You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 19, 2026.
We open with Tulsi Gabbard's parting shot as Director of National Intelligence — a new batch of declassified COVID origin documents that are now sitting on an official government website, fully indexed, available for any American to read. What they show, according to Gabbard, is that Dr. Anthony Fauci worked with politicized intelligence community leadership to suppress evidence of the lab leak theory, influence intelligence assessments, and mislead the very investigators who were asking him about research he himself was funding. We note the stunning circular logic — the intelligence community went to the man who funded the Wuhan lab and asked him whether the virus came from the lab he funded. He said no. They believed him. We also ask the question that still demands an answer — why did Joe Biden issue a sweeping preemptive pardon for a man who hadn't been charged with anything?
In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, first-time unemployment claims fell to 226,000, hovering near all-time lows, while gas prices dropped below $4 a gallon nationwide for the first time since the Iran conflict began — none of the economic doom the left predicted has come to pass. Then RFK Jr. announced that obesity rates in the United States have dropped for the first time in 50 years, down 2.5% since the start of Trump's second term — in a country where 48 cents of every federal tax dollar now goes to healthcare, with 90% of that spent on chronic disease. And Tulsi Gabbard's final official act was releasing files accusing Fauci of lying to Congress, lying to intelligence investigators, and covering up gain-of-function research — with Biden's preemptive pardon standing between accountability and the documents now in public view.
We also cover a federal judge clearing the way for the release of hours of Biden audio recordings — conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer in which Biden allegedly disclosed classified information, and the special counsel interview that led Robert Herr to say he wouldn't prosecute because Biden was too elderly and sympathetic a figure for any jury to convict. The same man who was still the sitting president of the United States at the time.
Our American Mama Terui Netterville joins the conversation on the World Cup tourists going viral across America — and she has been watching. Thousands of videos from visitors across Europe, Asia, and beyond who drove through the South, stopped at Buc-ee's and Waffle House, discovered free public restrooms and free water and air conditioning in stadiums, and posted online that everything they had been told about America was wrong. One visitor put it perfectly — if you want to hate the U.S., just listen to the media. If you want to love the U.S., just drive across it.
The Los Angeles City Council voted 10-5 to place a measure on the ballot that would allow non-citizens — including those in the country illegally — to vote in local elections and school board races. We ask what citizenship means if residency is sufficient, where the line stops once you detach voting from legal status, and what the Declaration of Independence says about who gets to institute a government and for whom.
In our Digging Deep segment, CNN conducted a poll asking Americans which source they trust most for political news. The number one answer was Fox News — at 5%. CNN came in second in its own survey at 2%. NPR and local news also came in at 2%. CBS was less than 1%. One man — Joe Rogan — was trusted by more people than the entire CBS News organization. We examine what this means: not just that big media is struggling, but that the organizations that used to capture 90% of the television audience in the 1950s through 1970s are now irrelevant because they stopped serving their audiences — and the audience went looking for something they could act