Speaker Johnson Live: The Farm Bill, ICE Funding, and Why the Grownups Have to Stay in Charge
Friday, May 8, 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 6, 2026.
We open with a story that perfectly illustrates the logical endpoint of socialist thinking in American cities — a Chicago alderman is calling for criminal charges against Walgreens for closing a store in a high-crime neighborhood. The charge? First degree corporate abandonment. We walk through why this is economically illiterate, morally backwards, and philosophically revealing — because when you criminalize a business for leaving a neighborhood your own policies made unlivable, you have officially crossed from governance into something else entirely. We trace the same pattern from San Francisco to Seattle to Portland, explain why crime causes poverty and not the other way around, and ask the most basic question in economics — if you want businesses to stay, why are you making it impossible for them to survive?
In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, Vivek Ramaswamy won the Ohio Republican gubernatorial primary with 83% of the vote, carrying every single county in the state — after the mainstream media spent months calling him a clown who couldn't win. Then the FBI raided the offices, marijuana dispensaries, and home of Virginia state Senate President Pro Tem Louise Lucas — one of the key architects of Virginia's redistricting effort — with a SWAT team, arresting multiple people. No specific charges were announced, but between the marijuana businesses, the redistricting allegations, and what appears to be a home health company, there may be a lot of smoke and a lot of fire. And in Indiana, five of the seven state senators who defied President Trump on redistricting and voted with Democrats to block new maps were voted out of office in Republican primaries — bringing Trump's primary endorsement record to approximately 95%.
Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson tackle the question of how much you actually share with your closest friends — and whether oversharing is a nervous habit, a trust issue, or just the way some people are wired. We get into the viral Barstool video of two former best friends publicly airing each other's secrets in real time, why the person who spills becomes the pariah even when she was wronged, why Teri's advice to her children is to keep secrets between themselves and God, and why the vault of true friendship should never have a combination that changes with the weather.
We get Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on the phone for an extended conversation covering some of the most significant legislative accomplishments of the current Congress. Johnson explains why getting all 12 appropriations bills passed in regular order — something that hadn't been done in years — is a bigger deal than most Americans realize, why the Christmas omnibus had become a bipartisan racket that nobody read and everybody funded, and how they're already starting the process again for next fiscal year. He also covers the Farm Bill, the border security and ICE funding reconciliation package that will fund those agencies for the next three years without a single Democratic vote, and the proposed rebranding of ICE to National Immigration Customs Enforcement — so the other side would have to say they want to defund NICE.
We also dig into Ilhan Omar's connection to the $250 million Minnesota COVID-era childcare and meal fraud scheme — specifically that a Minnesota House committee gave her office until May 5th to turn over documents and communications related to the nonprofits whose emails her office appears in repeatedly. May 5th passed. She turned over nothing.
We also get into the data center construction boom happening across America — and why AOC, Bernie Sanders, and the left are suddenly opposed to building the infrastructure America needs to beat China in the artificial intelligence race. We explain why losing the AI race to China isn't just an economic setback — it's a civilizational one.
For our Bright Spot, Max Davis lost his brother Beck to suicide on May 10th, 2023. He started a nonprofit called the Beck Davis Survivors of Loss Foundation and is now running a full marathon — 327 laps around the Washington Monument — to raise money for families dealing with grief. He's calling it the Washington Monument-a-thon, and people who've never met are showing up to run with him. His message to people who are struggling: think about all the people who are really out there and really do care about you.
And we close with the life of Ted Turner — who inherited his father's billboard company at 24, parlayed it into radio stations, traded those for a small Atlanta TV station, turned that into the first cable superstation, and then built CNN, the first 24-hour cable news network. Ted Turner passed away today at the age of 87. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.
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