Yesterday Today Tomorrow

Inseong J Kim: Hello, this is Inseong Kim from Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Our title today is "Re-establishing Americanism." Today, we’re looking at drones and the military-industrial complex in the public at a crossroads. We’ve been hearing about these terms, and we’re re-examining them today.

This program starts from something I just listened to on Fox Morning with Maria: that the US is buying and using Chinese-made drones in sensitive security contexts. Maria framed it as "the fox watching the hen house." It’s a very interesting statement. The argument is that this reflects an 80-year pattern of institutional changes.

The verbatim transcript of the specific line about the drone over the White House could not be located, so it is described rather than quoted. This is real. This is how much we’re not critically thinking. The underlying policy story is dramatic enough on its own, and the claim is that the last 80 years reflect a deliberate evolution of communism.

We see a lot of fruit of it today, but the seeds were planted a long time ago, even during the Cold War—even right after World War II. The Cold War was a result of fully implementing communism in certain countries, but it wasn’t over. The seed was being planted in US soil after World War II already. Corrupting government is part of that long-term goal. It is a long-running political argument with real historical documents behind it, but it’s just how we interpret it. We’re beginning to see it in our time. This piece presents that argument. Its strongest actual documents are people's side and mainstream counter-arguments. It all holds up to an issue that we are facing.

Again, the fox is watching the hen house. This is not about which party is right. We have to learn to step back or step out and see the history from 80 years ago all the way to today. How much has changed? The economic patterns changed, the culture changed, the ideology changed. Now we're facing a tremendous change in our children's lives—what they believe and what they are hearing. Next week's program will cover raising children in our difficult times.

But let's just understand, going back, how do we re-establish Americanism? If we don't know what it was and what it is about, then how can we re-establish it? Right now, it's chaotic, and that is the goal. Corrupt the government, then complain and distrust the government so all the things that we believed were false. Therefore, communism is the answer. That's the trajectory that we're being led to.

This idea about what is happening in New York and other areas is that we're embracing different ideologies over what we've treasured as Americans. We are freedom lovers. We have a core value of valuing the individual's rights and people here. We have to re-establish that. Otherwise, we are in that train altogether.

Americanism at its core is the idea that a nation can be held together by a shared creed rather than a bloodline. We are America. We're not connected by blood. Political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset called the American Creed liberty, equality before the law, self-government, individual opportunity, and deep structural suspicion of concentrated power. That was the idea from the beginning to today. Away from kingship, we want to be independent.

The Declaration of Independence framed government as something that exists by the consent of the governed, not something handed down from monarchs or religious structures. It is handed down to this basically self-governing with critical thinking, which is what humans really desire ultimately. The Constitution built that suspicion of power directly into the architecture: three branches checking each other, power split between the federal and state governments, elections as a release valve, and a free press as an early warning system.

The free press that Maria mentioned—she said it well—is the fox watching the hen house. What kind of system do we have that we call China an adversary, enemy, or competitor? However we say it, global does not mean we just give everything away—our identity, our treasure, our security. That's called surrender. We can have a free market. We can just have free trade.

The issue is giving up everything to another country. We have to think about that because other countries have bloodline connections. Not 100%, but every region has that. America doesn't; we don't have that. So how do we be united? It's one idea: everyone who came from other countries to America has one idea, which is freedom. The reason this idea prevailed is that America has free corrections, but we've still survived.

Pioneer work is journalism. There is such a danger when the truth comes out in the media for us to critically evaluate what is happening today. If we ban freedom of speech, that's the number one issue. If that is gone, then there is no freedom—absolutely there's no freedom. Basically, indirectly and covertly hijacking all the main media and telling us a different story than what's going on and what it is. Then we think we are living in a free country, but we don't.

Allowing journalists to speak the truth is the first line that we have to protect. This system was built with tools to correct itself: courts, elections, free press, and a citizenry culturally expected to be told when something has gone wrong and to expect someone to be held accountable when it has. These are very important issues. Over and over again, through danger, we overcome and prevail.

There are many historical events where we faced darkness and crisis. We always talk about Watergate over and over again because it didn't come fully to light. People are still looking for why and how it happened—is it a simple burglary issue or whatever else we've been hearing in the media? There are deeper things going on. To re-establish Americanism, it comes from the public. The people need to be more alert and more eager to be educated rather than saying, "I don't want to hear it. I don't want to know anything. It's so negative and it depresses me. I want to live my life; leave me alone."

That is the core problem that we've had here for over 80 years. But there were always pioneers on the frontline. Journalists brought the issues that were encountered by every generation. They didn't give up. It always comes out. Right now, a lot of issues with COVID are coming out—all the things that we didn't know at the time. Still, people are questioning it, and those people are precious because they don't give up the narrative they were given and keep questioning logically and scientifically.

If that rhetoric is manipulated, then people want to know what it is about. The policy fight has been going back and forth for years. In 2023, Congress passed the American Security Drone Act as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, barring federal agencies from buying and operating drones made in China starting in December 2025. This kind of issue should not be divided politically by which side is supporting or not supporting. Certain things, okay—some of the items we're using, gadgets and simple items, that might be okay. I don't know how dangerous those things are even these days.

