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

by Yeonmi Park

(If you know anyone who thinks that America is uniquely bigoted and xenophobic, just ask them to explain why the United States gets more visa, green card, and citizenship applications than any other country in the world.)

That’s why it’s been so troubling to see these basic values come under attack in America. (Though I’ve noticed that the attacks come predominantly from very comfortable and well-fed professionals with advanced degrees, seldom from lower- or working-class people.)

If you attempt to tamp down innovation and markets, you don’t get less lobbying—you only cement in the advantages of those who got there first, thereby worsening corruption.

Capitalism has many flaws, but in three hundred years no society has come up with a better alternative, and no one who isn’t a college student, a university professor, or a politician—as far as I can tell—is actually clamoring for anything else. The fact is, no ethical, law-abiding American should ever have to be apologetic about their success—and the vast, vast majority of American success stories are indeed built on the ethical treatment of workers and compliance within the boundaries of the law. Nor is anyone in America forced to work a job they don’t want, or keep a job they don’t like. The government cannot compel you to start a business—though unfortunately, as we discovered during the pandemic, politicians hostile to business and enterprise can try to force you to close them.

“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

What Friedman meant was that societies that prioritize equality never bring the people on the bottom to the top, but force everyone down as low as possible, where they can all be equal—this is the essence of socialism.

It would also be one thing if this anticapitalist sentiment were new and untried, and we had no examples to point to in order to understand how it has worked in the past. But these ideas are decades and centuries old, and have failed everywhere they’ve been tried.

The so-called economic reforms, business regulations, and tax increases that have been passed in the last several years have, from what I can tell, accrued no benefit whatsoever to people who actually depend on social services like public schools, universities, hospitals, parks, and transportation. With every new tax increase, with every new federal regulation, with every new piece of legislation, it seems that bad schools remain bad, unaffordable health care remains unaffordable, and dangerous neighborhoods remain dangerous. This suggests that the priority is never to actually improve the lives of individual people and families, but to simply increase the number of people who depend on new and existing government programs because they have nowhere else to turn. In other words, the solution to a bad hospital isn’t a good hospital, it’s two bad hospitals.

And the bluer the city government, the bleaker the prospects for hope.

This need to keep and accumulate as many citizens as possible who are dependent on the state also helps explain the overlap between people who are hostile to capitalism and people who are hostile to family life. The family remains the foundation of American society, the single most important institution in the life of children, far more so than any government agency dedicated to child education or welfare. But for decades now, the American family has been suffering. Absent fathers, children born out of wedlock, and the destructive effects of drug and alcohol abuse have eroded the central role of the family in American life.

In fact, it’s an opportunity: The destruction of the family creates more government clients.

What Genghis valued above all was talent, work ethic, and dedication to the cause—not lineage, pedigree, or connections.

The dirty secret about left-wing attacks on capitalism, the family, and meritocracy in America is that they’re regarded as quite the hilarious joke in China—which is happy to watch Americans devalue and degrade every source of strength they have.

SPEAKING TRUTH to power is as old as America itself. The United States might have been born as a reaction to monarchical tyranny in the late eighteenth century, but its deepest roots reach back a century and a half earlier. The English religious exiles who chose to make the difficult and dangerous journey across the Atlantic to the New World did so in search of greater individual and communal liberty—it was an exodus in search of truth and freedom. The sacrifices they made for the sake of that search were almost unfathomable. They left behind everything they ever knew and embarked on an entirely uncertain path. When they arrived in Massachusetts, the winter was unimaginably harsh, and the landscape of thick woods and forests was unforgiving. There was no obvious source of food or shelter; there were no authorities and there was no security. Everything had to be built from scratch. Our forefathers in America were willing to undergo such extreme conditions and assume such dangers—all for the sake of freedom of religion. That’s how precious they considered the basic freedoms of speech, expression, and conscience. They were willing to risk everything for it. This value was, of course, eventually enshrined into law in the form of the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1791. And for the vast majority of American history, it performed its function well.

