In this episode of America Uncensored, Chris and Shelley are joined by Yeonmi Park, a North Korean-American who left North Korea to pursue his dreams in the United States. They talk about Kim Jong-un's recent interview with Dave Rubin, why the US is crazier than North Korea, and what it's like growing up in North Korea.
00:00:00.000I'd be willing to make a bet, a gentleman's bet, that if Kim Jong-un did an interview
00:00:22.000with, I don't know, Dave Rubin, he would be allowed to say basically anything.
00:00:27.000He could talk about how he wins all the elections fair and square in North Korea, how everyone loves him, it's all perfect, there's no corruption, gulags don't exist, and there's no suppression of people's rights, none of that.
00:00:38.000YouTube would have no problem with him saying literally whatever he wanted to say.
00:00:42.000I mean, obviously, if he made direct threats against a person, take him down.
00:00:44.000But I bet if he also started talking about how, you know, making claims about war and their missile tests and just lying, YouTube wouldn't care.
00:00:54.000If Donald Trump comes out and says things, you may have seen Dave Rubin interviewed him.
00:00:59.000He just has these huge bleeps and he's like, you're gonna have to go off platform to watch because they'll actually just take down the video.
00:03:22.000I saw this video that went viral that claimed it reportedly it was made in North Korea talking about homelessness in the United States and it was saying like look how bad it is in America with all these people who don't have homes and North Korea isn't like that.
00:03:37.000So I guess we'll just Starting with this, right?
00:03:42.000How clearly there's an internal view of North Korea and a view that people there have of the United States.
00:03:48.000And then from that, your experience, you know, so how about we just, how about I just start over and say, what was it like growing up in North Korea?
00:09:45.000Is that because of like uh like historical family things like oh you weren't part of the revolutionary party and that's how you end up in a lower class?
00:09:52.000So this is like what like made me very sad America is like here all about white guilt like your ancestors owned the slaves but therefore you must be guilty and you are privileged.
00:10:02.000In North Korea the same thing because maybe my great great great grandfather was a landowner.
00:10:08.000Or not fighting for the communist side.
00:10:10.000Then they say your blood is tainted forever.
00:13:02.000And then the next day I, with my mom and to the lady, we found her and then she said, Oh, I can help you to go to China, but just don't tell them that you are mom and daughter.
00:13:13.000And then just tell them you're older than like 13, right?
00:13:16.000They say you're maybe 18 or 19 and told my mom you're like 35.
00:13:31.000So I crossed this frozen river, Yalu River, and there are guards with a machine gun standing there who are going to shoot you if you cross.
00:13:40.000But because the human traffickers bribed the guards, we were able to go.
00:13:45.000And as soon as we arrived in China, the first thing was my mom being raped in front of me.
00:13:50.000But the thing is, I never... So there's no sex education in North Korea, right?
00:13:54.000I don't even know the word sex by then.
00:14:22.000I mean, I still imagined with all of the problems of North Korea, people... You know, I have this vision of this dystopian world where the young men and women run and embrace and they're like, if the guards find us, it'll all be over.
00:14:35.000Human emotion still exists in this place.
00:14:37.000People still understand these concepts.
00:14:38.000But I suppose if the authorities, the powers, suppress knowledge from you, you can't have these concepts.
00:14:45.000So this is the thing, like, in North Korea, there's no concept for compassion.
00:14:49.000We have no concept for human rights, liberty, love, you know, all these things.
00:14:53.000It's like why George Orwell talks about who controls the language, controlling thoughts, right?
00:22:35.000They want the government to do it for them.
00:22:38.000A lot of young people, especially the millennial generation, not so young anymore, In my life, I was always told, you have to go to school, you have to go to college, you have to do these things.
00:22:48.000And everyone kept trying to tell me what I was supposed to do.
00:22:51.000And for me, I was, no, I'm not going to do it.
00:22:54.000But a lot of people I know went to college and just did what they were told.
00:22:58.000When they get out of college, they ask, now tell me what to do.
00:23:02.000So they're not used to being out there in the wilderness on their own.
00:23:05.000And of course, this is very, very, very different from, say, North Korea.
00:23:09.000But it's part of this shift, I suppose, where we used to be.
00:23:14.000I mean, Americans are fairly obstinate.
00:23:24.000So how did you end up, you know, so you're adapting to South Korea.
00:23:28.000At what point did you decide, now I'm going to make an even bigger journey and choose for myself to go to America?
00:23:34.000So I invited to a conference that was in Ireland, you know, Dublin, and it was a free conference, so they wanted to, it's like a youth leaders, like a leadership conference, every country participates.
00:23:47.000So they asked North Korea, they called up North Korea, embassy in London, would you send a delegation from North Korea?
00:23:53.000And then they said, we only can send three, because we have to spy on each other.
00:23:58.000So two is a lot easier to run, but three, like, you're watching, I'm watching, and we're watching everybody, right?
00:24:45.000So the interesting thing, I suppose, now is that you come here, you go to college.
00:24:49.000The current culture war in the United States is, there's a very negative depiction of colleges that they're embracing critical theory, Marxist ideology, and wokeness sounds like there's similar aspects to what you experienced with the ideology being, you know, told what you can and can't like and things like that.
00:25:07.000Not identical, obviously, but well, before the show, you said that the woke was crazier.
00:25:11.000Yeah, I think that's what I said, like, with Fox News, like, North Korea is not even this nuts.
