00:02:01.000It should leave a permanent imprint on anyone that listens of where we are as a country and the moral need to fight.
00:02:12.000Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com, and get involved with TurningpointUSA, TPUSA.com.
00:02:18.000If you're motivated to get involved after this episode, which you should be, get involved with Turning Point USA.
00:02:23.000Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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00:02:31.000Thank you to Derek from Oregon, Isaac from Colorado.
00:02:36.000Thank you to Susie from Maine, Monica from Alabama, Janelle from Colorado, Laura from California, Greg from California, Jessica from California, and Eric from California, Gretchen from California, Kay from Arizona, David from Illinois, and Alicia from Nebraska.
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00:03:09.000This might be our final warning from someone who nearly starved to death, lived in a country, didn't know what it meant to think, had never heard of the word love or God before.
00:03:46.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:03:55.000Will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:04:06.000Brought to you by Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage.
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00:04:18.000When I tell you that we are getting closer and closer to totalitarianism, I mean it, but don't take my word for it.
00:04:25.000Our guest for the entire hour is someone who has lived in a totalitarian country, a legitimate totalitarian country, and was able to escape and is a defector.
00:04:38.000Her story is chilling about how and why politics matters and why government matters, why we need to talk about morality and truth and goodness and beauty.
00:04:53.000She is the author of a new book called While Time Remains.
00:04:56.000She joined Dennis Prager for a full hour about a year and a half ago in one of the most powerful interviews that I have heard in quite some time.
00:06:23.000And therefore, there's always people who were afraid even to think.
00:06:28.000And just when we wake up, then just our neighbors are gone.
00:06:32.000And we don't know, like maybe space has something wrong or maybe they realize something wrong.
00:06:37.000And so I was growing up there not knowing the world like this ever existed.
00:06:43.000So you were taught that your leaders were close to gods before you left North Korea.
00:06:49.000Did you ever have any doubt of the propaganda they were telling us?
00:06:54.000Did you ever have anything like, this doesn't sound right?
00:06:58.000I think that's why it's so scary right now, seeing the death of critical thinking.
00:07:03.000In North Korea, they don't teach us what critical thinking is or asking us to using the inner logic part in our brain.
00:07:12.000I mean, in some sense, it's helpful if you don't use that part because then you are going to be okay.
00:07:18.000The first thing my mom told me as a young girl was, don't even whisper because the birds and mice could hear me.
00:07:25.000She said my tongue was the most dangerous weapon that I had in my body because if I said one wrong thing, it was going to kill up to three, two generations of my family's lives.
00:07:52.000There is a quote in 1984 by George Orwell, which is the only way to keep a secret from the government is to first keep the secret from yourself, which is very similar to what you're saying, which is don't even whisper because the birds and the mice might hear you.
00:08:13.000And so your story gets to be just super powerful of what you had to do to escape.
00:08:31.000Yeah, so when I was, by the time I was 13 years old, we couldn't really find any more food.
00:08:38.000The reason why we're starving is the regime decided to starve 90% of the population who are living outside of capital Pyongyang.
00:08:48.000And Kim Jong-hye said that when millions of North Koreans were dying, when I was totally in the 90s, this is one of the horrible famines that happened in the modern history.
00:09:38.000I was living in the northern part of North Korea, a town called Heishan, and we had a border with China and there was a Yalu River between us that was flowing.
00:09:48.000And so that's why we were able to see the electricity lights coming from China at nighttime.
00:09:54.000So before I continue, I just have some other very basic questions about North Korea.
00:11:39.000And if I understood you correctly, they got rid of Mother's Day because you can't have a relationship with your parent.
00:11:45.000Remember, we talk about a lot on our program, the one commandment that ties to your nation of the Ten Commandments, honor your mother and father so that you may live long in the land of which you are in.
00:11:55.000Totalitarians always try to break the bond between a child and a parent, and you lived through that.
00:12:01.000And so then I must ask: growing up in this totalitarian country, this tyrannical country, what then motivated you to put your life at risk to go across the river and essentially smuggle yourself into a foreign country?
