North Korean Defector Yeonmi Park: Is America on the Road to Ruin?

“The tactics that are being used in America right now to control people are the same tactics the North Korean regime used to control us and enslave us eventually,” says North Korean defector Yeonmi Park.

She’s the author of the new book, “While Time Remains: A North Korean Girl’s Search for Freedom in America.”

“This is our moment of cultural revolution in America,” Park says. “Once the American system goes down, then what do we have left? … The way of China … the way of North Korea.”

In George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” “when the young animals were born, they [didn’t] even know life before the revolution. Like when I was born in North Korea, I did not even know that I was oppressed. I did not know that life could be different … Easily, with a few generations, that’s possible,” Park says.

We discuss the victimhood pseudo-religion she sees taking over America, the manipulation of language, and the fight to preserve the ideals of this country.

“In North Korea, we don’t have inequality. But we are all dying from starvation … The enemy is poverty, not inequality,” Park says.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Yeonmi Park, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Yeonmi Park:
Thank you, I’m so happy to be back here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Yeonmi, congratulations on your new book, While Time Remains. I really enjoyed reading through it. The obvious question is, what is the time running out for here. What is it that you’re getting at?

Ms. Park:
The subtitle of the book is, A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America. I actually did not expect to come to America and have to look for freedom. You would expect America to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. When I came to America, unfortunately, I went to Columbia University, and there I was reminded of a lot of things that I saw in North Korea that were happening in America. Americans were not able to recognize those threats the way I could because they never lived in a truly oppressive country.

For them maybe it was just a new phenomenon. I don’t think they understood what it really meant. The reason I wrote this book is to try to wake up America to see the threats as they’re happening in the country. The tactics that are being used in America right now to control people were the same tactics the North Korean regime used to control us and enslave us eventually.

Mr. Jekielek:
I remember in our last interview, I asked you if you think it’s possible for America to become like North Korea? North Korea is unimaginable to most people here. You still think that’s possible?

Ms. Park:
It’s very possible. Living through the pandemic, that’s when I really understood that America is not immune to oppression. This country can totally become like China or North Korea if individuals stop defending their liberty.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let me dig into a few things here that really got me thinking. One, you reference Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s quote, “the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart.” Back in 1978, and you’re probably familiar with this, he gave the Harvard Commencement speech. Before that, he had exposed the Soviet Union for what it was. He had won the Nobel Prize eight years earlier. He was this hero coming out of a very despotic regime and everyone understood this. But after this Harvard address, he wasn’t so popular anymore.

Ms. Park:
Right.

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you remember this?

Ms. Park:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
I thought to myself, wait a second, Yeonmi pulled a Solzhenitsyn.

Ms. Park:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
What do you think?

Ms. Park:
That’s what he did, right. It’s amazing work of exposing the true horror of communism. But it’s like what he says, in every human being there’s no perfect angel or evil. Humans are capable of both. We were the ones that created Nazi Germany and put human beings into the gas chambers. We were the ones who were dying in the gas chamber.

What makes us do good is almost what kind of system that we are in, and that’s what I understand now. It’s not that some people are born with a dark heart, they are going to kill other people. That’s what the Chinese regime did during Mao, killing their own citizens and starving them. It’s for us to remember that it’s not magically everybody is going to do good or magically everyone is going to do bad.

It’s almost the system that we put ourselves into, and that system brings out which side. It can bring out the good side and it can bring out the worst part. And us recognizing that, what it means to be human, that’s very important.

Mr. Jekielek:
Specifically with respect to this Harvard address, what Solzhenitsyn did was, he called out the American elites.

Ms. Park:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right. The people running the show, everyone was expecting he would tell them how great they were and thank the people there for helping him. He didn’t do that. He said, “Yes, of course you have some great things here, but I don’t think I would wish your system on my home country. “ People were shocked and stunned and wondered, “How could he?”

In your case, you could have very easily been very popular, going to the Met Gala every year. You talk about that in this book and what a surreal experience that was. But it’s almost like because you chose to be a truth teller, that caused you some trouble.

Ms. Park:
Actually, you’re saying that I could be the darling of this movement of victimhood. I’m a woman. I was raped. I was sold and I can complain all day about how horrible men are. Because all the men that I met since I was 13 were all rapists. I can totally make the case for the world that men are truly horrible.

