Yeonmi Park escaped the oppressed, poverty-stricken nightmare of North Korea and sex slavery in China to reach freedom and success in America. But Park is worried about what woke ideology and authoritarian enforcement of wokeness are doing to America. If radical leftism’s current progress isn’t stopped, according to Park, America will become more like North Korea all the time.
The Founding Fathers thought they had prevented aristocracy by disallowing titles, but there can be a powerful oligarchy without titles or formal status, wielding more control over the lives of millions than many princes or dukes could have ever dreamed of wielding. That’s what Yeonmi Park warned about during a speech this week at Liberty University. Park was speaking at the university’s Helms School of Government’s third annual public policy conference, “Promise of the Declaration: Building on the Legacy of ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’”
Park explained the main issue with North Korea’s dictatorial government. “[In] North Korea, the power is so concentrated, it’s in the hand of one man, Kim Jong-Un, and a few guys… in the Communist Party,” she said. “America is becoming more like that every day. There are a few people in America… elites. They decide what we are allowed to talk, what we are allowed to feel, what women and men [are], they are redefining all these words for us.”
Language has power. If you control the language, as I said on a recent podcast with fellow PJ Media writers Greg Byrnes and Ben Bartee, you can control not just what people say but even how and what they think. And that’s what authoritarians — both in North Korea and America — want to do.
Liberty University quoted Park: “In North Korea, seeing dying people is like looking at a tree. That’s how common it is.” She went on, “In North Korea, we don’t even have a concept of love. The only love that North Korean people are allowed to know is the love for the dictator… Until my father passed away, he never told me he loved me.”
North Korea has horrific torture, abuse, and forced labor in its prisons and an ongoing food crisis. It is also one of the most dangerous places in the world to be Christian. How did the country become that way?
“A lot of people don’t understand how North Korea became this way. It resembles exactly what’s happening in America right now,” [Park] said, referring to her concerns with Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and intersectionality seeping into the American Education system, which she said fosters a victim mentality. “Now thinking about (these ideologies), what an insult that is to all the students. They were on purpose making me a disabled person.”
But there is a silliness about American wokeness that almost seems more dangerous than North Korea’s Communist ideology because it makes America weak and vulnerable. For instance, I recently reported for PJ Media how North Korea was unveiling new nuclear warheads while American media and politicians were arguing about “misgendering” the transgender Nashville mass shooter. Is America self-destructing? And could it really turn into a dictatorship like North Korea?
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