00:13:20.000But her book that I encourage all of you to get right now, While Time Remains, Ford by Jordan Peterson, we have so much to learn and we are so blessed to be able to have this story.
00:13:34.000And there are tens of millions of people right now in an open-air concentration camp in a country called North Korea.
00:13:39.000But I have to be told by pastors that politics doesn't matter, government doesn't matter.
00:13:43.000Meanwhile, tens of millions of people starve to death.
00:13:49.000Look, are you concerned about the American K-12 education system?
00:13:53.000Are you worried about what your children and your grandchildren are learning or honestly not learning in school?
00:13:58.000If you answer yes, my friends at Hillsdale College have a free resource for you.
00:14:01.000Hillsdale College understands the importance of education to the future of our country.
00:14:05.000They're now offering 10 free print copies of their recent issue of In Primus.
00:14:12.000It's titled Education as a Battleground, written by Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arne.
00:14:17.000The special issue provides a factual account of the issues in the ongoing battle over education, explaining why parents and teachers, not unelected bureaucrats or activists, should guide what our children are learning.
00:14:31.000With Hillsdale College, you can make a difference in your community by distributing these copies of In Primus at your church, local business, or even in your doctor's office.
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00:15:01.000Yanmi, let me ask you, when you were being raised in North Korea, what were you propagandized to believe about America?
00:15:11.000In some sense, it's exactly what Karen Left saying about America, that America is corrupt, poisonous, the dirty capitalist society where children cannot even study at school.
00:15:26.000But then also they're saying that Americans are cold-blooded reptiles that eat North Korean children, rape our women, and torture us.
00:15:37.000So they were saying how lucky we were having our dear leader defending us from these monsters.
00:15:43.000But the thing is, in North Korea, the child, we don't have internet.
00:15:46.000There's no way we can just Google and look up American.
00:15:49.000Only thing we could see was a school poster showing these like monsters, barbaric people were pulling our teeth out.
00:15:56.000And that's what I heard about America.
00:15:58.000I did not know this country was this beautiful free country.
00:16:02.000We will talk more about that in a second.
00:16:39.000They sold me just above $20 because I was a virgin and a child.
00:16:45.000And right now, even to this moment, there are 300,000 North Korean young girls and women are being sold for the organ harvesting and being sold as sex slaves in China right now.
00:16:57.000So you were then basically a sex slave.
00:18:27.000So, yeah, I think a lot of people think, okay, wow, that's got to be a great story that, you know, now you're in a good country that is South Korea.
00:18:35.000Actually, I remember like being free for the first time.
00:18:41.000And at some point, I was thinking, if the regime doesn't care me and give me enough at least some potato to eat, I would go back to North Korea.
00:18:54.000I was thinking if the regime would not execute me for defecting and then give me enough at least frozen potato to eat for the rest of my life, I would rather go back to North Korea than being in free South Korea.
00:19:09.000I mean, again, in the Bible, when God's chosen people were freed from slavery in Egypt, it just took a couple chapters before they told God, bring us back to Egypt, because at least we ate meat and we knew what we were doing all day long.
00:19:23.000And so once you went to South Korea, though, it wasn't like they just said, hey, welcome to Seoul.
00:19:28.000Didn't you have to go through a lot of interviews and almost pseudo-interrogations?
00:19:34.000Yeah, that's as soon as we arrived there.
00:19:36.000The first place they take us to is actually a hospital.
00:19:40.000Because North Koreans, even though we have supposedly free health care, there is literally nothing worse.
00:19:46.000So in the hospital, they use one needle to inject every patient.
00:19:51.000When they do operate, people don't have anesthesia.
00:19:54.000And most of people die from infection and fever and malnutrition, not from actual disease in North Korea.
00:20:01.000So they took us to hospital and do the full body check and make sure that we do not bring any new disease to the country.
00:20:08.000After that is clear, they put us in isolation of two months.
