North Korean defector Yeonmi Park told Fox News that America’s future “is as bleak as North Korea” after she attended Columbia University in New York City.
Park and her mother escaped North Korea in 2007 when she was 13-years-old. They crossed into China, but human traffickers caught them. They sold Park and her mother into slavery.
Christian missionaries helped Park and her mother escape to Mongolia across the Gobi Desert. They settled in South Korea.
Park published her memoir In Order to Live in 2015.
From Fox News:
One of several hundred North Korean defectors settled in the United States, Park, 27, transferred to Columbia University from a South Korean university in 2016 and was deeply disturbed by what she found.”I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park said in an interview with Fox News. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.
The first warning sign came at orientation when Park admitted her love for classic literature.
Park mentioned Jane Austen. A university staff member chastised her, “Then she said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.'”
English is Park’s third language. We all know it is not an easy language to learn. A lot of native speakers butcher it every day:
She was also shocked and confused by issues surrounding gender and language, with every class asking students to announce their preferred pronouns.”English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?””It was chaos,” said Yeonmi. “It felt like the regression in civilization.””Even North Korea is not this nuts,” she admitted. “North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”
Park accused the universities of denying Americans the “ability to think critically”:
“In North Korea I literally believed that my Dear Leader [Kim Jong-un] was starving,” she recalled. “He’s the fattest guy – how can anyone believe that? And then somebody showed me a photo and said ‘Look at him, he’s the fattest guy. Other people are all thin.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, why did I not notice that he was fat?’ Because I never learned how to think critically.””That is what is happening in America,” she continued. “People see things but they’ve just completely lost the ability to think critically.”
Park eventually learned to keep her mouth shut and not argue “maintain a good GPA and graduate.”
Park compared cancel culture to Kim Jung Un’s regime on Sean Hannity’s show on Monday night:
Park said that her collegiate curriculum of censored speech in the name of “safe spaces” and instilled hatred of White Americans reminded her of the North Korean “American bastard” indoctrination.”My enemy used to be Kim Jong Un: I have been on Kim Jong Un’s killing list of people for many years because I spoke out, and my original family got punished but now ironically enough, so many Marxists and Communists and Maoists and Leninists are now are sending me death threats,” she continued, calling the U.S. cancel culture a sad “irony.”She added that she is afraid to speak her mind in public, especially on campus, because of the cancel culture.”I crossed the Gobi desert to be free and now I thought I live in a country where I can say what I believe and have my freedom to think. However, now I have to constantly censor my speech because in the name off a safe place,” she said.”Columbia told us [what] we can’t talk about and I am so concerned if America is not free, I think there is no place else left that is free — that’s why it’s really alarming to me,” said Park.
Park also could not believe how every professor blamed white men for society’s problems. The way white men colonized Africa and Asia messed “up everything and they are the ones who need to be blamed.”
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