Yeonmi Park joins Dave Rubin to argue the US faces a silent cultural revolution mirroring North Korean tactics, where tech giants and media censor free speech and redefine hate speech as violence. Citing shadowbanning, forced masking, and Hollywood's false portrayal of her rescue, she accuses elites of prioritizing government control over individual liberty while Chinese influence hijacks universities. Park warns that brainwashing via TikTok and Netflix creates a generation ready to destroy the country, urging citizens to defend the Second Amendment, take responsibility for education, and resist this authoritarian drift before it becomes irreversible. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.