00:20:13.000You got to check out this book, While Time Remains, Yonmi Park.
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00:21:41.000So during this process, some of us even going under through the lie detectors.
00:21:46.000The North Korean regime sent some spies among the defectors and disguised them.
00:21:52.000So they have to verify our stories thoroughly.
00:21:55.000They had to make sure that we are actually North Koreans or not.
00:21:58.000And after two months of the interrogation, once we get verified that we are not spies, then we sent to three months of kind of a education center where they teach us that, you know, first of all, Americans are not bastards, that they live in a flourishing democracy.
00:22:15.000And they tell us, there is for the first time I heard about Kim Jong-yeo was a fact dictator.
00:22:22.000Like I, all my life, I believed that somehow he was starving just like us and working tirelessly for protecting our people.
00:22:30.000And then in South Sky, they were telling me that, no, he's a bad dictator.
00:22:35.000So in that, of course, that three-month period, I was learning about how to even take a bus.
00:22:40.000You know, I was almost different, coming from a different planet, time traveling and learning about modern technology, learning about what internet is for the first time.
00:22:51.000When you were going through all this process, one of the most powerful things I heard you mention to Dennis Prager that I remembered, I want you to explain it, is you, it took a lot of effort to think.
00:23:08.000What do you, that's, that's just such, that's something we don't, I mean, consider.
00:23:15.000What do you mean it took effort for you to think once you got out of North Korea?
00:23:20.000Yeah, I think this is where people don't understand how deep the tyranny can get.
00:23:52.000They never teach you how to think for yourself.
00:23:55.000And somehow in America, people think that when we are born as a kid, we are going to know what injustice is, what justice is, what democracy is, what human rights is.
00:24:06.000These are all conventions of the enlightenment.
00:24:09.000We invented these amazing ideas and we need to teach the children to understand what these are.
00:24:15.000But North Korean children are not taught of these topics.
00:24:19.000Therefore, thinking for yourself is never a thing.
00:24:22.000And I remember in South Korea, I was thinking for myself, like, even what I'm going to wear, right?
00:24:27.000What I'm going to wear, I mean, what I'm going to like do in my life.
00:25:35.000And tell our now American audience what you, the defector from North Korea, were being taught.
00:25:43.000It was shocking beyond anything that I could ever imagine.
00:25:48.000The professors were saying exact same things that my North Korean teachers said in the classroom.
00:25:55.000I was at some point thinking, did I transfer back to North Korean classroom?
00:26:00.000In American classroom, they were saying that all the problems in the world we have is because of the greedy capitalism and white men.
00:26:09.000And I was thinking, without capitalism, I mean, these kids are in there like a few hundred bucks yoga pants and then they're green just diktox.
00:26:18.000Their problems are having too much food.
00:26:21.000Without capitalism, they would not have any of those things they were having.
00:26:24.000And they've been dead long, dead, long time ago from starvation.
00:26:29.000And these professors were teaching these kids somehow that the worst thing in the world that can happen is inequality.
00:26:36.000Worst thing that can ever happen in life is a poverty.
00:26:40.000Inequality means there's a room to mobilize, to room to go further than you are.
00:27:39.000This is where, I mean, they say the only solution is a common revolution to all the problems that we have in America right now.
00:27:48.000And I was like, for the last two years, I was raising my son in Chicago and downtown, where governments have such a control that the governments are forcing my son to wear a mask up to here, eight hours a day in daycare.
00:28:04.000And street clubs are open, the clubs are open, and dog parks are open, but they close down the children's playground.
00:28:13.000So children have less rights than adults and these dogs.
00:28:18.000They have freedom to go get drunk and do whatever they want to do.
00:28:22.000And dogs run around, but not my child, because he's a human being, have no right to go to play outdoor in the sunshine in summer in the playground.
00:28:32.000And I think that's when I really understood.
00:28:53.000Can you just list a couple of specific examples of what you see happening in America where you say this is going to become North Korea very quickly?
