If you're paying any attention to what's going on in America's colleges and universities, you know that these places work hard to indoctrinate students into American Marxism, which substitutes race, sex, and climate change for Karl Marx's original ideas about capitalists and workers.  Naturally, Democrats and other leftists have pushed back, saying conservatives are exaggerating for effect so they can take over those institutions, kick out all the minorities and gays, and institute a "Handmaid's Tale" regime.  But what if it's not a conservative saying academia has gone off the leftist deep end?  What if it's someone who escaped from North Korea who says this?

Well, that's just who's saying it.  In 2016, Yeonmi Park, who escaped from North Korea at great cost to herself, transferred from a South Korean university to Columbia University.  Columbia, as you know, is the institution from which Obama graduated, and that still protects his undergraduate grades by keeping them sealed in a deep vault to which no one may ever have access.

Park was shocked by what she found at Columbia.  According to what she told Fox News, the indoctrination is more aggressive and unending than what takes place in North Korea itself:

"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," Park said in an interview with Fox News. "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."

Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.  

Yeonmi saw red flags immediately upon arriving at the school.

During orientation, she was scolded by a university staff member for admitting she enjoyed classic literature such as Jane Austen.

"I said 'I love those books.' I thought it was a good thing," recalled Park.

"Then she said, 'Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.'"

[snip]

"It was chaos," said Yeonmi. "It felt like the regression in civilization."

"Even North Korea is not this nuts," she admitted. "North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy."

After getting into a number of arguments with professors and students, eventually Yeonmi "learned how to just shut up" in order to maintain a good GPA and graduate.

In North Korea, Yeonmi Park did not know of concepts like love or liberty.

"Because I have seen oppression, I know what it looks like," said Yeonmi, who by the age of 13 had witnessed people drop dead of starvation right before her eyes.

"These kids keep saying how they're oppressed, how much injustice they've experienced. They don't know how hard it is to be free," she admonished.

Read the whole article here or watch the interview:

‘America’s future is as bleak as North Korea’ says defector after attending Columbia | https://t.co/HPTKZf3S2U

— Bookwormroom (@Bookwormroom) June 15, 2021

If you've been wondering why American corporations have swung so hard to the left, it's because, for thirty years, they've been staffing themselves at all levels with college graduates.  Today's graduates, despite their leftism, are not hostile to capitalism.  Instead, they're hostile to America and to liberty — and they've learned that by undermining America's racial equality and sexual normalcy, they can destroy the country and its liberty while keeping the money rolling, just as China does.  In other words, they are fascists, who allow a marketplace to operate provided that it — along with everything else in the country — is under complete government control.

I've been saying for years that America's leftists want fascism, but I always pulled back from likening them to Nazi Germany.  After all, Nazism would have been just another form of socialism if it hadn't allied its socialism with ferocious racism.

What's worrisome is that with Critical Race Theory, the new faith on the left, complete with its relentless attacks on White people (and, increasingly, Jews), I'm not sure I can continue to make the distinction between the American left and the 20th-century fascists.  This is especially true given Park's point that leftists are more fanatical here than in her natal country, which has long been considered the most oppressive place on Earth.

As a bonus, here's another Park interview about Columbia, this one on Hannity:

Image: Yeonmi Park.  Fox News screen grab.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.