Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Veronica Hays wrote in a June 16 post:
You know it's bad when a North Korea Defector is decrying American higher education as a regressive, socialist propaganda machine. Obviously, she knows of what she speaks.
Yeonmi Park, who escaped from North Korea at the age of 13, has a grim outlook on the fate of the U.S. After her experience as a student at Columbia University in New York, she was shocked to learn just how brainwashed Americans have become. “I thought North Koreans were the only people who hated Americans, but turns out there are a lot of people hating this country in this country,” she said.
Park told Fox News, “I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think. I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”
The suffocating political correctness Park encountered within the Ivy League will lead to complete eradication of critical thought, she warns. "You guys have lost common sense to a degree that I as a North Korean cannot even comprehend," she said. Moral relativism and nihilism has become the new creed. Park asks, “Where are we going from here? There’s no rule of law, no morality, nothing is good or bad anymore, it’s complete chaos.”
“Trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” comprise the current setting of America’s most prestigious and challenging learning environments. For Park to encounter this pathetic display of political correctness and weak mindedness among those who should be the best and the brightest intellectuals America has to offer is both embarrassing and alarming. Park recounts how professors permitted students to have the option to opt out of specific classes/discussions whenever course material could potentially threaten their delicate sensibilities.
But as Wonkette pointed out: "Park didn't elaborate on what North Korean schools do to coddle students who would rather not attend classes they find objectionable. Probably give them a medal for doing communism right," adding:
Perhaps recognizing the limits of the American education Is North Korea analogy, Park didn't have anything at all to say in either interview about Republican efforts to ban "critical race theory" from public schools, although if she keeps touring wingnut media, she may eventually end up explaining that preventing teachers from openly discussing America's history of racial oppression is the only way to save students from being indoctrinated.
Park's story fits so neatly into right-wing narratives that Hays didn't bother to question it. But as Wonkette also noted, there are doubts about that story, with critics noting parts of it appear to be lifted from the accounts of other North Korean defectors.
Hays was joined by WorldNetDaily in repeating it in a June 14 article by Art Moore. Like Hays, Moore had no interest in checking into her background and the veracity of her story -- after all, this is WND's narrative as well.