Actually, when I was trying to write my second book, there were a lot of people trying to force me to write that book on how hard it is to be a woman, or write a book on how horrible America’s treatment is towards black men, and comparing the American prison system to the North Korean concentration system to show how America is so brutal towards black men. Of course if I wrote that book, I would be on the New York Times bestseller list right now.

When I was trying to do my audiobook, we couldn’t find a narrator. They would keep bailing out, and they would not want to narrate my book. Eventually, we got a lady and she wanted to use a pseudonym, after we went through 11 people. It was like just finding a narrator who wanted to narrate the book, not even the writing of the book, was a real challenge.

That’s when I was thinking people are afraid. This is a really shocking thing to see how Americans are afraid and not acknowledging they are living in a somewhat oppressive country. Of course, the extent is never going to be like North Korea and China. I’m not even saying that. But we are on a path to getting there if we don’t turn back. We are definitely getting closer every day, especially with the education system, and especially in the current climate where they say your speech is violence. If you say the wrong thing and it’s politically incorrect, then you are spreading hate.

Mr. Jekielek:
You say, “My life’s purpose is to fight for human rights, especially for North Koreans.” But I think it’s broader. A number of the people at Columbia where you went to school and many other places, your cohort, would say, I’m fighting for human rights. We need to be safe and be able to be secure in our thoughts. We don’t want to be exposed to dangerous things. They might imagine themselves as fighting for human rights, actually.

Ms. Park:
They do.

Mr. Jekielek:
What do you think about that?

Ms. Park:
I was actually studying economics for the first two years. For the remaining two years I studied human rights, and then got a human rights degree with my BA at Columbia. It was really shocking sitting in the classroom. The professors or students would say that healthcare is a human right. The rights of LGBTQ+ are human right. Universal income is a human right.

What human rights means to me has currently lost meaning. I’m so sorry to say that. When people say I’m a human rights activist, that’s not what I mean. What human rights means to me is the right to pursue your life in a land where there is no infringement of your speech or your religion or your movement and your thoughts. It wasn’t about me demanding that the country give me free education, free healthcare, free housing, and free universal income. It wasn’t about my entitlement.

But in America what it has become currently is that human rights means that my feelings rise over facts, that if I feel gender fluid or like some unicorn or cat or anything in any kind of spectrum, then I have a right to be respected for that. I don’t even know what to say to that. It’s a mental condition.

It is really bizarre in the 21st century that you can’t understand that science is saying that men and women are different. Somehow, that a man cannot be a woman is controversial. And for them, it’s a human right for them to be fully recognized as a man, as a woman, or whatever they are feeling. That’s what scares me.

You’ve studied China a lot. Words don’t mean anything. In those countries, they altered the meaning of everything, and nobody understands what they’re talking about, and communication is extremely hard. Living in America is becoming like that. Words keep losing their meaning and there’s so much confusion around it. People are really having a hard time understanding each other now.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is something very interesting because you basically talk about how there’s something wrong with America’s elite class. You went on this journey in the book. You get to meet so many people in these places, again, I’ll use the Met Gala as an example. This is the place, if you’re there, you know you are on top of the world.

Ms. Park:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re going around and you’re meeting people there. But it’s like the change in the language as you’ve explained it, some people know exactly what it means. It’s just a lot of the rest of the people don’t. It’s almost become a kind of coded language for the intellectual elite. What do you think?

Ms. Park:
Comparing North Korea to the current America is about the political correctness. The ruling elite decides what is the truth, and what is allowed to be spoken about. In the North Korea regime, the Communist Party decides what people can talk about or not. If you disagree with the party’s line, you get executed.

Currently, in America, if you go against political correctness, you lose your dignity, your character is assassinated, and you lose your livelihood. During the pandemic, I was living through that and I was very openly becoming an advocate for the Second Amendment and freedom of speech in the U.S. Constitution.

One of the mothers in my son’s playgroup would say, “Don’t play with my son,” because I wasn’t safe. Of course, they are not executing my son because I’m a bigot. But the tactic of the elites is to tell Americans, “If you see something, say something.” It’s not about someone kidnapping a child.

This is a saying at Columbia University, that if somebody says something hateful, you have to report on them. It is the exact same thing that North Korean classrooms were saying, “You need to report on your classmates if they say the wrong things.”