00:29:08.000One is that dividing people based on collective guilt.
00:31:12.000Their injustice, their oppression is somehow that we cannot follow their non-grammatical, ever-growing pronouns.
00:31:21.000And my classrooms at Columbia in tears and telling me that I'm a bigot because I cannot use they in my sentences perfectly, them being a gender like fluid thing, something every second they can be anything they want.
00:31:34.000And for them, this is the end of the world.
00:31:37.000That's the oppression they are facing.
00:31:38.000And therefore, they want to destroy this matter, this country, in the name of some madness.
00:31:45.000I hope you all understood that that is a student, an American student at Columbia University, who is calling a young lady who was raised in North Korea, had to flee because of starvation, sold into a sex slave to watch her mother be raped to barely escape in negative 40 degrees in the Gobi Desert to South Korea, calling her a bigot because she doesn't use the pronouns that she prefers.
00:32:13.000Let me ask you just very briefly, how much, I mean, do you, this is an urgent time for America?
00:32:23.000Do you think that what needs to be done?
00:32:27.000I think this is a time for Americans to realize this is our time to found, like become founding fathers, find our country back, fight for the country that what made us unique, what made us great.
00:32:41.000Our founding fathers bled their blood, they gave their life for the liberty that we have today.
00:32:48.000Our time of speaking up right now is losing our jobs, getting demonetized and censored and calling bigots.
00:32:56.000But that is nothing to compare what our founding fathers did or North Korean people do to become free.
00:33:02.000So therefore, we need to realize freedom is truly not free.
00:33:06.000And we need to go speak up and fight back with this tyranny that is rising in the American government, all you mainstream media everywhere that we see.
00:35:18.000So let me ask you, Yanmi, now that you see America becoming more secular and less religious, do you think that makes it more likely for totalitarianism to take hold?
00:35:31.000Think there is a really correlation between uh, god and communism, because communists when they first, when they go for religion, there's a reason, because they are replacing god with themselves, they replacing the communist party with the ideology, the god's words.
00:35:49.000So now in America, more people becoming atheists.
00:35:52.000I mean it makes sense, because they do not understand the meaning of freedom.
00:35:57.000They don't understand that freedom without virtue it means anarchy and we lost virtue.
00:36:04.000And, of course, people on the subway in New York City shooting themselves as a heroin and harassing people and they say that's freedom, that's not freedom, that's anarchy and we've missed.
00:36:15.000Now we really misunderstand the meaning of freedom.
00:36:18.000People don't understand that freedom comes with responsibility and that also is lost.
00:36:24.000So we are witnessing this complete chaos that people lost meaning, not understanding what freedom is anymore.
00:36:32.000They don't even understand what's how we need to live a meaningful life in life like it just looks like completely lost darkness that i'm seeing in America that yeah, how do we win?
00:37:07.000Somehow there's a miracle that happened and god brought me to this promised land.
00:37:12.000And like that, I think, if we believe in god and if we believe in the founding fathers and what they wrote in the constitution, as long as we defend those principles, we can bring the glory of America, glorious America, back to this country, back to this land.
00:37:27.000That you see in America right now people, individuals like you, individuals that I meet every day and think my stomach.
00:37:37.000I'm hopeful and I think the key is not losing faith in humanity.
00:37:42.000And what shocks me about American left is their anti-human sentiment.
00:37:47.000That's exactly like at Columbia, the professor saying that humans are disease.
00:37:54.000We make the, our mother earth sick and this is what North Regime did.
00:37:59.000They said if when we are dying from starvation, it's easy to do socialism, if there are less people, it's easy to control, if there's less people.
00:38:08.000They don't believe that humans are made in the image of god, that we have the rights that give them from god, that nobody can take away from us, and the left is somehow spreading this idea that they pregnant women.
00:38:20.000The babies are not real babies and somehow humans are toxic, that we need to get rid of a lot of us, and this is scary.
00:38:28.000But despite that, we need to recognize that humans are gift and we need to protect life at all cost.