00:25:17.000This is, I mean, where do I even begin?
00:25:20.000But, I mean, it just, entire four years, I was, so in North Korea, by the time I was born, the revolution happened such a long time ago.
00:25:29.000People are not passionate believers of communism, right?
00:27:14.000You know what this rot has taken us to humanity.
00:27:18.000But these people are so completely brainwashed.
00:27:21.000They think white men are the source of every single evil that we have.
00:27:25.000I suppose I think it's scarier to me that you can warn us and say, hey, this is how the revolution started in North Korea.
00:27:33.000Hey, this is what it's like when you have this communist totalitarian system.
00:27:37.000And no matter how many times you scream it, there are a lot of people in this country that reject the idea that your warnings matter and they actively pursue these situations.
00:27:45.000I suppose they think they'll be like the higher caste, maybe those who live in Pyongyang.
00:28:40.000This is what I can't understand, and maybe you'll have some insight, having obviously been from the country.
00:28:47.000Wouldn't it be better for the party, for Kim Jong-un, for his close circle?
00:28:52.000Wouldn't they be wealthier if North Korea was successful and prosperous, with a well-fed population, with new technologies and electricity?
00:31:52.000I mean, you have to, like, raise your fist and pledge your life to the party, essentially.
00:31:58.000Well, July 1st is the 100-year anniversary of the Communist Party in China, and there's this phenomenon of Red Tourism, where people are going around dressing up like old Red Guards and they're doing the salute and they're making pledges to devote their lives to the Party.
00:32:12.000You go take an Instagram photo of you doing the Red Salute and pledging your life to the Party.
00:32:19.000That's the flag of Black Lives Matter.
00:32:22.000It's the symbol Twitter used for Juneteenth.
00:32:25.000And they say it's the Black Power Fist.
00:32:27.000And I'm like, yeah, I guess the Roman salute, which the Nazis used, is the White Power Fist.
00:32:52.000You see people marching through the street in defiance of edict from governors when they did the lockdowns, and they're performing the Red Salute.
00:32:59.000They give it a different name, but it's the same symbol, the same flag.
00:33:02.000The people who are organizing Black Lives Matter say they are trained Marxists, or at least some of them do.
00:33:07.000And critical race theory, which is the big battle in the culture war right now, is literally rooted in critical
00:33:14.000theory from the traditional Marxist school of thought.
00:33:17.000And they try and deny it. But every day I feel I do feel optimistic, especially today with, you know, seeing these
00:33:25.000these families, Loudoun County, they're standing up, they're challenging the stuff.
00:33:29.000But I feel like, you know, these people, these families are worried about what their kids are being taught, are putting themselves on the line.
00:33:37.000I'm worried that if too many people are scared, and they remain scared, we inch closer towards a reality where you can no longer speak out anymore.
00:33:44.000I mean, we have the poem, we know what happens when you don't speak out in defense of others.
00:33:48.000So it feels like we're heading in that direction.
00:33:51.000I think there was a viral video of some woman, it was like a Chinese woman who was talking about, I don't know if this was Loudon or someone else, but yeah, she was like a Chinese parent and she was saying, this is just like the Cultural Revolution, which I went through in China.
00:34:03.000And a lot of people kind of were offended by that because there, you know, possibly 20 million people died during the Cultural Revolution.
00:34:10.000So some people are like, oh, well that's, you're being too crazy if you're comparing this to the Cultural Revolution.
00:34:16.000But you know, if the hallmark of the Cultural Revolution was the struggle session, right?
00:34:22.000Which is struggle under Chinese communism is a verb where you struggle someone, you bring them into a room,
00:34:30.000everybody in their workplace, or everybody in your neighborhood.
00:34:34.000Like if it was a very prominent person, they would fill stadiums to denounce these people.
00:34:39.000Like the person would stand there, they'd be made to hold some kind of like torture pose
00:34:44.000so that they're like the airplane or something where they're like uncomfortable.
00:34:48.000They'd have like a placard put on them that says what their crimes are, right?
00:34:52.000And then people would scream at them, yell at them, humiliate them, shame them, throw things at them.
00:34:59.000And it's like, well, if you think of that as what the Cultural Revolution was doing to people, you know, we don't struggle people in the U.S.
00:35:12.000We can ruin people's lives on Twitter.
00:35:15.000We don't have to bring them into a room to yell at them.
00:35:18.000We can just make them lose their jobs.
00:35:21.000How is it that China and North Korea are so different, I suppose?
00:35:24.000They went through a culture revolution, they had purges, they have a communist party with the red salutes and all that stuff, but China still has massive cities and wealth and technology and food.
00:35:36.000Probably a lot of that is just the ability of China to accept investment from the West.
00:36:20.000And it wasn't really, the state was still involved.
00:36:23.000Like, the state still owned the means of production, but they were kind of like, we'll give people the ability to at least make money on a small scale.
00:36:59.000So that's when they finally started, I guess, modernizing and getting more technology and things to improve.
00:37:04.000And then, because China is such a massive market, there's so many people there to work, right?
00:37:09.000Manufacturing companies wanted to come in.
00:37:12.000Companies... Germany came in in the 70s to start, like, building their... Volkswagen was their barrier.
00:37:17.000Yeah, so, like, building their auto plants there already.
00:37:20.000And also, people see it as a big market where people can buy things now.
00:37:24.000So I think that's the real difference.
00:37:26.000But like, structurally, it's not that different from North Korea.
