The Patriot Post® · North Korean Defector: 'This Country Is Choosing' Tyranny

America’s colleges and universities are in trouble.

But we’re not talking about financial problems. Yeah, they’ve got those too. Instead, the real concern is that our institutions of higher learning have become centers of indoctrination where gullible minds are taught to hate the very country that made “free thinking” in academia possible in the first place.

It isn’t surprising that most American students gobble up the vitriol spewed by their professors at our country’s founders, the Declaration and the Constitution, and Western traditions. By the time they enter college as freshman (yes, we can still use that term), their minds have already been saturated with 18 years of left-wing propaganda found in television, movies, and social media. And their minds have already been primed by agents of the Left, also known as union schoolteachers.

In recent years, the pieces of this broader effort to undermine our country from within include Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and the Learning for Justice curriculum.

When they get to college, it’s one thing for American students to realize what’s being done to them, but quite another when a defector from North Korea finds that country’s mindset thriving here in the land of the free.

That’s right — North Korea. The quintessential Potemkin village, a place desperately trying to appear prosperous and free but whose citizens are oppressed by authoritarianism, state-sponsored brainwashing, and speech codes.

Sounds a little too much like our own country, doesn’t it?

Former Columbia University student and North Korean defector Yeonmi Park, for one, was amazed to find what one interviewer, Teny Sahakian, summarizes as “anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness” in a top American university. “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. It only got worse from there as Yeonmi realized that every one of her classes at the Ivy League school was infected with what she saw as anti-American propaganda, reminiscent to the sort she had grown up with.”

Park risked her life to get to America, a place she thought would embrace free speech and an open inquiry into ideas. In 2007, she escaped with her mother from North Korea, where they had fallen into slavery only to be rescued by Christian missionaries. She published a memoir, In Order to Live, describing her harrowing struggle to find freedom.

Instead, she found in the United States a nation evolving into a future North Korea. Even in the “land of the free and home of the brave,” people are silenced or punished for speaking out against the state, and citizens are told what to think and how to speak.

Park observed: “The new ideology might start in only a small number of classrooms, or magazines, or bureaucracies, but these little fringe ideas … 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.”

While you might might think this type of anti-American propaganda can only be found in Ivy League schools, think again. Students in community colleges, state universities, and even our elite military academies are being taught to hate their country and to feel guilty for being American.

At the college level, administrators and faculty have wholly embraced hate-hustling so-called “anti-racist” agendas and pledged to indoctrinate students accordingly. Add in strict speech codes, safe spaces, trigger warnings, preferred pronouns, cancel culture, self-censorship, mocking traditional viewpoints, removing Western literature and history, and professors using the academic lectern as a political bully pulpit, and you’ve got an army of millions ready to burn it all down after they graduate.

That’s enough to scare just about anybody, even a defector from the totalitarian regime in North Korea. Sometimes in history “there’s a military coup d'etat, like a force comes in taking your rights away and silencing you,” Park says. “But this country is choosing to be silenced, choosing to give their rights away.”

Maybe it’s time more Americans start waking up and heeding Park’s warning before it’s too late.