But national defense issues—we're importing those. First of all, I covered the whole thing about rare earth minerals that we cannot process here, so we have to have China make them and bring them here. So Chinese drones are everywhere, surveilling us—not just the citizens, but the White House. It's something serious.

I was in Switzerland almost a month ago, and I got a ticket. Nobody stopped us, no policeman stopped our car or gave us a ticket or anything. Then we got a mail. We got a speeding ticket. It's completely surveilled in Switzerland, and it's everywhere. It's happening here too, and something about it affects our freedom. In January 2026, the Commerce Department quietly withdrew the broader proposal after meeting with DJI in December 2025. It was reportedly part of a diplomatic thaw ahead of trade talks with Beijing. Around the same time, the FCC, acting on separate national security authority, had already banned the approval of foreign-made drones and components, including DJI's, from its covered list.

These are happening in our time. In January 2026, following fresh determination from the Department of War, the FCC exempts certain drones and components from the same ban through the start of 2027. In June 2026, Republican Pat Harrigan introduced the American Drone Manufacturing Dominance Act, proposing $1.5 billion to help US agencies and manufacturers get off Chinese drones entirely with a hard cutoff at the start of 2027.

Let's pause for a minute. We've been hearing a lot about the industrial complex. Eisenhower said that years ago, right after World War II. Today, we cannot even make a weapon. We don't even have a processing company of rare earth minerals to make a weapon. So we're still talking about the industrial complex? It's something to think about. When my husband was in the Air Force, I was hearing a lot about the Air Force shutting down. I was thinking, "What's going on? Why are they shutting down the Air Force?" Today, it makes sense why that was happening.

There are some issues we need to learn—how to think with data and statistics. We have to concern ourselves with national security in our country, and not in an extreme way like a pendulum. But at the same time, protecting our country matters with our freedom. Strip out the acronym, and the picture is this: multiple parts of the federal government have simultaneously moved to ban Chinese drones from sensitive US use while granting exceptions that keep them in use, often for the same underlying reason: cost, market dominance, and diplomatic timing pulling in opposite directions within the same administration.

Let's just talk about other things, like cheap items that China can make and we don't have to make here. Those items we have to re-examine. Do we need them? Is it necessary? But at the end of the day, throughout history, none of the countries, none of the tribes, none of the nations allow other groups of people to make their weapons. This is not even critical thinking. What happened from 1995 to today is much more than just simple economic decisions.

If they didn't think about shipping all the factories because of the cost, we can talk about it making sense. But not the military equipment. That we cannot even have the resources is something that we have to revisit and seriously check. That shouldn't be an excuse that we have to ask China to give us a leverage for the rare earth mineral. It's not even common sense for a person like me, and I'm not a professional scholar talking about geopolitical issues.

So that contradiction, more than any single quote at what Fox's "watching the hen house" framing is describing, is something we all have to think about. Is that okay that another country—it doesn't matter whether it's China or not—doesn't have to be a threat we feel like, but any country's making of our security surveillance system is something weird to me.

Whether or not any Chinese-made drone is literally flown over the White House, the underlying vulnerability of the US security apparatus being materially dependent on Chinese-made hardware is real and documented. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a real, documented fact—that's where we are at. It's actively being argued about in Congress and the FCC right now, not a fringe claim.

Basically, it just gives us a whole picture from 80 years ago to today. If we don't see how it gradually evolved in the name of diplomacy and also economic, reasonable, scientific decisions we made, yet where we're at today is a totally different picture than how it presented 80 years ago, 70 years ago, 60 years ago, 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago—the transition is very fast.

The phrase "military-industrial complex" is younger than 80 years. President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address was January 17, 1961. That's after the Korean War. The Korean War is a forgotten war. We did not consider that we won the battle; we stopped in the middle. Yet we are talking about this military-industrial complex and how we got here today.

I shared a little bit that I came home and I was not comfortable talking about feeling like I’d like war. That's not what I am standing for. I'm from South Korea; I know what war does. But defending our country—without defending, there is no national security. So, defending our country with the countries that created issues in our time, and we're still depending on them, is a critical issue that all of us as Americans have to be aware of and have a voice in.

It's not just the media, but every citizen has to be aware of it and understand and have a voice over it. All the things happening, we need to see in a critical view because we have so much toxic, unfiltered propaganda messages in social media to change the whole mindset of how we do things in America. A free market does not mean we're giving up how we live in America from the foundations that we had.

Re-establishing Americanism is needed today because we do not want to lose who we are and what this special country of America is about. If we don't share our ideas, then we'll be shared with other ideas than our idea of Americanism. It's going to be taken over and it's going to be gone. So we have to make a choice. It doesn't come from government. It comes from individuals—us, everyone—to protect this valuable idea about self-governing, having freedom, and having freedom of speech that is ours.

Sometimes I feel, many times whenever I come to my radio show, I feel not comfortable. Every time I go home and think about why I have to feel this way in America. Everyone who is listening to the program, it has to come from individuals—every one of us—to be American. Re-establishing Americanism doesn't come from outside or top-down. It comes from within us. Thank you for listening to Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. We'll be back next week. Thank you.