North Korean Defector Delivers a Shocking Rebuke of America's Woke Culture

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

When a North Korean defector goes to an American, Ivy League university and feels like she’s back in her totalitarian home country, perhaps the country’s education system has got some problems?

That’s the takeaway from Yeonmi Park, who left North Korea at age 13 to defect to South Korea. She is speaking out, giving her commentary on what she experienced at Columbia University after coming to America in 2016 as part of a larger settlement program. Her first encounter with woke-ness was not a pleasant one.

This per Fox News.

One of several hundred North Korean defectors settled in the United States, Park, 27, transferred to Columbia University from a South Korean university in 2016 and was deeply disturbed by what she found.

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park said in an interview with Fox News. “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 was chastised for daring to like Jane Austen novels and other classical literature. You know, because that’s just horrific or something.

Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.

Yeonmi saw red flags immediately upon arriving at the school.

During orientation, she was scolded by a university staff member for admitting she enjoyed classic literature such as Jane Austen.

“I said ‘I love those books.’ I thought it was a good thing,” recalled Park.

“Then she said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’”

You have to love the teeth-gnashing about having a “colonial mindset” from people attending an Ivy League university in one of New York’s richest areas. Clearly, the students there are connected with the true struggles of the world and haven’t benefited at all from the progress of their forefathers, right?

It’s all just so stupid, and Park, of all people, understands what real tyranny is. Instead of experiencing the freedom of thought that she was expecting after arriving in the freest country in the world, she was told to fall in line with a social justice ideology that seeks to stoke divisions, not stimulate new ideas. It’s insane, and it’s a sad testament to how worthless our university system has become.

Park also shared her experience getting corrected for saying “he” and “she,” as well as the general anti-American sentiment in all of her classes. In the end, she saw a group of adult babies whining about their supposed “oppression” while having never truly known any in their lives. Remember, the Ivy League schools are almost exclusively made up of people from well-off families who wouldn’t know tyranny if it slapped them in the face.

“These kids keep saying how they’re oppressed, how much injustice they’ve experienced. They don’t know how hard it is to be free,” she admonished.

“I literally crossed through the middle of the Gobi Desert to be free. But what I did was nothing, so many people fought harder than me and didn’t make it.”

I worry about the country’s future. I really do. Is this really going to be the next generation of leaders? And if so, how in the world does the nation survive this idiocy that has become so pervasive in higher education? Unfortunately, the answer is likely that it likely doesn’t.