00:37:30.000You know, North Korean people ideologically and structurally, people like to pretend that China's not communist anymore, because they have, you know, a certain thing, like they have a stock market, but you can't own property in China still.
00:37:44.000Like the state owns all the land still.
00:37:46.000You can buy a lease on the land for 70 years, and that's what you're buying when you buy real estate.
00:37:54.000Or you can buy an apartment in an apartment building, but you cannot actually own land.
00:37:59.000All the land is still owned by the state.
00:38:01.000And there is no real private companies.
00:39:45.000I know a lot of these activists on the left, and they're very utopian, they're very optimistic, idealistic, and they're like, we can create this beautiful utopia so long as we all just agree on how things work.
00:39:59.000Well, it starts with 10 people, them and their friends.
00:40:02.000And they all say, hey, I work today and I'm going to share with you my bounty.
00:41:27.000Yeah, which one just do you and I remember being a little kid and they have a bunch of colors and they're like, which one is your favorite?
00:41:49.000Clearly green is not my favorite color today.
00:41:52.000You know, a good point about that is, like, a lot of the problem people have with, like, this critical race theory stuff that's going around, especially when it's being taught through, like, K through 12, like, whatever it is as a university subject, you're a college student, you're a fully foreign person.
00:42:09.000But, like, if you're talking in kindergarten, you don't even have a real sense of your own self-identity, and yet you're already being put into these classes.
00:42:19.000See, what's interesting, technically, they aren't teaching critical race theory, because they're arguing, oh, we don't bring up the literature of race and policy.
00:42:29.000What they're doing is they're teaching the core thesis of critical race theory within other subjects.
00:42:37.000So imagine, here's why I described it.
00:42:40.000Imagine if a bunch of parents decided that the new math curriculum would be something like, here's a math problem a child encounters.
00:43:13.000And then you look at the math problem, you're like, this is just this whole thing.
00:43:18.000So they're finding subversive ways to indoctrinate kids, but it's also incorporated in their policies.
00:43:22.000And the scary thing is it's become inherent now, where you have these schools that don't even recognize they exist in this alternate reality.
00:43:57.000So for my family leaving Korea, coming to the United States and all that stuff, these concepts of a North and a South and this conflict didn't exist at the time.
00:44:05.000Something happened where all of a sudden, the city where my great-grandfather is, is worlds apart from the city where my great-grandmother was
00:44:15.000And I think my great-grandmother was from Seoul, and my great-grandfather was from Haeju?
00:44:36.000Something happened to make it that way.
00:44:37.000And now that impacts, you know, even me and other people whose history sort of stops at these conflicts.
00:44:44.000The historical revisionism that's happening in the United States is what scares me, and that's why I kind of, you know, related to these circumstances.
00:44:51.000I mean, North Korea also had like a speed run at this in a certain way because it was the Soviet Union after World War II that got North Korea, right?
00:45:00.000Like the treaty was, we split it along the 38th parallel that the Western democracies, they get South Korea, Russia, the Soviet Union gets North Korea.
00:45:12.000like a crash course in this in a certain sense where like you know now suddenly Kim Jong uh well Kim Il-sung is put in and he's like taking soviet stuff and then using it to build his own identity cult and all this stuff so it's kind of it's kind of crazy to look at North Korea too because this is like this is like the you know like the super powered version of what happens I mean, the thing is, like, what shocks me about North Korea, they began, like, communism, right?
00:45:40.000Promising, oh, I'm gonna give you free healthcare, free education, free housing, free everything.
00:45:45.000I mean, nothing is free, but they say everything is free.
00:45:48.000So they did that in the beginning from the Soviets, they got subsidies.
00:45:51.000So they were giving rations to the people for free.
00:45:55.000In the 90s, they stopped, the Soviet Union collapsed.
00:46:10.000So that's why like 30 million people died in the 90s in the northern parts.
00:46:15.000If you secretly grew a tomato plant or something in your base and like you hid it in your house, would they would they execute you if they found it?
00:46:23.000No, I mean if you hide it really well.
00:46:25.000Yeah, like let's let's say you're starving.
00:46:36.000We work collectively in the farm, and then the government takes 80%, and 20% is divided between the government officials, and then they just don't give you anything.
00:46:47.000It's like the stupidest thing I've ever heard, to be honest.
00:46:50.000It's an inefficient way to run a system to even benefit themselves.
00:46:54.000I think this is why China was like, hey, let's take investment.
00:48:24.000So he did all propaganda, making him Kim can move the mountains, knows what you think, like everything began there.
00:48:31.000So, so what are the circumstances keeping North Korea as it is?
00:48:35.000Certainly there's external pressure for them to change their ways, open up, free their people.
00:48:41.000But I, my understanding is like China is very defensive.
00:48:45.000China likes North Korea as sort of like this problem that the rest of the world needs to come to China to work on.
00:48:53.000They're a crazy guy with nukes and only we can negotiate.
00:48:56.000Like if you have to talk to us and it actually ties a lot into sort of China's internal political struggles as well, because certain factions within China were the ones working with the Kim family.
00:49:48.000And this is happening, and nobody in mainstream, like Michelle Obama has no problem standing up for girls that are captured by ISIS or Boko Haram.
00:49:57.000Where is any public figure in the mainstream standing up for this curse?
00:50:01.000Right now there are 300,000 North Korean refugees in China hiding, and most of them are women, and most of them are trafficked.
