You're listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for August 20, 2026.

We open with a chilling case out of Albany, New York, where 35-year-old Jessica Bowie stands accused of pledging allegiance to ISIS and plotting to bomb the New York State Capitol while also expressing a desire to harm President Trump. We use the case to dig into the theological roots of Islamist violence, the constitutional line between religious liberty and criminal conduct, and the possibility that mental illness predates her radicalization. From there we hit our Top 3 stories: ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergolais taking the Fifth before three House committees, New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani suing his own City Council over a $10,000 teacher's aide stipend he says bypasses collective bargaining, and former Congressman Eric Swalwell getting his devices seized by the FBI amid his long-running entanglement with suspected Chinese spy Fang Fang. We then turn to the backlash over fashion designer Marc Jacobs saying he'd have styled Luigi Mangione for his murder trial, and we push back hard on the idea that a defendant's right to counsel translates into a right to admiration.

Our American Mamas segment welcomes Teri Netterville to unpack the emotionally fraught trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother charged with strangling her three children, weighing the medical system's failures, the online conspiracy theories swirling around her ex-husband, and the difficulty of holding both empathy and accountability at once.

We Dig Deep on the stalled SAVE Act and the citizenship-verification fight in the Senate, debating whether Majority Leader John Thune is protecting the filibuster or just protecting himself, before breaking down the historic wave of congressional primary losses this cycle, from scandal-driven defeats like Cory Mills and Andy Ogles to Trump-related casualties like Thomas Massie and Dan Crenshaw, DSA insurgents unseating longtime incumbents, and redistricting fights that pitted sitting members against each other. We also examine California's Proposition 40 wealth tax, walking through why taxing paper net worth instead of cash could drive founders and investment straight out of the state.

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