Why a North Korean Defector Is Denouncing the Ivy League

Yeonmi Park’s shifting persona and her newfound fame on the MAGA right raise questions about the stories we buy, totalitarianism, and ‘post-truth’ America

This article appears in New Lines Magazine

Yeonmi Park is tired of defending herself to journalists. “I wrote all this in the books. I explained a million times,” she told me near the end of our tense and, at times, surreal 45-minute conversation. “They refused to believe me.”

Park, 29, was once celebrated in the mainstream press. At a youth summit in Dublin in 2014, she gave a deeply emotional speech about her escape from North Korea that went viral, transforming her from a minor celebrity in South Korea, where she was living at the time, into one of the world’s most famous defectors. Outlets like The New York Times and The Daily Beast ran breathless articles, and Park quickly became a fixture in elite, mostly liberal circles. She attended the Met Gala. She opened for Hillary Clinton at the Women of the World conference. Marie Claire profiled her. Penguin gave her a $1.1 million book deal. She was admitted to Columbia University.

For four years, Park quietly pursued a degree in human rights studies, attending the university’s campus, a shaded neoclassical oasis in uptown Manhattan. But after graduating in 2020, she returned to the spotlight with a different kind of defection story. The liberal establishment, she claimed, was morally debased, an indoctrination machine that threatened to transform America into a North Korea-style nightmare, with a mix of safe spaces, gender ideology and diversity initiatives — all flashpoints of the American culture war that conservatives have railed against for years. Park’s horror stories of her time in Columbia’s liberal gulag won her audiences with podcast hosts like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, who have large — though not exclusively — conservative fan bases.

Park took things further in February, when she appeared on two of the most extreme programs in the MAGAsphere: Mike Lindell’s “Frank Clips” show and Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. Months later, she signed on as a contributor with Turning Point USA, a large, well-funded youth organization known for hosting MAGA firebrands like Bannon and Tucker Carlson. In response, The Times and other prominent media outlets have now begun to highlight long-standing questions about her credibility.

Park has mostly decided to stonewall journalists like me, so I didn’t expect a response when I emailed an interview request in late June. An hour later, my phone rang. “I don’t see why I should talk to you,” she said. I started asking questions. I wanted to understand her transition from international human rights advocate to U.S. culture warrior — and why her specific brand of storytelling fits so perfectly into the right-wing ecosystem she’s embraced.

Read the rest at New Lines Magazine