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March 14, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
27:54
N. Korean Defector Sees This Alarming Trend in the US | Yeonmi Park | INTERNATIONAL | Rubin Report
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dave rubin
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yeonmi park
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yeonmi park
I think for the people to realize that this is America's, our moment of cultural revolution is happening.
This is a silent revolution happening in classrooms, in corporate businesses, in the media.
It's happening everywhere and we just don't see it and the media is lying to us.
They are changing the entire dynamic of this country where somehow hate speech is a violence, therefore you have no right to speak your mind.
And that's not the definition of freedom.
People don't even understand what it means to be American, and they're Americans.
Like, I became a citizen last year, and in my citizenship test, my interviewer was asking me, have you ever persecuted anybody for their political opinion?
If I said yes, I could not become American.
And that's what Google does.
That's what Facebook does, what Instagram does, and that's what used to Twitter did.
dave rubin
I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the author of the brand new book, While Time Remains,
a North Korean defector's search for freedom in North America, my friend Janmi Park, who
Welcome back to the Rubin Report.
yeonmi park
Thank you for having me back.
dave rubin
Yanmi, last time I saw you was in Chicago, Illinois.
You were living in Chicago at the time, and you opened for me on the Don't Burn This Country book tour.
We did a matinee show at the Chicago Improv, and I didn't tell you you had to be funny, but you crushed it.
You did like 10 minutes of freedom-loving stand-up comedy, and you crushed it, my friend.
yeonmi park
Oh, thank you.
That was the most fun thing I've ever done in my life, so I'm very grateful.
dave rubin
Did you ever think if you would have gone to your life, you know, 15 years ago in North Korea that you'd be doing a little stand-up comedy in Chicago a couple years later?
yeonmi park
I mean, this is a thing, like, this was beyond anything that I knew about the world.
I did not even know what stand-up comedy was.
And for instance, I mean, I thought of Americans as, you know, cold-blooded reptiles, monsters, right?
Never knew in my life that I was going to be hanging out with Americans and, you know, make some jokes.
dave rubin
Yeah, it was really just absolutely wonderful.
One of the most memorable ones for me.
So I don't want to go into your whole story again, which you have now, not only did you write your first book about, but you've obviously told so many times over.
We'll put a link to it down below so people can get a full recap of your story.
But in essence, You, in a really just unbelievable way, you defected from North Korea, you eventually made it to the United States, and really what you're doing now, and I think what this book is about, is really warning people that so many of the signs that you saw in North Korea are happening in the United States right now.
Is that a fair estimation of how this book really shapes out?
yeonmi park
Yeah, absolutely.
I think most people would get really shocked that, you know, how dare you compare North Korea to America.
And of course, I'm not comparing, the living standards are the same.
However, the tactics that North Korean regime used to control people and brainwashing was, was the same tactics that I'm seeing right now in current America.
And more and more, every single day living in Chicago and New York City, I see this country getting destroyed.
dave rubin
So one of the things that's interesting is you've described in the past how, you know, basically getting mugged on the streets.
That was in Chicago, right?
Yeah.
And then these false cries of racism because the people who mugged you happened to be black women and just all of this sort of nonsense related to cancel culture.
But then it really got escalated under COVID, right?
Because it wasn't just silencing people because someone was calling you racist.
Then it was really government designed silencing.
yeonmi park
Absolutely.
I mean, during the pandemic, as everything was canceled, I wanted to make videos about the plight of North Korean women, how they're being raped and their organs harvested out in China under the Communist Party.
And when I talk about this women's plight in China, my videos get demonetized, censored, and get shadowbanned on all the social media platforms.
I reached out to Google, like, do you guys not support the Me Too or something, right?
That's all about it.
Believe her.
Believe what women say.
And why would they not support this women's plight of North Koreans on the Chinese Communist Party?
And they said, simply, it does not meet our guidelines.
And I mean, during the time I was raising two years old toddler, I'm sure now you're being a father, you understand how powerless that I felt living in America.
I thought the best thing that I've ever done was giving my son the U.S.
passport, making him born in the field of freedom.
But during the pandemic when I sent him to daycare his teachers would make sure that he would wear a mask up to here eight hours a day to two years old who just barely learning how to run and walking.
And then they were opening strip clubs next door and like bars opening and then they would lock down the children's playground but the dog parks were open.
And I was thinking, somehow the dogs have more rights than my child in America right now, right?
They have freedom to go to park and run around under the sun, but my son couldn't.
And I think that's when I really realized how powerless I was as an individual.
I never thought that I was going to be locked indoor.
