North Korean defector: The ‘dictator’s handbook’ is being used to indoctrinate U.S. schoolchildren, and it keeps me up at night

Yeonmi Park warns that today’s teaching of “equity” and white privilege is “a playbook for dictators.” 

She knows of what she speaks. Park courageously defected from North Korea at the age of 13 in a quest for freedom, escaping through China, Mongolia and South Korea before finally reaching the United States in 2014.  

That year, she was named to the BBC’s international “100 Women” list for her activism in raising awareness about oppression in North Korea. Now 27, she is raising her 4-year-old son in Chicago – and has strong words for the U.S. and its education system. 

She cautions that the emphasis on equity and teaching that there are those who are “privileged” and therefore “guilty” shows how dictators create a vision of “paradise” and seize power from people. Park says those who promote the ideology fail to study history.  

“That’s why we keep repeating it. We have seen how this plays a role, a playbook for dictators,” Park said in an interview with Fox News Digital last week. “There is a playbook for this elite … to seize power from people. And this brainwashing is a seed of that, like making sure that everybody is brainwashed to believe this is a way to get to that paradise. 

“And the paradise doesn’t exist.”  

Park explains that indoctrination includes tenets such as “white privilege” and “white guilt,” and is exactly what North Korea did in the name of “equity.” 

“[In America,] it’s all about this hierarchy of victimhood. And I see that my son is learning at school who is privileged, who is guilty. 

“This is exactly the dictator’s handbook. I mean, it’s Hitler’s youth, Mao’s youth and Kim Il-Sung’s youth. They always go for young children because they have [not] lived their life enough to have critical thinking skills. Their brains are very plastic, very malleable, and easy to observe information and believe it.”  

Park will release her second book in 2023, in which she explores the parallels between some trends in the U.S. and North Korea, such as censorship and demonizing groups of people for the purpose of exploiting power. 

She says she came to the U.S. to find freedom of thought and action, and she is worried about what she calls the “massive indoctrination coming from the left” that is also introducing socialism to children.  

“The definition of socialism means giving all the power to the government. They decide the means of production. They decide every aspect of our lives,” she said. “In North Korea, they say, ‘OK, we’re going to make sure everybody is equal … so give us all your land.’ So we gave the regime all the land, so they abolished private property. Nobody could own anything. State owns it. And that is when they took everything, and did not give anything back to us. And then when we gave all our rights, they didn’t give anything back. That’s a reality of socialism.  

“I’m willing to move anywhere it takes for me to protect my child from this brainwashing. So, when one more person convert[s] every day like that, we are going to end up like North Korea eventually. I think it’s our personal responsibility to protect as many people and children as we can from this massive indoctrination. 

“This is where it keeps me up at night. I never knew that I was going to be waking up at night and terrified being in America. I did that tons of nights in North Korea and China.”