Far from maintaining an absolutist commitment to the sanctity of freedom of expression, a large segment of American society now believes that free speech is a public and private threat. The right to not feel offended, the right to be protected from unpleasant realities and difficult ideas, the right to feel safe from people who disagree with you—these are of course not rights at all, but they have come to supplant the legal rights enshrined in the First Amendment. And because no American is actually entitled to deny any other American their First Amendment rights under the law, many have come up with an extralegal strategy for suppressing speech they don’t like: what is known as “cancel culture.”

The real power of cancel culture is the fear that it instills in the minds of millions of ordinary people, convincing them to think twice about expressing themselves freely or else risk having their lives destroyed by real and/or online mobs.

There is a term for making people second-guess every word or gesture for fear of losing their livelihoods. It’s called “dictatorship of the mind.”

At the end of the day, this is the object of cancel culture in America: to deprive people of the right or ability to express thoughts that run counter to official narratives, so that eventually, they won’t even know how. Threaten enough people with the destruction of their reputations and livelihoods if they criticize the wrong thing, and eventually they won’t even know how to criticize it.

This helps explain why so many media outlets, universities, foundations, NGOs, politicians, and corporations all seemed to spontaneously converge on the same narrative about COVID: “It came from a wet market, not a lab leak, and any speculation to the contrary is racist, and racist speech is the equivalent of physical violence, so it must be banned.” This was obviously patently absurd on its face—but it was effective in making people second-guess their own common sense, which told them that the virus probably leaked from the nearby virus-research lab, and think better of voicing their well-founded opinions out loud.

Cancel culture is not just about trying to punish comedians for making occasionally tasteless jokes (which it is their right to do), it is about locking ordinary citizens out of social participation if their opinions are considered “undesirable” by the media, corporations, and government. It is as serious as serious gets.

A more modest proposal is to recommit ourselves to the founding principles of our Founding Fathers and their forebears: to freedom of speech, expression, and assembly. This means doing what the ACLU did in Skokie, Illinois: prioritizing the law over our own feelings. And it means defending the rights of individuals—even ones we disagree with—from the mob.

In other words, we must take the path of resistance. Like the pilgrims, we must take the road that makes us uncomfortable, that is uncertain and frightening, if that’s what the truth demands. Because that is the only road to freedom.

The consequences of this were most visible during COVID-19, when nearly all U.S. corporations, universities, and media rushed to defend the actions and decision-making of the Chinese government, helping the CCP cover up the origins of the virus by deeming anyone who disagreed with the official Beijing line as a “racist” or “crackpot” or “conspiracy theorist.” It also became painfully clear that U.S. industry had outsourced the most basic capabilities to China: America, the most technologically advanced industrial country in history, could not even make its own masks or ventilators.

It is the Earth’s longest-running experiment in deliberately managed human misery, a perpetual crime against God, an interminable violation of human dignity, a black mark on the human species so dark and deep that it can almost make you ashamed to be a part of it—that it can make the individual human beings incarcerated there spend the entirety of their short lives dreaming and daydreaming of living instead as a bird, or even a mouse.

The first rule of winding up in a North Korean concentration camp is to never, ever ask why you’re there. It can lengthen your sentence, or lead directly to execution, or to the arrest and imprisonment of your family or friends.

All regimes are capable of violence and abuse. But more than torture or imprisonment or corporal punishment, it is the mental enslavement of Kowon that remains for me the embodiment of socialism.

For Napoleon and Stalin to become possible in the first place, the old regimes—of Louis XVI in France, of Nicholas II in Russia—first had to lose control of their countries through many years of political and societal decay, all of which occurred during peacetime, and in eras when no one thought the dissolution of the monarchies would ever be possible.

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.

Meanwhile, these same American elites have been selling off their own country to China, spending decades shipping as many American jobs to China as possible, eroding America’s industrial and manufacturing base and supply chains, leaving the country vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Millions of ordinary Americans have been plunged into chaos and ruin in the process. The response from elites has not been to help these people, but to stigmatize them all as racists, bigots, transphobes, and insurrectionists, in order to justify their declining fortunes.

I worry about what will happen the next time a big surprise arrives on our shores. Will we have the cohesion, the belief in the rule of law, and the confidence in democracy to see us through? Or will we resort to trammeling the Bill of Rights, seeking to silence dissenters, muzzle freedom of speech, get rid of political enemies, and assent to the government assuming indefinite “emergency powers”?