Currently, in America, that elite decides what we can talk about, what we can challenge, and what we need to believe or not. That group, once you go against them, then it’s like we are being disloyal to that ruling elite. There’s so much of a price to pay right now in America too.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let me give an example. Just a few days ago, the New York Times published an op-ed, “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” This is something that if you were following actual scientific papers, you would already know that this was the case. People have also said that these masks were used almost like a talisman.

It was like a symbol of your compliance or your acquiescence to this orthodoxy that you’re describing. But all of a sudden, what I call a shibboleth is gone, because the New York Times says so. What’s going to happen? But there were a lot of these people out there that were kind of enforcing compliance.

Ms. Park:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
I know if you have a child in the New York school system, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Ms. Park:
Exactly. That’s very heartbreaking because my son was two years old when these lockdowns began. I couldn’t afford to not be working, everybody had to work, and he had to go to daycare. They would demand that he wear a mask for up to eight hours a day in the daycare. They are letting strip clubs open next door. They’re letting these clubs open for others to do whatever they do.

They would open dog parks, but they would shut down the children’s playgrounds in the summer when there’s a warm breeze and sunshine. They said, “We need to stay safe.” I was thinking, “Dogs have more rights than my son right now.” Because he cannot speak for himself, he’s two years old, if his teacher demands he put on a mask, he has to do that, or he cannot even qualify to go to daycare.

I’m talking about how many people were shunned during that time. If you asked a single question about mainstream orthodoxy, then you were marked as a conspiracy theorist, “You’re a danger to public health.” You lose your job, you lose your account, you get banned, and you get censored. We did this to our own people in the name of public health and public good.

Who have we hurt with the lockdown? We hurt our American people the most. Children got depressed. People were dying from drug overdoses. Crime went up. Business got destroyed. In the name of this one thing, the government decided they’re going to protect people, but they destroyed so many lives.

Mr. Jekielek:
When you describe your life in both books, the vast majority of the policies that were implemented by the Kim regimes were crazy and didn’t make sense. When you think about it far away, okay fine. But when you look at it here, a lot of the policy that we employed here in this country didn’t make sense.

It’s very hard to come to terms with that. There’s a lot of people that believe in some of that to this day. I was reminded of the power of propaganda in North Korea and the things that you said you believed, which were really unbelievable.

Ms. Park:
The North Korean regime, their policies were just beyond evil, beyond anything that we have seen. They chose to starve their own population. They would choose to let them die from starvation, even though they had every resource to feed them. Until this day, Kim Jong-un uses the same tactic to control the population.

Currently in America, what scares me and people do not understand this, nothing has been more evil and dangerous than the government has been to individuals. Nothing, not even the World Wars ever killed as many people. Americans somehow think that the government is a benevolent organization that is representing their rights. Actually, they are a collection of stupid, or very greedy, or evil people, who come together and fight for their own interest.

Mr. Jekielek:
Maybe a few good ones in there too? You’re not sure?

Ms. Park:
Maybe there are a few good ones, but then they would go away. A founding father like George Washington, he would walk away. After he led the country, then he would go away. With Joe Biden being in government business for 40 years, I would say, “Dude, you should be ashamed.” If he had actually dreamed of fixing something in the government, he should have done that in the last four decades. He is a career politician.

Of course, government is a necessary evil. We need them to keep us safe. We need them to protect us, and give them power for our military and some public things that we need to run. But we need to keep them as limited as we can, and we always have to watch out for them.

But the thing is, a lot of people just think that somehow the government looks out for the best interest for all of us. As long as we give them more power and let them keep growing, somehow they’re going to bring us a socialist paradise, which is exactly what the North Korean regime did and what they promised. People don’t understand this.

When Kim Il Sung came to power, he promised the North Korean people two things. “I’m going to get rid of inequality completely. Nobody’s going to be rich or poor. We are all going to be all equal.” The second thing was, “I’m going to provide three meals a day of rice and meat stew. “And then, of course, “Free education, free healthcare, free housing and no taxes.”

And everybody thought, “For all this, what can we do for you?” Kim Il Sung said, “Give us your private property. Give us your rights and freedom of speech.” We gave everything that we had to him in hopes that he would divide everything equally among all of us.

What did he do? He took everything and gave nothing back to us and he made us into slaves to the regime. Right now there are so many Biden promises, like the student debt forgiveness, similar to the same tactics that Kim Il Sung used to buy the votes and become a dictator eventually. When the government keeps promising things that are free, that’s a very dangerous ideology.

