57% of the Prisoners Cooper Released Committed New Crimes — and He Wants to Be a Senator
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Stephen Parr and Louis R. Avallone. This is the full show for July 21, 2026.
We open with a 29-year-old Democratic Socialist named Milat Kiros who just defeated a 15-term congresswoman in Colorado's Democratic primary — with the backing of the DSA and Bernie Sanders — and who has told voters exactly what she believes: that America is exploitative and extractive, that ICE is a terror apparatus, that Israel's military aid should end, and that the existing world order needs a reckoning. We note that she arrived in America because her father won the U.S. diversity visa lottery — a program that saved her family from an Ethiopian civil war and famine — and that she earned degrees at Washington College and Notre Dame Law School on American soil. We are not speculating about her worldview. She has put it in writing. And she is one general election away from Congress in a district Republicans haven't won in half a century. We say what needs to be said: believe people when they tell you who they are.
In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, the federal government suspended $867.5 million in Medicaid payments to California and $199 million to Minnesota after CMS reviews flagged high-risk fraud in home health and other services — with CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz saying the administration is done chasing stolen funds after they've already left the building. Then New Jersey's Democratic Governor Mikey Sherrill revealed that a software glitch allowed 6,000 non-citizens to register to vote in 2023 and 2024, with 400 of them actually casting ballots — a story the governor got ahead of before the DOJ could, and one that makes the case for the SAVE Act more powerfully than any speech. And 100 New York state lawmakers sent letters to the congressional delegation demanding ICE be abolished — the same ICE that exists because Congress decided in 2002 that someone should enforce federal immigration law.
We also cover the Trump administration's discovery that the federal government has been sending nearly $100 million per year to dead people — and has now stopped. The fix required asking one basic question: is the person we're sending this check to still alive? That question, apparently revolutionary in Washington, was answered by comparing 885 million federal payments against death records. Government doesn't have a revenue problem. It has a stewardship problem.
Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson debate whether they'd go back to old TV over smart TVs — and the answer is a resounding yes, for reasons that go beyond nostalgia. Streaming costs more than cable ever did, smart TVs are listening and tracking everything, you can no longer skip commercials, the content is ideologically slanted, and nobody can find anything. Teri misses Blockbuster. Kimberly misses the DVR. Both agree that horizontal screens make sense because human eyes are horizontal — and that vertical video on phones is a waste of the aspect ratio God gave us.
We dig deep into former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper's early release of 4,234 prisoners following an NAACP lawsuit arguing that incarceration is racist — a number that exceeded the 3,500 agreed to in the settlement and included 99 sex offenders and 24 people convicted of murder. Within five years, 2,412 of those released — a 57% recidivism rate — had committed new crimes and been rearrested, including charges of rape and murder. Among those released and later arrested for murder was the man accused of stabbing Ukrainian immigrant Iryana Zyrutska to death on a Charlotte train. Roy Cooper is now the frontrunner for the North Carolina Senate seat. We say plainly: we should stop rewarding failure. There are people dead in North Carolina today because their governor let violent criminals out of prison to kill again.
We also cover the State Department's follow-up report confirming that Cuba is actively helping Iran, Hamas, and other jihadist organizations expand their influence throughout the Western Hemisphere — connecting the dots between communist Cuba's survival dependence on American adversaries and the broader axis of pressure being applied to the United States from multiple directions simultaneously. No single threat defeats us. Together, they create friction, consume resources, divide attention, and complicate national security. All of it from 50 miles off the coast of Florida.
For our Bright Spot, Texas Representative Andy Hopper wrote a letter responding to a Mexican senator who demanded that Texas stop enforcing its border laws because migrants were dying trying to cross illegally. Hopper's response is worth reading in full — citing Texas independence, the Alamo, San Jacinto, and the sovereign right of every nation to determine who enters its territory. He also told Mexico directly: we will not accept border policy instruction from a government that has allowed cartels to dominate vast regions of its own territory. Abandoning enforcement would not save lives. It would guarantee the cartels more victims, more profits, and more power. We call it exactly what it is — a bright spot.
We also cover New York City's welfare rolls hitting 865,000 cash assistance recipients under Mayor Mamdani — up from a low of 336,000 under Mayor Bloomberg — and note that a democratic socialist does not view this as a crisis. He views it as an achievement. We view it as what happens when you promise free things and then wonder why more people ask for them.
We also discuss the case of a 29-year-old woman who died after a ChatGPT conversation that increasingly centered on themes of sacrifice, death, and resurrection — with the AI telling her she would need to die before becoming who she was meant to be. We make the distinction between a mentally healthy person who reads letting your old self die as a metaphor for personal growth, and someone already struggling with depression or delusion who reads it as instruction. AI is a language tool. It produces eloquent, resonant language. It does not know who is reading it.
And we close with Scottish runner Josh Kerr breaking the world mile record in London — running the mile in 3 minutes and 42 seconds to break Hicham El Guerrouj's record that had stood since 1999, the longest anyone had held the official world mile record since records began. In front of 60,000 fans, a man ran a mile in the time it takes most of us to find the remote. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.
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