No one knows and hates tyranny like one who has lived under it, and we’re not talking about the kind of tyranny where snowflake-y college students must hear opinions that trigger their emotions.
Yeonmi Park and her mother escaped from North Korea into China in 2007, when she was 13, and the pair were sold into slavery. They made it to Mongolia with the help of Christian missionaries, crossed the Gobi Desert and eventually found refuge in South Korea, where Park, now 27, went to college before transferring to Columbia University in 2016.
At Columbia University, however, Park said she sees a lot of similarities between the communist dictatorship she grew up in and what is taking hold in the United States.
“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy to learn how to think,” she told FOX News. “But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think.
“I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”
Park said professors actually gave “trigger warnings” to let students opt out of readings and discussions that might frighten or dismay them.
“Going to Columbia, the first thing I learned was ‘safe space,'” she said in an interview with the New York Post.
Park related how when she started at Columbia, she was excited to take history since the subject is discouraged in her homeland. When her teacher asked if students had an issue with the term “Western Civilization,” most did, saying it was “colonial.”
“Every problem, they explained us, is because of white men,” she said. This reminded her of her home country, where people were categorized based on their ancestry, the Post reported.
Eventually she “learned how to just shut up” so she could get good grades and graduate. But, she said, “Even North Korea is not this nuts.”
