The U.S. Left Has Become So Authoritarian, Even This North Korean Refugee Is Concerned

When Yeonmi Park made the courageous decision to flee North Korea at the age of 13, she couldn’t have imagined the life that awaited her.

After enduring the barbarity of North Korea’s ruling regime, unspeakable acts of sexual violence as the victim of a human sex trafficking ring in China, and a trek across the frozen Gobi Desert, Park managed to escape to South Korea and, eventually, the United States. While her U.S. life has given her a deep appreciation for basic, God-given liberties, Park’s experiences in America have alerted her to a much larger issue overlooked by much of the country — the fragility of freedom.

Her new bestseller, “While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America,” Park issues a stark warning about the left’s increasing threat to the American way of life. The intolerance today’s U.S. leftists display towards individuals refusing to subscribe to their worldview is leading the country down a path to totalitarianism, she says, in which free speech and independent thinking are forsaken in favor of groupthink.

“The new ideology might start in only a small number of classrooms, or magazines, or bureaucracies,” Park writes. “But these little fringe ideas held by a small number of young people and immature adults in isolated industries located in eccentric parts of the country can slowly but surely become the entire society’s dominant culture. Especially if the new ideology works to the advantage of political, financial, and cultural elites, they will be happy to adopt it as dogma in all the country’s institutions of power.”

Park tells readers about her personal experiences with leftist philosophy in America. This includes indoctrination in college classrooms. Park was a Columbia University student when she recounted an incident in which a professor claimed Jane Austen’s literary works were promoted. “female oppression, racism, colonialism, and white supremacy.”

“My comprehension abilities were by no means perfect, and I just resolved to ask one of my new classmates later on what the professor had actually said,” Park writes. “But ‘Jane Austen books,’ the professor clearly went on, ‘propagate the idea that women are inferior to men; that only white males are fully evolved and capable of higher-level thinking; that salvation is only achievable through the dogma of Christianity.’ … She ended with a line I’ll never forget: ‘This is how we look for hidden systemic racism and oppression.’”

As someone who comes from a country ripe with real oppression, Park’s confusion with such distorted logic effectively exposes the absurdity of leftist thinking and its hatred for Western culture. These stories and others in the book show how ideological corruption in our education system has led to an increase of America-hating leftists, who then go on to become leaders of major corporations and government institutions.

Throughout the book, Park highlights numerous issues relevant to today’s ongoing cold civil war, including cancel culture and an increasing disregard for American values among a growing number