Nothing is free in the world. When something is free, like me crossing that river to China with this lady helping me for free, what did she do? She sold me into sex slavery. Not questioning why something is free is very scary.

Mr. Jekielek:
I remember years ago someone telling me, when you’re getting Facebook for free, the reason is you’re the product.

Ms. Park:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right.

Ms. Park:
You’re the product, yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
Nothing is really for free.

Ms. Park:
No.

Mr. Jekielek:
Ever. I want to touch very briefly on this, just to finish up about the masks. I’m very happy the New York Times published this op-ed.

Ms. Park:
Too late. I’m being serious. They should have done it a long time ago.

Mr. Jekielek:
I agree with that. But you’re torn, because on the one hand, many people who really trust the New York Times will understand a little more reality. On the other hand, it’s almost like you’re supposed to forget about what happened to your son and to countless children who have had developmental and speech delays.

It really makes me really angry to think about what happened to children during this pandemic. I want to see the policy change, and I want people to believe that the policy change is right so that it will help. But it feels like we’re going to cruise right through the accountability for what was done.

Ms. Park:
We can understand maybe they were not accepting the facts. But what was not acceptable was these people who were doing fact checking on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and everywhere on social media. They were the ones who didn’t go to Harvard University or a medical school. There were actual scientists, people who actually went to medical school that were saying, “These things don’t work. We are completely wrong on how we are managing this pandemic.”

Now suddenly, they’re like, “Oops, we made a mistake. Let’s move on.” This can be a pattern if we let them go like this. There should be actual consequences for harming people. If human rights matters, they actually harmed so many people. God, what are we going to do? How many lives were lost during the pandemic, how many people were losing their jobs and getting divorced, and going through drug overdoses? What are we going to do with these people?

I don’t know. This is the time we need to somehow show them that there are actual consequences for harming people, and they cannot do that to the American people ever again. But I don’t know if we are strong enough to stand up.

Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned the fact checkers. You had examples of people even without a degree basically fact checking some of the top epidemiologists in the world.

Ms. Park:
Yes, from Stanford and Harvard.

Mr. Jekielek:
Exactly. It’s preposterous that this was done. But what this really speaks to is the cozy relationship between big government and Big Tech and big education, all these different structures, including big business.

Ms. Park:
Mainstream media.

Mr. Jekielek:
Mainstream media, and I was thinking big pharma, but of course big media, all of it working together and sharing some of these code words that we’ve been discussing. It really amounts to a massive amount of power and the ability to shape our very perception. On one hand it’s censorship, but on the other hand it’s almost like you don’t know what you missed, if you didn’t know where to look.

Ms. Park:
Right. Exactly.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right.

Ms. Park:
It’s getting harder to find the truth. They keep burying the truth. That’s what they do even in schools, and even in universities. You cannot look for the truth. If you do, you are a bigot.

Mr. Jekielek:
What about this? What is the relationship between all these big structures and society? You were talking about big government, but this is bigger than big government.

Ms. Park:
Yes. It’s some kind of unification of all these organizations that have so much power and influence. They come together and somehow team up to say, “Now we are going to control the people in a way that we want to.” But the thing is, it’s a tactic.

Any dictatorship, the first thing they go for is the media and education. They start brainwashing like with Mao, Hitler’s youth, and North Korean youth. Every country did that when they went through this kind of revolution. This is what people didn’t understand or now are maybe just starting to understand—this is our moment of cultural revolution in America.

The tactics are the same. The media gets compromised. The education system gets compromised. The propaganda is produced by Hollywood. Even the entertainment industry cannot be just for fun anymore. And then, the scientists cannot question the science. That completely defeats the purpose of science.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right.

Ms. Park:
That’s why I feel like America went way further along than where I would like it to be, and we don’t have a lot of time left. What is the institution that is left right now who is not under a threat from the unification of all these institutions who demand that we only follow their facts, and demand we only follow their commandments?

Mr. Jekielek:
On the one hand, this is a terrifying message that you’re sending. On the other hand, you also have a message, “We’re not there yet, guys.” Because there are people that say, “We’re just like North Korea here.” I keep talking about this tweet, but I haven’t been able to find it. But someone wrote something to the tune of, “You have the ability to change your society until the moment you don’t.”

But that’s how it is, because you don’t know the moment. It’s hard to tell when that moment comes, when all these freedoms that you had suddenly disappear. We still have prosperity and abundance, relatively speaking, compared to most people in the world. It’s actually unprecedented to some extent in the history of the world.

