What Makes America Great: 10th Annual Fourth of July Special — America at 250 - Part 1

What Makes America Great: 10th Annual Fourth of July Special — America at 250 - Part 1

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! See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Is America Still the Greatest Country on Earth?

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! See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

In 1948 We Knew by Morning — So Why in 2026 Are We Still Counting Votes Five Days Later?

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! See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Y'all Street Is Coming for Wall Street

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 [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

The T in TPS Stands for Temporary — and the Supreme Court Just Made the Left Say the Whole Word

You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for June 25, 2026. We open with the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling clearing the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian nationals — and we explain why this ruling is exactly right and why it took this long to get here. The T in TPS stands for temporary. It always did. The left shortened it to the acronym specifically so they wouldn't have to say the word. We connect it to Samuel Adams' warning that the tools of a tyrant pervert the plain meaning of words — and explain why a humanitarian program that has lasted 15 years and spawned a shadow immigration system was never what the law intended. In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, the U.S. Senate passed a war powers resolution demanding the U.S. cease military engagement with Iran — then President Trump called out specific Republican senators by name at a White House lunch, and the Senate voted on the exact same resolution again, with Rand Paul and Bill Cassidy flipping their votes. Then the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a sweep of major wins — ending asylum claims from those who haven't yet crossed the border, upholding the end of temporary protected status, striking down Hawaii's concealed carry ban as unconstitutional, and ruling in favor of Monsanto over claims that Roundup causes cancer. And a series of massive earthquakes — a 7.1 followed by a 7.5 — struck Venezuela, with President Trump immediately offering USAID and instructing all agencies to move quickly to help the country the U.S. now considers a new and great friend. We cover Rosie O'Donnell telling Jim Acosta's internet show that she doesn't think Trump's 2024 victory really happened and that she believes Kamala won — with no evidence, just the emotional need to reject a result that offended her politics. We note that Donald Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, that Kamala Harris doesn't even think Kamala won, and that the left's habit of calling Republicans election deniers while doing exactly that themselves is the purest form of projection. Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson debate whether party games kill the vibe or enhance it — and the answer, it turns out, depends entirely on timing. Throwing out Uno mid-conversation is a vibe killer. Showing up to a designated game night is a completely different experience. We also hear about a competitive grandmother who never let anyone win, a son-in-law who travels with board games, and the Parr family's ongoing Dungeons and Dragons campaign that has been running for a year and a half with six-hour sessions. In our Digging Deep segment, we read the Democratic Socialists of America's actual platform — all of it, including the pictures — and what we find is nothing short of a blueprint for revolution. They explicitly call for a new democratic constitution that would replace the current government with a single legislative branch — no Senate, no executive, no judiciary — with representation limited to workers, powerful labor unions, and social movements. This is not a party that wants to amend the Constitution. This is a party that wants to abolish it. We ask why the Democratic Party is allowing a party with a completely different platform to run its candidates in Democratic primaries — and we call the DSA exactly what it is: a parasite inside the Democratic Party whose first objective is to destroy its host. We also cover Letitia James publicly expressing unhappiness with Mamdani's primary wins — and we notice that her complaint, stripped of the language, is essentially that the new wave of progressive candidates don't look like the old wave of progressive candidates. When diversity reaches positions of power that threaten your own position of power, suddenly it becomes complicated. We note — with some genuine surprise — that Mayor Mamdani has added 580 new police officers to the NYPD, triggering protests from the very Democratic Socialists of America activists who helped elect him, who are now protesting outside City Hall because they feel he has abandoned the cause of defunding the police. For our Bright Spot, Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion in the asylum case is a masterclass in the plain meaning of words — ruling that a person who has not crossed the border has not arrived in the United States, and therefore cannot claim asylum under a law that only applies to those who have arrived in the United States. He quotes the American Heritage Dictionary. He gives everyday examples. He is doing what every judge should do — letting words mean what they say. We call this a genuine bright spot. Joy Reid says no Black person is really excited about the 4th of July because it's a symbol of slavery. We remind her that the Declaration of Independence — written during the era of slavery — declared it a self-evident truth that all men are created equal, and that statement was used to justify abolition. The United States was the first nation to ban the transatlantic slave trade, six months before Britain. That's what the Fourth of July represents. And we close with the discovery that the Lincoln Memorial has a 15,000 square foot basement — called the Lincoln Memorial Undercroft — that has existed since the building was constructed in 1922 and is now open to the public for the first time, featuring a signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation and graffiti left on the walls by the workers who built 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! See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.