American Ground Radio
You’re listening to American Ground Radio with Stephen Parr and Louis R. Avallone. This is the full show for July 14, 2026. We open with the Democratic Socialists of America's national co-chair going on record calling for the abolition of the United States Senate — and we explain why this isn't a fringe idea anymore. The DSA wants to replace the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court with a single legislative body allocated purely by population, rename it the People's Bureau, and hand it public ownership of the nation's largest corporations. We walk through what that actually means — that seven or eight major cities could effectively govern the entire country, that the constitutional protections for smaller states would vanish, and that the structure they're proposing is the same one that produced the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, and Communist China. We also note that 51% of the DSA's National Policy Committee openly identifies with communism, Marxism, or Marxist-Leninism — not according to conservative critics, but according to a report cited by the former Democratic chief counsel for the House Judiciary Committee. The Democratic Party needs to decide whether it is going to continue letting these people run under its banner. In our Top 3 Things You Need to Know, President Trump formally notified Congress that hostilities with Iran have resumed — opening a new 60-day window under the War Powers Act after Iran repeatedly violated the ceasefire and continued attacking civilian shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Then inflation dropped from 4.2% to 3.5% last month — the largest single-month decrease in four years — driven largely by falling gas prices during the ceasefire, with core inflation down to 2.6%. And Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett testified jointly before Congress requesting increased security funding — with Barrett revealing that six weeks ago her teenage son opened the front door to find their street filled with police cars responding to a swatting attack on their home. We also weigh in on President Trump's signature appearing on the new $100 bill as part of America's 250th anniversary commemoration — and we have a genuine disagreement about it. It's a milestone that comes once in a nation's history and deserves recognition. But putting a sitting president's name on currency in circulation is outside American tradition, starts to look like the kind of thing emperors and monarchs do, and gives his critics an easy target that's hard to defend. Our American Mama Teri Netterville makes the case that moms are still better matchmakers than any dating app ever invented — and backs it up with evidence. Three couples she personally set up are now married, including her own daughter Summer and Louisiana Tech baseball captain Phillip Matulia, whom Teri identified as the right match before her daughter was even willing to consider it. She also shares the story of Andrea Swift — Taylor's mother — who heard that Travis Kelce loves his mother, said ding ding ding, and the rest is history. Terry's conclusion: we know our children. Apps know your data. There's a difference. In our Digging Deep segment, a Fort Worth police officer threatened street preachers Richard Pankoski and David Grisham with disorderly conduct citations at a Pride parade — telling them directly that if someone is offended by their talking, that constitutes a problem warranting a citation. We explain why this is not a close constitutional question. The First Amendment does not exist to protect popular speech. It exists precisely to protect the kind of speech that offends people. The Fort Worth police chief acknowledged the officers were wrong — but we push back on his framing. They weren't wrong in the manner they addressed it. They were wrong to address it at all. Religious speech enjoys the same constitutional protection as secular speech. If marchers get to publicly celebrate what scripture calls sin, preachers get to publicly call it sin. We then turn to Zoran Mamdani's New York City — where Manhattan's average one-bedroom rent has hit an all-time high of nearly $5,500 a month and Brooklyn is setting its own records, with critics calling the housing situation DEFCON 1. We connect it directly to Mamdani's rent freeze threats, which gave every landlord in the city a powerful incentive to raise rents before the freeze could take effect, and to congestion pricing, which is now making it financially attractive to live inside Manhattan rather than commute — driving up rents from the demand side. The left created this crisis with its own policies and is now running on those same policies as the solution. For our Bright Spot, President Trump and Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi announced that U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by September 30th — ending a 23-year military presence that peaked at 170,000 troops and is now down to roughly 2,000. We also cover Iraq signing new oil deals with Chevron and other American companies to build pipelines running from Iraq through Turkey to Europe — bypassing the Strait of Hormuz entirely — which would permanently reduce Iranian leverage over global energy markets. And we close with 28-year-old Rishi Sharma, who at 18 became curious about World War II, interviewed one veteran, then another, then another, until curiosity became an obsession — and he has now spent every single day of the last ten years interviewing veterans of the Greatest Generation, preserving 3,000 firsthand accounts of American history on hard drives and SD cards before those voices are gone forever. 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.
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