Ms. Park:
It’s a miracle, yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
But there’s all these dark directions and you don’t know when that is going to happen.

Ms. Park:
Right. It’s very hard to pinpoint in history at what point did we choose our demise, or when the American civilization falls apart. Regardless of how well we are doing, we need to teach people that politics matters. Just look at the example of North Korea and South Korea. They have a different political system. One country became the poorest nation in the world, and the most oppressed nation in human history. One country now has the 11th largest economy in the world.

Politics obviously matter. Regardless of what we do, people in democracies really have an obligation to participate in the democracy. They need to understand how the governments are working, how the money is spent, what the plans are, and what the policies are. And now there’s an issue that if you care about politics too much, you are a lunatic, to young people, at least.

For the young people, it’s very hard for them to understand what they should care about in life. Among the young generation, maybe that’s why they say the voting rate is so low in America. Somehow they don’t think that politics is the most important thing. They think the most important thing is watching Netflix and following this TikTok trend.

Mr. Jekielek:
A lot of people have been what you would call black pilled, which means they are thinking to themselves, “What’s the point? I’ve tried.”

Ms. Park:
That’s what I keep hearing.

Mr. Jekielek:
“I tried to be involved. Look at these systems and these big structures, they are all working together. There is never going to be any accountability. My family was hurt and there’s no recourse and these people just keep getting away with it.”

There’s a lot of people that have had this experience and might be in this situation where they feel a bit hopeless. That’s one reason I like talking to you a lot, because you have seen some of the darkest things that humanity has to offer, but you didn’t go that way.

Ms. Park:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
Even though there were tough moments.

Ms. Park:
When people say, “As an individual I cannot make a difference,” you are American. You’re the freest individual in human history, not just in the world right now. No human has ever been this prosperous and had this many rights and had a bigger voice than you. There are people in North Korea who do not even know what it means to have a voice. Americans certainly do.

If a North Korean comes from North Korea, not speaking a word of English and as a sex slave comes this far and can become who I am today, anybody in the world can make a difference. That mind of perseverance is also lacking. That’s why so many people become pessimistic and nihilistic. Somehow the world is pointless. Fighting for truth and fighting for justice is somehow a pointless game. It’s so sad.

There’s so much to be grateful for, so much to be excited about, and so many ways to make a difference. But then, when somebody tries to make a difference, they are using these tactics to tell them, “Your vote doesn’t matter.” This current culture that we have is so negative, especially to young minds. It’s horrifying.

I look at the social media platforms and it’s really bad. No wonder so many Americans have this anxiety, and it’s an overly medicated country. It’s appalling, I cannot believe it. Almost none of my friends in New York can function without therapy. With a lot of them, their peers help them with their anxiety. You would think if we achieved this much prosperity and freedom, we would be dancing around and happy and all jumping up and down. But that’s not what we are doing.

Mr. Jekielek:
In the book you mentioned something like self-pity is a bottomless pit.

Ms. Park:
Yes, a bottomless well.

Mr. Jekielek:
Bottomless well.

Ms. Park:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
One thing that has just occurred to me as you were talking, there are some relationships that I’m very grateful for in my life, and gratitude can also be a well.

Ms. Park:
Absolutely.

Mr. Jekielek:
An incredibly energizing one, I might add.

Ms. Park:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
You talk about this a bit.

Ms. Park:
It’s a habit. If you get up in the morning, you can complain about a million different things and the list will never run out. But if you decide, “I’m just going to be thankful today or I’m going to be grateful, the list is never going to run out. That was like what the Bible taught us. I even asked my mother one day how to be happy. When I asked God how to be happy, he asked me to learn gratitude. Happiness only comes when you’re grateful.

Americans lost that gratitude. In this culture they almost demand that you be a victim. They ask you to be oppressed and miserable. This is like when people were asking me, “Why are you so normal? Why are you so functional?” When I was pregnant, I had a pregnancy app that doctors asked me to download.

Every day they were asking me, “Are you depressed? If you are, it’s completely normal. Postpartum depression, the baby blues are a completely normal thing to feel. Tell your provider how you feel every day.” Now, you are making me depressed because you keep asking me this. I was not even thinking about that, but every day I have to keep answering this questionnaire.

