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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.