00:50:09.000So we have actual modern-day slavery existing.
00:50:13.000China has a huge human trafficking problem.
00:50:15.000Because the one child policy screwed up the population.
00:50:36.000We do rescue work, but it's become so hard during the COVID.
00:50:40.000So, but the thing is, it's, you know, now in America right now, there's only over 200 North Koreans made it to America for during the last 75 years.
00:51:05.000As a South Korean, you can just fly here without notice and get a visa on entry, right?
00:51:10.000You get an electronic visa, but it's hard to get a working permit.
00:51:13.000You can come as a tourist, but it's very hard to come as an immigrant from South Korea.
00:51:18.000Yeah, it's actually fairly difficult, I think, for anybody to get a work visa in the United States.
00:51:24.000I say relatively difficult, but I'm sure there's a lot of countries where it's a lot harder, especially with, like, Middle Eastern refugees into Europe.
00:51:47.000Well, so... I guess the difficult thing is, I'd like to try and predict the future.
00:51:52.000You know, I'd like to know, can we take... We've made some of these statements, like, oh, we can see what happened in North Korea, we can see how people behave, how they're scared to speak.
00:52:00.000And then, we've said, somehow North Korea became this way.
00:52:14.000gonna break out of this and just become sane again and defeat the cultural Marxist ideology?
00:52:21.000I'm fairly optimistic, to be completely honest.
00:52:23.000I mean, I see these parents waking up.
00:52:25.000I see a lot of reason to be optimistic in terms of what's happening politically with people being snapped to attention because of what's happening.
00:52:33.000And I have to imagine that there's elements within the U.S.
00:52:35.000government, they know everything we're saying and they're worried about these things too.
00:52:40.000Or is the ideological split so severe that these, you know, cultural Marxists and critical race theorists control too much?
00:52:48.000Well, I think with everything happening in schools, that was definitely overreach.
00:52:53.000Like once you start targeting people's kids, that's when people really freak out.
00:53:50.000We recently saw China send the most warships they've ever, warplanes, into the Taiwanese defense zone.
00:53:57.000And so there's this, obviously, one thing we mention often is Thucydides Trap.
00:54:01.000There's a very real fear that war will be happening soon.
00:54:04.000I'm wondering, before we start talking about China though, The stuff that you see with North Korea with the firing of the nuclear missiles.
00:56:34.000Wasn't the brother that Kim Jong-un poisoned also, like, hiding in China?
00:56:38.000He was kind of being supported by China, too.
00:56:41.000China has been trying to push, like, their own interest in North Korea by pushing people who would make the kind of market reforms they want.
00:56:49.000And supposedly Kim Jong-nam... Kim Jong-nam was open.
01:00:21.000However, now, like in a way, Biden is worse, right?
01:00:24.000I mean, Trump at least brought a highlight to the issue and tried to solve something about it.
01:00:30.000Like Biden recently, they reviewed their policy towards North Korea.
01:00:34.000Which is going to be exactly what Obama did.
01:00:37.000Strategic patience, which is strategically you do nothing, just waiting, and Kim Jong-un take the first positive move.
01:00:45.000So if they ignore North Korea like this, four, five years, eight years later, we don't know what North Korea end up with nuclear capability.
01:01:14.000But I certainly see what you're saying.
01:01:16.000I was hoping that it was a first step towards trust and maybe some kind of normalized trade, maybe some kind of encouragement towards, you know, look, there's opportunity if you change some of your ways.
01:01:27.000But, you know, based on what you've all been saying about how China wants the reform and they don't, it really does feel like the Kim-Ill family is a bunch of despotic... what's the... megalomaniacs.
01:01:43.000And also the thing is, if we are negotiating with North Korea for the first time, it makes sense to honor them, make them feel comfortable and trusted.
01:01:51.000This guy has been playing the same playbook for like, last 70 something years.
01:01:56.000They know what they know, or what they want to.
01:01:59.000So in a way, it just doesn't work anymore.
01:02:01.000Like talking to North Korea and then just try to make them warm and come out.
01:02:51.000You know, when I interviewed these New Zealanders who rode their motorcycles through North Korea, the one thing they did say was like, beautiful country.
01:04:44.000That really is something truly amazing about Chicago that I should definitely give it credit for.
01:04:48.000Been to a lot of cities, but to have every city street with trees lining every house, it really is fantastic.
01:04:57.000So I'm pretty sure the people that I interviewed, they said they chose their route, but I'm sure it was just that it was an acceptable route in the first place.
01:05:07.000Because if they went through bad areas, it was interesting.
01:05:11.000He said, they told me that a lot of people criticize North Korea for their Potemkin villages.
01:05:17.000When someone comes in to interview, they bring them and they show them this wonderful supermarket and they say, look at all the glorious bounty.
01:05:23.000And we in the U.S., we say they're putting on a show to make it seem like they're successful.
01:05:47.000Worked on a lot of US officials, Bernie Sanders.
01:05:49.000Who was it who said that they came to the US and said, if my people saw what, you know, we've done to them, because he was like at a supermarket.
01:06:14.000So like he was, yeah, he was just saying like, he was standing in an Aldi and then he got too depressed and had to leave because he was like, they've destroyed our people.
01:06:24.000I thought there was a Russian guy who said that, you know, if my people saw, you know, the variety or whatever of the Americans, there would be a revolution overnight or something like that.