My son would have to put a mask like that and couldn't go even eating in the restaurant like that.
dave rubin
It must have been doubly jarring for you because having come from a place where people couldn't say what they think and neighbors were afraid of neighbors and everything else, suddenly you're confronted with this again.
What do you think about, was it shocking to you that in a place where freedom is supposedly so important, how quickly everyone quote-unquote behaved?
yeonmi park
Yeah, I think in the name of public health, how everybody just lost any common sense, any mind of their own.
But the thing is that governments, the mainstream media was playing this fear tactic to the people, right?
They were just saying how as if the COVID is a deadly virus and lying to people.
And so many children that I had with my son, their mothers would not let their child out for two years.
inside this apartment condo. Their child never seen the sunlight in their life for two years.
We don't even know what that effect is and how easily people get brainwashed.
It's like North Korea during the BLM protests and the looting.
My mother visited me in Chicago and we were just hearing these guns shooting everything. And
then we turn on CNN and BBC and all the mainstream media. It says there was really no violence. It
dave rubin
was mostly peaceful. Mostly peaceful.
yeonmi park
That's what they say. Yes. And then we could not go buy the milk because they were looting
the grocery stores literally.
Then we could not even buy the milk.
And then the mainstream media just lies to American people.
And if they were not living in Chicago downtown, they would not have known what we went through.
dave rubin
Yeah.
yeonmi park
And I would have believed CNN if I were not living in Chicago.
dave rubin
Right, so you eventually left Chicago and made your way to New York.
New York's got its own set of problems, but it seems to be a little bit better than Chicago, right, in terms of that, maybe?
yeonmi park
Yeah, a little better, but still, as an Asian woman, there's a huge hate Asian crime.
Like, literally, whenever I take the subway, I know that I'm risking my own life taking the subway.
And why is it so grimmer is that when I was escaping from North Korea and China, I had at least a place to escape to.
That was America.
There was a free country there waiting for me.
I am scared every day for my son because if America falls, I cannot imagine the world without America.
Where would my son escape to for freedom?
There's no place left.
dave rubin
Is there a weird thing, sort of psychologically for you, where when you were escaping North Korea, we've talked about in the past, in some ways you didn't even know what you were escaping, because you had lived in that cave, so to speak.
So you didn't know what was on the outside of that cave.
Here, where you see the authoritarianism coming, you didn't expect it here, so I would imagine in a weird way it's almost worse seeing it here?
yeonmi park
It's a lot hopeless, you know.
Because now I see the map of the world, right?
In North Korea, I did not see the map of the world.
I did not know what was possible.
Now in the world I see with the internet, seeing all the human history and current world, I know what's possible.
And America is the best chance we've ever got as a humanity.
This is the humanity's hope.
This is the best country in human entire history.
And if people cannot be happy with America and refuse to defend this country and individual liberty, I mean, there's nothing in the world that is left to defend.
I mean, the only thing that is left is evil dictatorships.
So that's why I'm so heartbroken.
dave rubin
So you write about this, but what do you think it is that we can do to sort of ignite that fire in people?
I mean, obviously everyone knows in Florida, where you just were, and you're coming back pretty soon, I mean, it's here.
There is a sense of let's fight for it.
But we are losing a lot of the states at the moment.
yeonmi park
I think for the people to realize that this is America's, our moment of cultural revolution is happening.
This is a silent revolution happening in classrooms, in corporate businesses, in the media.
It's happening everywhere and we just don't see it and the media is lying to us.
They are changing the entire dynamic of this country, where somehow hate speech is a violence, therefore you have no right to speak your mind.
And that's not the definition of freedom.
People don't even understand what it means to be American, and they are Americans.
Like, I became a citizen last year, and in my citizenship test, my interviewer asked me, have you ever persecuted anybody for their political opinion?
If I said yes, I could not become American.
And that's what Google does.
That's what Facebook does, what Instagram does, and that's what Twitter did.
So these people have no idea what it means to be American.
They are the ones in these institutions and brainwashing all of us to believe that this authority and rule is somehow better.
So I think that revolution really starts within individual liberty, individual responsibility, that we need to fight for our children's education.
We need to, you know, start going to city hall meetings and show up and demand what we deserve and what free country should look like.
dave rubin
How much of this do you think is being directed by China?
That they just have so much influence in our tech companies and now in our government and, you know, that we know for a fact that Eric Swalwell has had a relationship with a Chinese spy and nobody does anything about it.
He's still in Congress.
I mean, is this really just coming directly from China, just having us silence ourselves?
Pretty easy, easier than invading us.
yeonmi park
I mean, this hijacking by the CCP is everywhere.
Columbia gets money, MIT gets money, right?