There are also a lot of signs of that here in America. They keep constantly asking, “Are you okay, are you depressed,” to a pregnant woman, to a nursing mother and to everybody. “Mental health is important. Are you depressed? Are you depressed?” It’s a weird culture. Somehow we are not celebrating the victorious life, but we are celebrating the misery.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right. It’s almost like fueling the self-obsession.

Ms. Park:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
Or something like that. I’ve been learning that on social media there’s a whole self-harm trend even, and things like this. It’s terrible.

Ms. Park:
Or they keep doing the tic thing, and people start following it, without having any tic problems. It’s a real thing. When I came to America they were asking me to do therapy and they said I’m having PTSD. That wasn’t a concept I had. I did not know that was something to complain about. Somebody told me that it’s an option to complain about if you want to.

It’s okay. We can be a generous, gender-sensitive society, but we are just overdoing it right now. We stopped telling people, “You are strong. You can persevere and be resilient.” Instead of teaching resilience, we are asking them or teaching them how to be a victim and how to complain about literally everything and anything, and not always having a problem is a problem.

They make you create injustice out of thin air. They make you create a problem out of nowhere at Columbia. They have 10,000 different pronouns and you cannot catch up with their speed. And for them, that’s the greatest injustice they’ve ever seen. That is not injustice. I’ve seen a lot of real injustice.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right. With all of this pushing people to obsess over their issues, their problems, their mental health, TikTok is a huge conduit for this from what I’ve been learning. As far as I understand, TikTok is effectively a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party. I want to see more of these types of studies done. But if you know people are mentally vulnerable, and you feed them things that accentuate that, you have just crystallized for me how powerful this tool can be in the hands of the Chinese regime.

Ms. Park:
Yes. That’s the precise reason why I don’t contribute any content to TikTok. I don’t want people to find any reason to go to that platform. First of all, I know how evil the Chinese regime is. But second of all, there’s no study ever showing that people have felt more fulfilled in their life or felt more encouraged in their life by using TikTok.

It’s an endless competition for attention. You need to do so many insane things to get that attention and be a narcissist, and somehow the world is all about you. For the young people nowadays, their dream is becoming a social media influencer. Somehow, that’s a job. That’s what they aspire to.

It’s not about wanting to become a scientist and cure cancer. It’s not about building a rocket, advancing our technology, being a good teacher, or educating our children. It’s not about that. It’s all about me. I want to be famous. I want to get fame.

Clearly, we know that any young girls who go on Instagram or TikTok become more suicidal. They’re very depressed. They’re not functioning that well. If smoking is dangerous, we need to put a warning on the label that it’s going to kill you, showing a picture of an almost destroyed lung. Somehow, even though we clearly know this thing is so harmful, especially to children, we are not doing that.

A lot of parents maybe were not educated, they didn’t go to university, and they didn’t have time to read the newspaper. Then, if they don’t tell their children this and then give them an iPad, they become the victims and consumers of this harmful content. That’s the thing, I’m not arguing that America’s perfect. We have a lot to improve on, especially with these parts, we have a lot to improve on.

Mr. Jekielek:
There are all these stories. There is the film, “The Social Dilemma.”

Ms. Park:
Yes, on Netflix.

Mr. Jekielek:
That shows us how these profiles are developed, how they feed the things that you maybe don’t want fed, and how the executives at these companies don’t let their kids use those apps for obvious reasons. But we put this in the hands of a genocidal, evil regime and let it program our children. One of the things that you wrote in the book made a lot of sense to me. You said that increased Chinese Communist party influence around the world translates into an increase of the North Korean reality around the world. Can you explain what you mean here?

Ms. Park:
People really do not understand the danger of the CCP. The Chinese regime has been expanding through America, Africa, to the Middle East in Iran, and to all these other countries. They started giving them scholarships. They are offering to build roads and companies and factories, they make them indebted, and then they move in.

For example, in North Korea, the mining towns gave the CCP a 200-year lease, or a 300-year lease. Do you really think 300 years later, North Korea will have anything left when they take back the land? No way, it has become Chinese. Their agenda is really to make the North Korean reality a norm in the world.

Right now, as long as America stands as the defending democracy, people still understand the alternative way of life is possible. For Chinese people, a lot of them want to come to America. They know a superior system exists there. But once the American system goes down, then what do we have left? China is left with all this influence, and the entire world is under their power.