01:06:50.000Kim Jong-un brand peanut butter, different flavors.
01:06:53.000Here's one with a red label, here's one with a yellow label.
01:06:55.000Yeah, the joke is that in communist countries you wait in a bread line, in capitalist countries the bread line forms for you, or something like that.
01:07:03.000The bread is in a line waiting for you, all just on the shelf and everything like that.
01:07:09.000I think that If you go back to the early 1900s, the rise of the communist and the fascist factions in Europe, and, you know, more so towards World War II, the communists get defeated in Europe by the fascists, the fascists get defeated by the Allies and the Soviet Union, but then communism begins to flourish and thus we get the Cold War for several decades.
01:07:34.000I think one of the challenges we face is that individual liberty has weaknesses.
01:07:39.000We tolerate these authoritarians, these communists, and they exploit.
01:07:54.000They have to kill people to support it.
01:07:56.000But so long as there are zealots who are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get what they want, We potentially walk the path towards that corruption as
01:09:00.000They don't see the connections between themselves.
01:09:02.000I do think there's some kind of blindness in the U.S.
01:09:06.000about ideology on the left, where there's this kind of idea that there's no such thing as left authoritarianism, where we just pretend not to see it, or the official media or whatever pretend that there's no such thing as left authoritarianism.
01:09:20.000You know, it's it's like a weird thing.
01:09:23.000And it it bleeds into like it happened with Antifa, where people were like, oh, it's it's not it's an idea, not an organization.
01:09:30.000But then it also bleeds into like the China stuff where you have people who are just like, well, no, China is not authoritarian.
01:10:14.000Yeah, are you familiar with the political compass?
01:10:16.000It's a square and there's four quadrants, and then you have the top left, which is authoritarian, the top right, which is authoritarian, and the bottom, you know, you have left and right that are libertarian.
01:10:27.000So the libertarian right's easily definable.
01:11:00.000So these people, I think they do it on purpose, it's very clever.
01:11:04.000You tell someone that if you want to be the freedom-loving libertarian leftist, the good guys, you have to beat people, you have to start fires, and believe in our cult ideology.
01:11:15.000In reality, if you look at the core of a libertarian system with cooperative economics, it is small tribes, it is small farms working together.
01:11:29.000You don't demand they adhere to an ideology.
01:11:32.000But if our jokes, if our whole perspective in society is that freedom-loving leftists are the people burning down buildings and cancelling people and threatening them and destroying their lives, there literally is no libertarian left in the United States.
01:12:25.000Yeah, it's the tricky thing about Marxism or communism, whatever you want to call this ideology, is that it really takes advantage of the fact that I think most people are good people.
01:13:06.000You know, we need a critical conservative theory.
01:13:09.000So all the conservatives, here you go.
01:13:12.000Critical theory was, you know, the Marxists rooted it very much in the Marx ideology of oppressors and oppressed based on class.
01:13:19.000I was actually just reading some good old critical race theory to better understand what they're talking about and Kimberly Crenshaw wrote that they coined the phrase critical race theory on purpose so that people understood it came from the Marxist framework of critical theory, but Critical theory and Marxism didn't understand American racism.
01:13:38.000So they needed to take his philosophy of oppressed and oppressor and apply it to racial politics in the United States.
01:13:44.000So we'll do the same thing now and we'll create critical political theory.
01:13:48.000And it states that if you are a liberal, you're an oppressor.
01:13:52.000And if you're a conservative, you're oppressed.
01:14:01.000Because the whole point of Marxism is to create struggle.
01:14:06.000And it divides people into different groups, makes them struggle, and those groups divide up into more groups, and they fight and fight, et cetera, et cetera, intersectionality.
01:14:15.000I don't think it can be solved by people fighting each other.
01:14:34.000But when you're actually face-to-face with someone, it comes down to basically like, you know, if somebody feels like they're being attacked, even if you are completely wrong, if you feel like you're being attacked, you will either respond in three ways.
01:14:50.000And so if somebody feels like they're being attacked, that's what's going to happen.
01:14:53.000You have to make connections with people based on, like, our common humanity, because that is the antithesis of Marxism, that we have a shared common humanity.
01:15:31.000They just pretend it's about helping you and making the world a better place, but it's actually about how can I empower myself?
01:15:38.000And I experienced this with Occupy Wall Street.
01:15:41.000The activists literally said, you know, they would say we want to flip the pyramid over.
01:15:45.000Now, to the untrained, flipping the pyramid over implies the working class will now be on top, and the capital will be forced to be on the bottom.
01:15:54.000What it really means, and this is what I asked, if you flip a pyramid over, the bricks crumble into a disheveled pile, with only one of those bricks from the working class sitting on top, and that'll be us.
01:16:08.000In the bellies of the people they possess?
01:16:11.000So this social justice stuff is very much a Trojan horse, which is probably something that you noticed, Yanmi, when you were at Columbia, was that this guise of compassion and kindness.
01:16:22.000How did they couch it to you when you were first learning about social justice at your school?
01:16:27.000Did they present it as something highly positive, or did they force you to do this stuff?
01:16:31.000It wasn't just, so I remember at the orientation, right?
01:16:34.000And then she was like, instructor came, so who likes like Jane Austen?
01:17:08.000Did you speak up and say, hey, actually, I'm from North Korea and... I did, I did.
01:17:12.000So before the class, in the class, right, there's like a Western Civilization, Music and Art in Columbia, you have to take in a core curriculum.
