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 t
