Yeonmi Park escaped North Korea as a young woman, crossed China, and eventually reached the United States, where she expected to find a society built on freedom. Instead, she says, she was startled to hear ideas at Columbia University that reminded her of the ideology she had fled. In this conversation, Park describes her journey from a country where the state controls information, movement, and speech, to an American campus where students and teachers spoke openly about communism and Marxism as answers to injustice.
Park’s testimony is powerful because it comes from lived experience rather than from books alone. She compares the language of guilt, conformity, and denunciation she encountered in America with the pressure to conform in North Korea, and asks whether the United States is drifting toward the very system she risked her life to escape. Her question is a warning, not a prediction, and it invites viewers to listen carefully to someone who has lived under both systems.
North Korean Defector Yeonmi Park joins us today to talk about her experiences fleeing North Korea, and discovering Communism and Marxism in America during her time at Columbia University. Is “woke culture” making the United States even crazier than North Korea?