01:17:20.000And then professor's like, who has a problem studying Western Civilization, like the music?
01:17:25.000And everybody like raising their hands.
01:17:27.000And they said, because of this white man killed all minority and silenced women, we have to now study this Beethoven and Mozart's Bigots.
01:17:58.000binary. They're now saying Beethoven was black though. He wasn't. But they're actually now
01:18:05.000arguing that because of white supremacy Beethoven couldn't actually be marketed as a black man so
01:18:11.000they had to change his race. No joke. Wow. They're they're they uh
01:18:16.000There was this big thing where they started claiming that a black man invented the light bulb and that Thomas Edison just took credit for it.
01:18:22.000Thomas Edison was not a cool dude, don't get me wrong.
01:18:25.000But I think the actual story was that a black man who worked for Thomas Edison developed a special filament.
01:18:57.000I don't think there is a grand architect or conspiracy or group that are trying to make it happen.
01:19:03.000I think you could argue there's a conspiracy in the sense that a bunch of people who have a worldview rooted in this don't realize they're destroying everything around them.
01:19:10.000Some people for sure know they're lying, cheating and stealing.
01:19:14.000But it feels like dominoes falling over.
01:19:16.000You know, Joe Biden doesn't seem to be all with it.
01:19:18.000But he hears what people are saying, critical race theory is good, and he goes, okay.
01:19:21.000Mark Milley, the general, he has no idea what he's talking about.
01:19:25.000He goes, I just want to understand white rage, and it's like, bro, that's insane.
01:19:32.000It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
01:19:35.000Yeah, I think this is where the beautiful language stuff comes in, because if you, you know, people call people useful idiots, kind of, but it's kind of more like most of them are well-meaning innocents, I've heard that term, where like, really they're just, you know, they, they want to be better people, like you were saying, Chris, and they want to, but like the beautiful language really Just, it kind of pulls the wool over the eyes of a lot of people, and it's on purpose.
01:20:00.000You see this in every communist society where, I mean, in China, they just came out with a white paper, the Communist Party, about, you know, how the Communist Party in China has led human rights for a hundred years.
01:20:13.000They've been the leader of human rights.
01:20:16.000Uh, you know, because we've, you know, like this is the time where like they killed 80 million people.
01:20:21.000But they're like, yeah, no, we've definitely, you know, they redefine human rights.
01:20:25.000They say, you know, we talk about the universal, universality of human rights within the context of each country.
01:20:32.000So they're already saying human rights are universal, but we're going to change what this means, human rights.
01:20:37.000And then they go, we believe that human rights are subsistence, development, and contentment.
01:20:45.000And therefore, these are like the metrics that we're using to say that we've, you know, we've lifted so many million people out of poverty, you know, we are the leader in human rights.
01:20:56.000But it's even absurd, even if you use that standard, because they killed and starved and like 80 million people.
01:23:26.000I don't know how they did that in North Korea.
01:23:28.000I mean, it's kind of the way that a communist regime destroys society in a certain sense, because you destroy the meaning of language so everybody's a liar.
01:23:38.000You have to be a liar all the time for your survival.
01:23:49.000So in the movie, they go to this other planet through the Stargate portal, and when they try and write on the ground, the slaves there freak out, like, writing is forbidden, what are you doing?
01:24:02.000And they're like, we're trying to convey an idea to you, and it's like, you can't do that.
01:24:06.000And it's because when people have the ability to communicate, they become dangerous.
01:24:15.000The collective computational power of a large group of people is a lot.
01:24:19.000So to keep people oppressed, you must limit their ability to understand reality and share those ideas.
01:24:24.000Well, this is why I think the United States of America has always been the greatest enemy to communism.
01:24:30.000You know, it states, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that there is this, I mean, they called it like nature or the creator that gives people inalienable rights.
01:24:44.000This is different from most other countries, that you don't have freedom of speech or freedom of
01:24:50.000religion because the government grants you that.
01:25:38.000The one thing that greatly benefits China in the international conflict where we're trying to convince people who's right and who's wrong is the narrative of Black Lives Matter in the United States about some grand institutionalized racism where they come out and say look what you're doing to these minorities and it's all exaggerated or extreme or at the very least they hyper focus on some stories and make it seem like the whole of the country is racist or broken I mean, that's what Chinese propaganda has been doing about the U.S.
01:26:04.000Every day, there's a 30-minute Chinese news show that plays on every channel, right?
01:26:11.000And, like, it's always, whenever they talk about America, it's always about how dangerous and violent and racist and whatever, how bad it is.
01:26:20.000And so this stuff about critical race theory is kind of just like, it's exactly the same thing.
01:26:31.000Like, they can just say, oh, well, you can't criticize us for Wuhan, the lab leak or coronavirus.
01:26:37.000I mean, they won't admit it's a lab leak.
01:26:38.000But, you know, you say that it's racist.
01:26:41.000There was an incident that happened in the UN last week where Canada was about to bring up that there should be an investigation into the Uyghur genocide and the Chinese representative stood up and was like, preemptively said, actually there needs to be an investigation to Canada for what happened to the indigenous children.
01:27:00.000You know, like he just like right before the Canadian official was going to say something just came up and Classic Communist Party move.
01:27:11.000You know, it's funny, there's this, it's like a joke idea.
01:27:15.000What if we are actually in North Korea?
