Born in North Korea in 1993, Yeonmi Park sought to escape that country’s stifling dictatorship by fleeing to China in 2007. Sadly, she was captured there by human traffickers who sold her as a piece of meat. Escaping to the U.S. in 2014, she became a student at Columbia University where she discovered that in many ways it was less an educational institution than a purveyor of Woke Ideology, yielding a culture in which the values of integrity, self-discipline, self-awareness and hard work had been replaced by the superficial Leftist notion that Privilege and Oppression are the engineers of all human outcomes. Seeing this narrative as a recipe for a self-indulgent decline into a childish sense of victimization, she said of her fellow students in a 2023 interview with the N.Y. Post: “I was sold for $200 as a sex slave in the 21at Century under the same sky. And they say they’re oppressed because people can’t follow their pronouns they invent every day.”
While hardly idealizing America, Yeonmi’s basic message is that the Left’s portrayal of it as a hotbed of racism, oppression and injustice is a ludicrous exaggeration, the freedoms and opportunities it offers being mere fantasies in other parts of the world. Indeed if any political faction is a threat to those freedoms and opportunities, she says, it is the Left with its self-righteous insistence on cancelling, firing or prosecuting anyone who disagrees with it! Its arrogant abuse of government authority, she suggests, is ironically reminiscent of the dictatorship she escaped in North Korea!
A published author and confirmed conservative, Yeonmi recently [Dec. 11] appeared in a photo on X with fellow “freedom fighters” [i.e., conservatives] James O ‘Keefe and Eric Metaxas. She appended to the photo: “Thank you God, for America and for keeping it free.” Her 2023 book, “While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America,” is basically an expose on the ironic extent to which today’s “liberals” actually represent the chief threat to the liberal values upon which America was founded.