'Even North Korea was not this nuts': Defector recalls Ivy League education

North Korean defector Yeonmi Park talks about her experience as a Columbia University student in a Fox News interview (Video screenshot)

After attending an Ivy League university, a defector from North Korea is warning Americans that if they continue on the current path, their future is “as bleak as North Korea.”

The anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness at Columbia University was deeply disturbing, said Yeonmi Park in an interview with Fox News.

“Even North Korea is not this nuts,” she said. “North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”

Park, 27, said she expected that in exchange for the time, effort and “fortune” she gave to attend the prestigious university, she would be taught how to think.

“But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” she said.

“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.”

Park said she saw red flags immediately upon transferring to Columbia from a South Korean university in 2016. A staff member scolded her during orientation for admitting she enjoyed classic Western literature and authors such as Jane Austen.

Park recalled the staffer saying: “Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.”

But it got worse, as every class was filled with the kind of anti-American propaganda she grew up with in North Korea.

She initially pushed back, getting into arguments with faculty and students. But she eventually “learned how to just shut up” for the sake of maintaining a good GPA and graduating.

Under the isolated, rogue communist state, Park grew up without knowing concepts such as love and liberty. She recalled witnessing people drop dead of starvation.

“Because I have seen oppression, I know what it looks like,” she said.

But fellow students kept saying “how they’re oppressed, how much injustice they’ve experienced.”

“They don’t know how hard it is to be free,” Park said.

‘They’ve just completely lost the ability to think critically’

In 2007, at the age of 13, she and her mother fled, crossing the frozen Yalu River into China, where they were captured by human traffickers and sold into slavery. Christian missionaries helped them flee to Mongolia, where they walked across the Gobi Desert and finally found refuge in South Korea.

In North Korea, she said, people are deceived by propaganda because they aren’t taught to think critically.

“That is what is happening in America,” she said. “People see things but they’ve just completely lost the ability to think critically.”

Unlike North Korea, Americans have access to great thinkers, but they “choose to be brainwashed.”

She said she is very disappointed after having come to the United States with great expectations.

“You guys have lost common sense to degree that I as a North Korean cannot even comprehend,” she said.

Park pointed to the erosion of the rule of law and morality.

“I guess that’s what they want,” she said of the nation’s progressive influencers, “to destroy every single thing and rebuild into a communist paradise.”

See the interview:

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