01:27:19.000Not like literally the physical space, like what if people in America are the ones who think they're so smart and think they know the world, but it's all propaganda, it's all manipulation, it's all controlled.
01:27:29.000And then actually in these other countries, they have spaceships and they have, you know, a hundred years more advanced technology.
01:27:35.000The idea is that for a lot of people, you just believe what the TV tells you, you just believe what the newspapers tell you.
01:27:40.000I suppose the difference is in the United States, we have these kinds of conversations that challenge our own understanding of the world.
01:27:45.000We also have freedom of movement so we can go to these other countries or meet people from these countries.
01:28:17.000They have to lie in some circumstances, but they lie when they shouldn't, and there's a lot of people who are corrupt.
01:28:21.000But then our media lies to us all the time as well.
01:28:24.000I do think it's funny when we talk about the things China is doing.
01:28:28.000And, you know, you mentioned that China's got this program where they say all these things about the United States.
01:28:32.000We got the same thing, sort of, right?
01:28:34.000We've got these corporate American deep state whatever media that just say whatever the establishment wants them to say.
01:28:42.000Granted, we also have the internet with some free speech still available to the rest of us, but more so than many of these other countries.
01:28:51.000I mean, the great thing for China is that the American corporate media is saying the same thing as the Chinese propaganda, especially during the entire coronavirus.
01:29:11.000Don't say anything that contradicts them.
01:29:13.000Well, even worse, this is something we covered recently, like a lot of these medical journals early on that were saying, you know, it's lab leak hypothesis, complete conspiracy theory.
01:29:24.000Not only were they quoting scientists like Dr. Peter Daszak, who was working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China is giving money to some of the biggest medical journals in the world.
01:30:40.000Unless Google was audited and forced to reveal where the money is coming through.
01:30:44.000But it's very, it works in any capacity.
01:30:47.000Any individual can run any video as an ad, and anybody can buy an advertisement and choose to run it on a specific channel.
01:30:55.000So if you find somebody who's producing a show called, like, China, you know, a YouTube channel called Why China is Right, and every day they do an hour video where, as an American, they're like, this is lies and propaganda, China is great, Some political actor might not be able to physically fund that without an ad appearing.
01:31:13.000YouTube will say, this is Chinese-sponsored.
01:31:16.000But the Chinese government could put money into a company which then advertises sneakers.
01:31:21.000And they say, we want to run all of these ads for sneakers on this channel.
01:31:46.000Because Google just says, hey, here's how much money you made in ads and you have no idea where the ads came from or what the ads are for.
01:31:51.000I have people, they mention to me, like, oh, I got a Bloomberg ad on your video once.
01:31:55.000This is back during the election or whatever, primaries.
01:31:57.000And I'm like, good, I rag on the guy all the time, so if he's paying me to rag on him, it's understandable that he wants to try and counter that narrative, but I don't think you guys buy it, right?
01:32:04.000I think my audience is smart enough to realize the dude's full of it and he's buying political ads, and I'll take his money.
01:32:09.000But what if it's more insidious than that?
01:32:12.000What if it's a company for air conditioners?
01:32:16.000Every ad spot that you have, so there's ad inventory.
01:32:19.000Your video could be a certain amount of minutes, maybe it's 15 minutes, and a YouTube ad can appear every certain amount of minutes, and algorithmically they restrict how many ads can appear.
01:32:29.000Not every video sells every possible ad space.
01:32:36.000You saw a YouTuber who was constantly saying things good about you.
01:32:40.000You could indirectly make sure every single available ad on that channel was paid for, and that YouTuber is now making tons of money, successful, and driven to produce more of the content they're doing because it works.
01:33:13.000There was this really creepy moment where China was asking people to upload a video to their YouTube channels, where it was a guy complaining about a Falun Gong show in New York City.
01:33:26.000They were like, I think it was Falun Gong.
01:33:53.000Do you guys feel like this is capitalism defeating itself?
01:33:57.000Like the fact that people are being able to monetize this money that's available to weaponize information against the way that the West has become powerful?
01:34:07.000That's kind of what I've been thinking.
01:34:11.000This might be kind of a tangential answer to that question, but I don't believe in capitalism.
01:34:18.000I think that's a Marxist kind of construct, a binary.
01:34:22.000You have communism or you have capitalism.
01:35:03.000Alright, well, we should take Super Chats.
01:35:05.000If you haven't already, give us a like, hit that like button, subscribe to the channel, and share the show if you think these conversations are important.
01:35:12.000We're definitely gonna have more like it.
01:35:14.000And now, there's a lot of questions because this is like one of the more serious, you know, shows that we've done.
01:35:49.000I think I'm on season three, but I think I started with season two, so I need to, like, stop and go back and make sure I watch, but heaven a blast.
01:35:56.000All right, Mark Guidetti says, Yanmi is such an inspiring human being.
01:36:04.000Tim, it's surprising it took this long to have her as a guest.
01:36:53.000I think that was kind of how he put it.
01:36:55.000But like, he talked about how, you know, even growing up as a Uyghur in China, he had this idea that like, it was kind of a misunderstanding.
01:37:05.000that if the Chinese Communist Party just really understood what was happening with the Uyghurs,
01:37:10.000like on the ground, then there wouldn't be so much repression, you know?
01:37:14.000Like he just kind of thought it was a misunderstanding.
