While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

by Yeonmi Park

Today, there is very little countrywide consensus on any political or cultural matters. What’s more, the internet, social media, and the twenty-four-hour news cycle have exposed the corruption and incompetence of many of our political and cultural elites, to the point where most Americans no longer have any faith or trust in their elites. This in turn has led to historically low levels of voter participation in local and state politics, declining rates of church attendance and religious belief, and plummeting rates of family formation. Unwilling to take responsibility for any of these categories of national decline, American elites have resorted to insisting that all this is somehow the fault or responsibility of a particular political faction (almost always “conservatives” or “Republicans,” by which they simply mean “working-class” or “rural” or “white”), and that we must start banning certain books, censoring certain forms of speech, and kicking these “political enemies” off various free speech platforms.