The big media gets money.
Not only that, when my first film was trying to become a movie, the producer sent me a script.
In the script, it said China was my promised land.
I was rescued by Chinese authority and they gave me refuge.
I called the producer like, what are you talking about?
This is not what happened.
I was a sex slave at 13.
And he said, this is the only way we can make a movie in current Hollywood.
unidentified
Wow.
yeonmi park
And that's when I realized even Hollywood, even just pure entertainment is gone.
So we cannot even fathom how much is hijacked by China.
And just for instance, education, I mean, healthcare, the media, everything is under Chinese control right now.
And I don't think a lot of people understand the gravity of this, this, you know, problem that we are facing.
dave rubin
What do we do to wake people up to that?
I mean, they hear that sort of thing a lot, right?
More and more of us are talking about it, but, you know, it seems like it's like we can't barely deal with our own government, much less we have to deal with China.
yeonmi park
I think it's a first thing that we realize we still have time to go back to the glory of this country.
When people meet me, the first thing they usually ask me like, are North Koreans dumb?
Like, why there's no revolution?
They can just easily start a revolution.
Why you guys are putting up with this totalitarian regime?
And if you stand up in North Korea, not only you get executed, the three to eight generations of your family get executed.
And they do, and they all get killed.
In America, we currently don't get executed for saying the wrong thing.
Maybe we get censored, we get called a racist and bigot, and we lose our job, we lose our dignity.
But we still, the consequences of standing up is not that high compared to North Korea and China.
So I think for us to realize that even though there's a price to be Pay to be free and speak in your mind.
I think all of us now do not put up with this PC culture and in classrooms and work everywhere.
We need to speak our mind and we have to think for ourselves.
dave rubin
Can you talk a little bit about how this has sort of affected you politically?
Because, you know, we're pretty good friends, actually.
We've had many, many meals together and shot basketball together and done a bunch of stuff.
But I'm not that familiar with all of your politics.
But I'm only asking, actually, because it seems to me you're being embraced by people sort of on the right and being neglected by people on the left, even though the lefties would say, hey, we're the ones for human rights and all of those things.
Yet, in your story, that's not how this is playing out.
yeonmi park
Yeah, I mean, when it comes to left, their human rights means fighting for free healthcare and free education.
That is an insult to human rights.
Human rights means, like, right to liberty, you know, right to happiness and pursue your life.
But for them, it's all about free stuff from government.
And their human rights means, you know, fighting for their 10,000 different genders they come up with every day.
That's what they say.
It's in the name of human rights, what they are fighting for those causes.
And that's when I got disillusioned.
These people don't even understand what human rights means.
And using that slogan every single day, I was talking about women's rights is a human rights.
And then for them, what does it mean human women's rights?
It's like, we have a right to cry in the boardrooms and we should feel comfortable with that.
Do you know there are people actually are being sold like livestock?
They don't understand what actual human rights means in the real world.
And then the reason I became, they say I'm a conservative, I'm like, I was learning that from reading your book, the first book, Don't Burn This Book, right?
Like what it means to be a classical liberal.
That's who I am.
Like, I mean, you're gay, right?
I'm friends with so many gay people too.
And I just live in individual liberty and let them decide and governments should not have power over what people should do and what they think.
But believing that somehow I'm a far right wing currently, and it seems that most people within the common sense come into the right camp because they are the most tolerant camp currently.
And I think I fell into that because they accept me.
They don't say, you've been on the New York Times, therefore you have no right to speak your mind.
When I go to New York Times, they say that you've been on Fox, we cannot have you.
And recently my book just got published with the same week as Greta Thunberg.
I sold way more books than her, and her book is a New York Times best-selling list, and my book is not.
It happened to be the first book, and it happened to be Jordan Peterson, and we expected that, right?
dave rubin
You're in good company, my friend.
For the record, it did happen to my second book.
We should have been number two in terms of sales.
They didn't even put us on.
You know, I realize I sort of half threw away a comment that we played basketball together.
I'm going to have my guys put the picture of Enos Kanter picking you up and you getting
your first alley-oop was a pretty beautiful, beautiful, beautiful moment.
Okay, so you're sort of outside of the machine because your story doesn't fit their narrative.
Have you found any ways of making inroads with these people?
That seems to be the new thing, that if there's some way we can save some of them and show them, no, you should be about human rights before women's rights, or whatever it might be, that that's the group of people we want to bring with us right now.
yeonmi park
Yeah, I think that's the hope, right?
There are so many people that we can still save and they can still have some kind of logic in them that they can believe that this is wrong.