01:37:16.000And this is something we've heard from multiple Chinese dissidents,
01:37:20.000or people who've been in prison for their beliefs, or whatever, that like they thought it was just like,
01:37:25.000because they grew up in this environment where they're taught, like even if you try to resist
01:37:29.000the brainwashing, if you're a dissident, you're a pretty stubborn person, right?
01:37:33.000You're a pretty stubborn, opinionated person.
01:37:35.000But even people who were like able to dissent from an authoritarian system, they had that part of them that was kind of a little bit in disbelief that it would actually get so bad.
01:37:44.000Like he didn't think he was going to go to prison for starting a kindergarten.
01:39:40.000El Rojo Grande says, Hey Tim, PSA just released a limited edition AR-15 lower in response to Biden's comments on defense from a tyrannical government.
01:39:49.000The Tyranny 15, safety selection has freedom, F-15 and nukes engraving.
01:41:06.000People should find the appropriate Republican who has the gall to challenge wokeism and wokeness and bring on someone who's had experience.
01:49:07.000So to remind people, like, that's how much the dear leader loves you.
01:49:14.000I have a feeling that there's like at some point you got a bunch of these like North Korean Communist Party members and they're like sitting there like and I just half glazed over.
01:51:38.000Your girlfriend's boyfriend says I'm a big manly man, and hearing the finer details of Yanmi's story made me cry and unable to repeat to others.
01:52:15.000Yeah, they become a nuisance every so often and you got to cull the numbers otherwise they keep breeding and there's helicopters everywhere.
01:52:21.000But it's so cute when they're feeding their young.
01:52:45.000What if like, what if a burglar comes to your house in a helicopter and he's like, in an Apache, and you're like, hey, you know what you're supposed to do?
01:52:50.000We're allowed to have it, that's the thing.
01:52:51.000Joe Biden doesn't want us to have it, that's for sure, but we are.
01:52:55.000Commander232 says, Park, I have much respect for you and wish you the best.
01:52:59.000I was stationed in South Korea in 2010 through 2011 when I was in the army, and all the Korean people I met were so welcoming and wanting to work with you, and wanting to work with you, and that included North Koreans I met at the DMZ.
01:55:27.000$10 for Knowles the first time, $10 for Lauren Chen, $10 for Knowles the second time, $10 for China Uncensored, $10 for Uber Ian, $10 for Wonderful Lids, $10 for Yanmi, the bravest, most wonderful voice we have, and $10 for teaching about the horrors of communism.
01:56:12.000In Venezuela, for instance, where they want to control and regulate currency and control the people, they can share with Bitcoin.
01:56:17.000Of course, in North Korea, if you don't have a smartphone technology to actually use this stuff, it's probably hard to actually, you know, fix it.
01:56:25.000Here's a question that's probably for me, but I'll say it for, uh, I'll ask Yanmi.
01:56:29.000Brent Chappell says, what has been your favorite anime so far?
01:56:32.000And which one do you want to watch next?
01:57:50.000You guys do such a good job covering about him.
01:57:54.000Well, it doesn't seem so secret to me.
01:57:59.000I mean, Moon Jae-in, in his youth, he was a leftist, kind of a communist sympathizer.
01:58:06.000So there are a lot of people who think that he is still basically that, and the people that are in power in South Korea are sympathize with North Korea, would like to unify with North
01:58:18.000Korea, and also are sympathetic towards China and turning away from the U.S. essentially.
01:58:24.000We did a few videos on China Uncensored about that topic.
02:00:35.000So you need to like this video, subscribe to this channel, hit the notification bell, and even then it doesn't do anything.
02:00:41.000So I guess if you really like the show, you can share the show and go to TimCast.com, become a member, help support our work because we're gonna be bringing on more journalists and expanding our content.
02:00:49.000New website launching in just a few weeks.
02:00:51.000But I guess so long as you like the show and you just come and watch it of your own volition, YouTube doesn't owe me promotion.
02:00:59.000YouTube doesn't owe me notification bells.
02:01:01.000I guess technically if you choose to get notified and you don't, they're kind of ripping you off.
02:02:39.000So we're gonna get, maybe, we were having a laugh with Michael Malice and we're talking about getting an old-timey painting where we can like take the eyes out and have the eyes follow you.
02:02:50.000And Michael said that we should, he showed us a picture, a painting of Kim Jong-il wearing a samurai outfit and riding a tiger.
02:02:57.000Have you ever seen that painting before?
02:05:58.000Do you want, uh, well, I guess I suppose you just shouted out your book and your YouTube channel already, but do you have any other social media or anything else you want to mention?
02:06:04.000Oh, well, I'm on like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, not on TikTok.
02:06:32.000And you can follow China Uncensored or America Uncovered or our podcast China Unscripted on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, not TikTok.
02:07:04.000Yeonmi, the story about how you risked your life to watch a movie, how you faced certain death even just staying where you were and you had to make your way to China, how you endured slavery because it was better than death, but how you traveled through the desert to make it finally to South Korea to find freedom is one of the most inspirational stories I've ever heard.
02:07:23.000And so I hope it inspires many Americans to stand up for what they believe in.
02:07:27.000To not allow ideologues and authoritarians to take over, because certainly it can be way worse if we do nothing.
02:07:36.000And we have a lot to lose as a country, but for the time being, fighting back, we would never even risk as bad as it was for the things you've experienced.
02:07:47.000I mean, Americans, their worst case scenario will never be as nearly as devastating unless we do nothing.
02:07:53.000So I hope that's a good reminder and thank you for coming.