Eric Church's Perfect Speech, China's Imperfect Intentions, and a Marine Who Didn't Wait for Permission
Thursday, May 14, 2026
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You're listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for May 13, 2026.
We open with the China story that keeps getting bigger — the day after we covered the Arcadia, California mayor who pleaded guilty to acting as a Chinese Communist Party agent, a man named Lou John Wang was convicted in New York City for operating a secret Chinese police station — kidnapping dissidents, pressuring critics of the CCP, and running what amounts to a foreign government's law enforcement operation on American soil. We connect it to Trump and Rubio's diplomatic trip to Beijing, explain what China's secret police stations actually do, and make the case that China's infiltration of American life — through supply chains, universities, real estate near military bases, and now city halls and police stations — is unlike anything any hostile nation has ever accomplished inside our borders. We ask the question every American should be asking — how much access has the Chinese Communist Party already built while we were telling ourselves economics and national security were separate conversations?
In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, President Trump landed in Beijing with a delegation that included Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wang — arriving to a red carpet welcome and plans to push for Chinese market access for U.S. businesses. Then the U.S. Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as the next chair of the Federal Reserve on a 54-45 vote — with Democrat John Fetterman the only crossover — signaling future interest rate cuts that sent equity markets surging. And Salem Communications — home to Hugh Hewitt, Joe Piscopo, Charlie Kirk, Mike Gallagher, and American Ground Radio partnerships in New York, D.C., and the Salem Podcast Network — has been acquired by Waterstone in a deal CEO David Santrella says will accelerate the company's faith-forward mission for years to come.
Our American Mama Teri Netterville joins us to talk about country singer Eric Church's commencement speech at North Carolina — which she calls the single greatest commencement speech she has ever heard. Using the six strings of a guitar as his framework, Church walked graduates through faith as the foundational low E string, family as the A string, their life partner as the D string at the heart of the instrument, ambition and resilience on the G string, community on the B string — where he urged graduates to put down roots, volunteer, and build the thing their community needs even if the internet never sees it — and individual greatness on the high E string, the thinnest string most easily bent by outside pressure. We walk through every string and explain why this speech deserves to be heard by every graduating class in America.
We dig deep into a new Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth report called From Learning Recession to Learning Recovery — which identifies a nationwide decline in student achievement in math and reading that began in 2013 and was just as severe before the pandemic as during it. The researchers blame social media. We disagree. We connect the timeline directly to Common Core — the untested, nationally imposed educational standards pushed by the Gates Foundation and adopted by 46 states by 2013 — that confused children, baffled parents who could no longer help with math homework, and produced exactly the results you'd expect from conducting a nationwide experiment on children with no prior testing. And we note that Louisiana — which abandoned Common Core's methodology and adopted the Science of Reading — now leads the nation in educational improvement.
We also cover the DOJ's settlement with PayPal over their $530 million Economic Opportunity Fund — a 2020 program that tied eligibility explicitly to race and national origin in violation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. We make the case that you cannot achieve fairness by creating an unfair system, and that civil rights laws were designed to stop discrimination — not rebrand it.
We also dig into Senator Tommy Tuberville's proposal to establish English as the official language of American schools — and make the case that a shared language is not about race, it's about unity, assimilation, and the Tower of Babel.
For our Bright Spot, a Marine veteran with a concealed carry permit in Massachusetts was already going car to car helping people escape and exchanging fire with an active shooter on Memorial Drive in Cambridge before police arrived. The shooter — who had previously been given half the recommended prison sentence for shooting at cops in 2020 — was stopped before anyone was killed. Nobody's covering this story. We are.
We also note that Rudy Giuliani has recovered from pneumonia, left the hospital after being on a ventilator and in the ICU, and remind listeners that God is not finished with us until He says so.
And we close with Logan, Cody, and Brody — three high schoolers in Cooper City, Florida who pulled over to help a man they thought had a flat tire and discovered he was having a heart attack. They called 911. Emergency crews arrived. Diego survived. His son said, God didn't send angels with wings. He sent those boys. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.
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