But in my book, I was writing about how I was invited by Jeff Bezos to go to this private gathering of American greats and movers and shakers.
And he flew me on the same flight that you do Harvey Weinstein.
Right before the Me Too.
And then, at that hard, I mean, jazz event, he gave a speech, and everybody stood up and gave him a, like, standing ovation.
And the woman who accused him of the Me Too, she was in the sitting too, and they called him the man and the legend.
Once Me Too blows up, I call them, like, did you guys know that he was actually harassing women?
Like, of course we all knew, like, did you not know?
The hypocrisy, they only talk about women's rights and Black Lives Matter when it's convenient.
When there's actual consequences of standing up for, like, dignity and freedom, they don't do that.
And one day I was invited by Tina Brown by Daily Beast.
She invited me to join this private gathering with Nancy Pelosi.
And then she was saying in this private, off the, you know, record dinner, she was saying she's going to impeach Trump tomorrow morning.
And then she's telling everybody, you know what to do.
And there are all these business tycoons and finance people in the same region as in downtown, in a midtown in New York City.
That means you need to short the market because the market is going to go down, right?
If she's announcing that tomorrow morning.
And back the time I was married to a trader, I texted him, like, she's not, like, you know, impeach Trump.
Like, is this even legal?
Is it not inside our trading information?
It's like, yeah, that's illegal.
And that's when I understood the corruption.
These people are not saying, they're not misled.
They know what they're doing.
They're using this ideology to control people and better their position and gaining more power.
And that's when I got really disillusioned of the hypocrisy of the American elite.
They don't care about anything else other than themselves.
dave rubin
Do you think we're just kind of fat on our freedoms that you can, you know, wave the flag here, you can ring the bell, you can do a dance and try to get everybody to pay attention as many of us do, but that Americans, we just, we've all got the iPhone, they've got the, you know, PlayStation 5 and whatever else is distracting them.
And that really is the reason that not enough people will ever step up until, until it's too late.
yeonmi park
Yeah, that's the thing.
There's TikTok, right?
There's social media platforms, all this Netflix, everything distracting us.
We're so busy getting entertained by this empty stuff.
And that is very toxic a lot of times.
And people have stopped reading books.
They have stopped understanding the meaning of enlightenment.
And what it means to be an individual.
So I think the problem is a lot bigger than I think what I see currently.
And raising a child, it's a really scary thing right now currently in America.
And I think that's why I sent my child to a non-Catholic school and sent him to church.
I think at some point it's beyond us.
And one thing that I know, whenever there is a communist revolution, the first thing they do is going after religion.
And that is very scary.
Right now, how much religion is getting attacked in America, and that people have no... Like, if you are somehow a Christian, you are, like, being bullied, that you're a stupid bigot.
And in North Korea, I know, they killed God and they became God, right?
And they became the most evil God.
So, yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I just do everything I can do in my power and just have to pray.
dave rubin
Yeah, I want to back up to what you said earlier about living in New York City as an Asian woman.
Obviously, I don't want to play identity politics, but there really is a rash of violence against Asian people.
Even when I was there last week, there was a story about an Asian woman just being, you know, basically mauled on the subway.
Random guy, no purpose, didn't steal anything, literally just violence for the sake of violence.
How concerned are you, and do you feel like anyone in New York is going to do anything about it?
yeonmi park
So it happened to me several times.
Some guys come up and just hug me.
And I'm just so freaked out.
I don't even know what to say.
What if they can stab me and shoot me, right?
These people are not even... I don't think they're in their same mind at this point.
Everybody's on their fentanyl and drugs are everywhere.
I used to live in Manhattan.
I just moved out to Queens.
The K-town is 32nd Broadway.
It's mostly Asian community.
We don't have drugs there.
Now they're drug lords sending, selling these like drugs in the purple wrap,
looks like lollipop.
And my son thinks it's a lollipop, he asked me to buy him that.
And that's a drug.
And there's a cop standing there doing nothing about it.
They're just standing there doing nothing.
And I think this is why I'm just so curious why Americans are okay with their countries being ruined.
And somehow there's so much resentment to America in their mind, in their mind that America deserves to be get dismantled and destroyed.
And maybe that's why they're not doing anything.
Because if you are, if you love your country in any little passive way, you cannot be sitting there and your heart is not broke.
dave rubin
Yeah, and then at the same time, they'll gladly take someone like you and throw you under the bus as you fight to give them the freedoms that they're, you know, in essence, squandering.
Do you find that some of the allies should do more?
I mean, what else should guys like me be doing?
And the people that you are able to connect with and talk to, what should we be doing to keep fighting?
yeonmi park
No, I'm eternally grateful.