The reason I wrote this book is because for so long, I never had the language to describe either tyranny or freedom. Now that I’m finally starting to, I need you—the reader—to help me bring attention to the fact that millions of North Koreans are still being robbed of even the words to describe their horrible nightmare, and that America itself is not as safe from a similar fate as it might think.

And as the generation of the Great Depression and the world wars passes on, so does the memory of what it took to build the system of abundance that we enjoy today. As America becomes predominantly made up of people who didn’t have a hand in building the system in the first place, it is producing more and more people who want to destroy the system because they don’t understand it. They don’t appreciate how fragile their freedom is, how precious their system of government, how rare their way of life. And so they entertain fantasies of tearing it down. In some cases, those fantasies are becoming reality.

It’s no wonder, really, that while millions of people around the world continue to face murder, starvation, rape, torture, and enslavement, many Americans who support “social justice” are primarily concerned with the infinite multiplication of ungrammatical gender pronouns and how much “range” to give chickens before they wind up in supermarkets. It’s easy to laugh at this kind of childish, nonsensical behavior—even I enjoy poking fun at it now and again—but at the end of the day, unfortunately, it’s deadly serious. When a people become untethered from history, when they become unshackled from reality, when they lose the ability to understand cause and effect, they become ripe for exploitation from those who hold real power.

But there is a different kind of revolution, one that unfolds more modestly, almost imperceptibly. The new ideology might start in only a small number of classrooms, or magazines, or bureaucracies. You might notice it spreading, but comfort yourself that it’s prevalent only among people below a certain age, and so they’ll grow out of it; or popular only among people who work in certain industries or certain parts of the country. You tell yourself that those people all live in a “bubble,” and that it’s never long before bubbles pop. You’re confident it’s just a fad, and that it’s never long before fads fade away, giving way to new fads.

But these little fringe ideas held by a small number of young people and immature adults in isolated industries located in eccentric parts of the country can slowly but surely become the entire society’s dominant culture. Especially if the new ideology works to the advantage of political, financial, and cultural elites, they will be happy to adopt it as dogma in all the country’s institutions of power. Some version of that process is what happened in Russia, China, and North Korea. There is a version of it happening now in America.

Ronald Reagan said it best: “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance, it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”

What is this freedom that we need to preserve? Dear reader, it’s right there in the Bill of Rights: freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition; the right to bear arms; freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; the right to due process of law, freedom from self-incrimination, and the rights of accused persons; freedom from cruel and unusual punishments; the freedom of cities and states to make laws for themselves independently of the federal government. We as Americans must fight to preserve these freedoms, because they are never more than a generation away from disappearing. This doesn’t mean we have to harden our hearts, or lose our humanity or compassion. One thing I love so much about Americans is that—unlike any other people on the planet—when they face daunting challenges, they become more cheerful and hopeful, not less. As we brace ourselves for the fight of a lifetime, we mustn’t forget who we are.

For this reason, I believe our fifth founding will involve the reestablishment of personal responsibility and local government. For too long, we have looked to our national government in Washington, D.C., to solve all our problems and to resolve all of our differences. But it is not the job of the president to fix your local school system; it is not the job of the Supreme Court to make decisions for your family or community. It is your job—and mine, and all of ours—to participate every day in self-government, not just to outsource democratic government to politicians.

You will feel more hopeful, more optimistic, more compassionate, more disciplined, and more determined to improve the future than ever before. The light of your example will shine so brightly that no woke mob will be able to extinguish it—in fact they will be embarrassed by it, because deep down, they know that they have nothing whatsoever to offer free, prosperous, patriotic individuals and communities. Don’t be cowed by them. Don’t give up on our country.

My favorite part of the interview was when we discussed my experience at Columbia, because Rogan came to the dangers of the woke movement earlier than most. His core insight was that the current generation is able to withstand so little adversity and reverts to shouting and crying so easily because they’ve never had to endure truly hard times, like all earlier generations have. “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times” was the bit of wisdom he shared with me (from the novel Those Who Remain, by G. Michael Hopf).