only the youngest woman to complete the crossing, but the fastest ever, shattering the previous record by more than 40 days. 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 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!