When I was getting shadowbanned and censored everywhere, the locals gave me community, right?
I mean, now the Twitter got freed, but I mean, you guys did that before, where, like, we had no place to go speak our minds.
And it was so In a way, it's so oppressive.
In a country, you expect to have freedom of choice and voices, and we didn't have that.
So I think people like you being entrepreneurs and finding opportunities to give people freedom and make things better, I think that's very important.
So thank you so much for the lockers.
dave rubin
Trying, trying.
I mean, thank you more importantly for everything you're doing.
What else is in the book that people may not know about either your story or what you're fighting for right now?
yeonmi park
Yeah, I think that's where people really need to understand, you know, it's not like I came to America with an agenda.
I didn't know what left or right meant.
That's like, you know, I did not even know what Americans looked like.
dave rubin
Yeah.
yeonmi park
So coming here, I was in the arms of the, like, really liberal left, right?
Penguin giving me training saying, don't ever talk about what you think about Second Amendment.
Because somebody was asking me when I came to America, what do you think about people owning guns?
And I was like, That's a fantastic thing because imagine if North Koreans had guns.
I was not going to let them take my father like that.
We are not going to let them kill our eight generations of family.
While you die anyway, you're going to fight your death.
There's no country can be able to be that enslaved when they have guns to defend their rights.
And even Cameroon and Cambodia, before the genocide, the first thing they did was taking all the guns from the people.
So my desire for owning that gun is a lot deeper than just like some school shootings, right?
It's not about that.
And people were like, just don't ever, ever say that in public.
And they were like, what do you like to say?
I like to read.
Like, what do you like to read?
I was like, I love to read Bastia's The Law, John Stuart Mill's Liberty.
dave rubin
And they were like... I can see where this is going, yeah.
yeonmi park
Yeah, just don't say that.
And back then, I didn't even know why it was not allowed to say that.
And because Penguin, I guess, wanted to protect me before I get branded and left.
They just didn't want me to do that.
And they would keep begging me to write about how hard it is to be a woman.
You know, how oppressed as a woman in living life, and how America is so oppressed to the black men, putting them in our camps, which is like same thing with the two North Korean political prison camps.
I'm like, that's not even the same thing, right?
If you go to a political prison camp in North Korea, you don't make it even until three months.
These people keep going and keep coming back out, and that's a problem.
So I think that people don't understand.
I was not trained by CIA in giving these messages.
I was a pure person coming here and seeing the tendencies that I was seeing in North Korea happening in America.
And it's coming from a, I don't know, it's a really genuine place.
People don't recognize this pattern because they've never seen a true oppression.
And I see the same pattern and tactics.
And there is something called the dictator's handbook, right?
And I feel like that's what America is doing right now.
They're going through this manual handbook on how to control full citizens.
And they're playing all the tactics coming from every angle.
dave rubin
Are you hopeful?
I mean, despite everything you're describing here and a sort of shock to coming to America and seeing a, you know, you came in a time when it was, we were in this kind of upheaval, but are you hopeful that we can do the right thing here?
yeonmi park
Yeah.
If we have, if we do fight for our second amendment, I think we are never going to be the state of North Korea and China, that's for sure.
But I don't even know how many generations can stand understanding the meaning of self-defense.
You know, they think some governments keep brainwashing them that guns are bad and they're school shootings, right?
That's the brainwashing you keep going through.
And eventually, what generation is going to stop understanding the meaning of having a gun and give that up?
And that, I don't know.
That's the thing.
Other than being pessimistic, optimistic, that's really irrelevant.
I know what's the right thing to do.
I know it's my responsibility as a mother to tell my son what I know about the world, right?
That's our responsibility being an adult.
Educating our children about the things that we understand so they can go further understanding new things.
But we have been failing at that.
We've been failing our children and not teaching them the things that we understand.
And I think that's why coming from this new generation believing that they're oppressed living in America and they want to destroy this country because, you know, this country is bigoted and they just heard that from their teachers.
It's nothing about based on actual truth.
dave rubin
I was going to ask you to sum this all up nicely, but I don't know that you can do it any better than that.
Do you have any final thoughts?
yeonmi park
No, I mean, that's all.
I think, you know, we just have to do the right things.
Nothing about being hopeful, being, you know, like anything about just do the right thing.
And that is telling the truth and speaking up against power.
dave rubin
The book is What Time Remains, which is just a perfect title too, because there's urgency.
There's urgency because before you know it, it's gone.
Yanmi, I look forward to seeing you in the free state of Florida sometime soon.
yeonmi park
Yeah, see you soon.
dave rubin
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