Then, what is going to be the norm of our world is going to be the way of China and the way of North Korea. That will truly be a time that humanity will forever forget that this kind of life and this kind of system was ever possible. This is what I wrote in my first book when you see the animal farm in the book.

When the young animals were born, they didn’t even know about life before the revolution. When I was born in North Korea, I didn’t even know that I was oppressed. I did not know that life could be different, because that’s all I knew. In a few generations, that is easily possible.

Mr. Jekielek:
With these new technologies, like TikTok and all the surveillance and coercion technologies deployed in China in Xinjiang province against the Uyghur people, that technology is being honed in extreme ways. It allows that type of coercive indoctrination of reality to be distributed beyond a place like North Korea, which has always been completely isolated from the internet and the norms of other countries in the world.

Ms. Park:
Yes. What baffles me right now is that the Congress was going to spend a hundred billion dollars defending Russia’s democracy and their autonomy.

Mr. Jekielek:
Ukraine’s.

Ms. Park:
Yes, Ukraine, the war between Russia and Ukraine. But they somehow are not bothered about a Chinese invasion. Literally, their spy balloons are floating around in our sky and that is not an invasion. This is how an invasion starts before the actual military comes over. Somehow, this mainstream media is not telling us this is an actual threat.

China doesn’t like democracy and they’ve been doing this to our academia. They’ve been giving money to Harvard, Columbia, MIT, and all the schools, so they cannot criticize China. After I wrote my new book, there was a producer in Hollywood who was trying to make a movie about my first book and he sent me a script. I was reading the script, and I could not believe it. It says that when I got to China, I was granted authority. They gave me refuge, and that was my promised land. They protected me.

Mr. Jekielek:
This was the centerpiece of your message, if I recall. There is a hundreds-of-thousand-strong human trafficking and slavery industry in China. And this is what was in the script?

Ms. Park:
Yes. I called up the producer, “What are you talking about? “This is not what happened.” He said, “This is the only way we can make a movie about North Korea in the current Hollywood.” That’s when I understood how many messages had to be altered.

With the movies that we see right now that come from Hollywood, how many messages had to be changed so that China would approve the money and the studios would contribute to China and get the money from China? The depth of this infiltration from China is so deep that I can’t even fathom it. I don’t think most Americans really understand how deep this is, the infiltration into our system.

Mr. Jekielek:
We have this huge urgency to help Ukraine versus Russia.

Ms. Park:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
I absolutely sympathize with the Ukrainian people and they’re fighting heroically. But somehow, we don’t seem to have that same level of urgency here.

Ms. Park:
Or even half the level of urgency.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right.

Ms. Park:
It would be appropriate. It’s between what we are doing to defend somebody else’s democracy and autonomy, versus defending our own autonomy which is getting infiltrated from another country. Literally, our children are learning that math is racist. Math is made up by white men.

It’s exactly like the example I was using of my North Korean classroom. My teacher was saying, “What is one plus one?” I say, “Two.” I was wrong because my dear leader Kim discovered that when he was a child, if you add one drop of water to another drop of water, it becomes a bigger one, it does not become two. That’s how he proved that math was made up by the white man.

This is the same thing that our children are learning. They learn that somehow gender and sex is a social construct that was made by white men to control the minority people. Our children are learning the exact same propaganda nonsense in school and we are okay with that. This is not someone waking up everybody from their nighttime. They need to sit down and they really need to understand, “This is not okay.”

Where are we going as a civilization that we cannot understand that men and women are different, and that math is real and science is real? This is another kind of religion. They were making fun of Christians believing in God and Jesus Christ and miracles. They’re creating an unbelievable, nonsense religion and asking us to believe that somehow men can get pregnant and they can breastfeed.

I’ve been pregnant. This is a real thing. You cannot be pregnant if your body is male. That’s the thing, it’s a perfect time for China to infiltrate because Americans are so divided, and have so lost perspective on what’s important in life.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of the things that has been floated recently is the idea of a national divorce. There are people who are thinking along the lines of what you just described, and then there are people that are thinking the more traditional way, based on scientific reality. The idea is maybe it’s time to have a national divorce. What’s your reaction to that?

Ms. Park:
To me, there’s an easier way. I was writing about voting with your feet, that in capitalism we have options to show our preferences. If you really care about climate change, you can go to Whole Foods, buy a product that they sell, shampoo in a paper container, not plastic, because it would not be biodegradable, and it’s a very expensive product.

In capitalism, you can fight for everything. You can fight for little ducks and you can protest about counter goods. You can buy this product that doesn’t work, and it’s your choice. In America right now because we are a capitalist society, if people really do not like the system, they have a right to emigrate to other countries who are socialist. They can go to Cuba. They can go to Venezuela. They can go to China. They can go to North Korea or they can go to other countries.

Mr. Jekielek:
But of course, they’re not going to.

Ms. Park:
That’s a problem. That’s the hypocrisy that I’m talking about. If they really, truly think that this country deserves to be destroyed and dismantled because it’s a racist, horrible country, then they should not be here. They should go and be in a better country that stands for their principles.

I don’t know what it is that Americans are so guilty about. They do not denounce evil and it’s very dangerous. This ideology that somehow America is a truly racist and inherently evil society, for those people, we don’t ask them to actually take action. That’s why if you believe that, then go to a different country. I don’t think that national divorce is making sense in any way.

Imagine those people who actually go and start their socialist paradise, I know what they’re going to become. They are going to suffer. My grandma was one of those victims, because she did not know better. They really thought that inequality was the worst thing in life.

In America people are telling me, “We are so bad because there are homeless people. For me as a North Korean I say, “What do you mean? You have a right now to work and not be homeless.” In North Korea, they’re going to send you to a prison camp if you choose to become homeless.

They say, “We are so bad because there are billionaires.” In North Korea we don’t have inequality, but we are all dying from starvation. The enemy is poverty, not inequality. We are brainwashing everybody to believe that somehow inequality is the enemy, not poverty.

We still have hope. There are a lot of people that are misled. My Columbia classmates, I have nothing against them, They were brainwashed too. All of us who know the truth, and who know what evil is, can use our voice to educate all of them. Let’s go knock on the liberal’s doors and tell them and give them books, and maybe someday that this country will come back.

Mr. Jekielek:
Or have media that talks about these things.

Ms. Park:
Like you.

Mr. Jekielek:
I really love this one term.

Ms. Park:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have this one term in the book, “The warriors of light”. That’s kind of what you’re talking about right now.

Ms. Park:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
Tell me about “The warriors of light.”

Ms. Park:
An individual is beautiful. I really believe that we are unique, even though this society tells us that humans are a disease. That is the anti-human sentiment that the Left is talking about, that somehow we are the problem on Earth, and that without us, the world would be a beautiful paradise, and humans are a disease.

No, because of us, animals have rights. We are so good that we give the animals rights, the things that cannot even fight for their rights. That’s how good humans are. That’s how good our hearts can be. We all have the warriors in us with that beautiful light that we can carry if we recognize it and we can get in touch with ourselves.

You can stop looking at social media and read more books and find your community. If you are not going to church, create your community. Stay connected to your family and look at each other, and really get back to reading books. There are so many great Western minds. John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty. These books still move my heart when I read them, but nobody else seems to read them.

Mr. Jekielek:
You said, “Lock yourself in somewhere with the classics and nothing else.”

Ms. Park:
Yes, exactly.

Mr. Jekielek:
“And it will change your life.” There’s a lot to be said about that.

Ms. Park:
There’s a reason why we got enlightenment out of that. There’s a reason why we progressed and we discovered democracy out of it. No system, no civilization ever thought that individuals deserve rights like we do now, that we deserve equal votes, and gave us this much prosperity.

Mr. Jekielek:
For those people who do feel demoralized right now and say, “Sure Yeonmi, this is all very interesting, but nothing I’m going to do is going to make a difference.” What’s your message to them?

Ms. Park:
To me, saving the world doesn’t mean you will be a Spider Man superhero. If you take care of yourself and you don’t become a burden to another person or to the system, that in a way is saving the world. We have so many problems currently because a lot of people want to become criminals. They want to harm others. They cannot take care of themselves.

If you learn how to take care of yourself physically and mentally, then you can start taking care of your family. Once that is in order, then you can take care of your community, and then bigger things. But it starts within you. Maybe all you can handle is just yourself, and that’s fine. That’s what I teach my son.

We don’t need to be these virtuous beings who keep talking about how we need to save everybody and make everybody have equality of outcome. All that it takes is just taking care of yourself and not being a burden to somebody else, and that can be a noble cause.

Mr. Jekielek:
Yeonmi Park, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Park:
Thank you so much, I’m honored.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Yeonmi Park and me on this episode of “American Thought Leaders”. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.