Multiple media outlets are reporting North Korean Defector Yeonmi Park’s shock that, “she viewed the US as country of free thought and free speech – until she went to college here.”

Yeonmi Park attended Columbia University and was immediately struck by what she viewed anti-Western sentiment in the classroom and a focus on political correctness that had her thinking “even North Korea isn’t this nuts.”

The 27-year-old told The Post that she couldn’t believe she would be asked to do “this much censoring of myself” at a university in the United States. “I literally crossed the Gobi Desert to be free and I realized I’m not free, America’s not free,” she said.   

“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 told 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.”

The Post writes, “Park fled North Korea at age 13 in 2007, a voyage that took her and her family to China and South Korea before she went to school in New York in 2016. 

“Her professors gave students “trigger warnings,” sharing the wording from readings in advance so people could opt out of reading or even sitting in class during discussions, Park told The Post.

“Going to Columbia, the first thing I learned was ‘safe space,’” she said.

“Every problem, they explained us, is because of white men.” Some of the discussions of white privilege reminded her of the caste system in her native country, where people were categorized based on their ancestors, she said.

Park said North Korea students were constantly informed about the “American Bastard.”

“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 told The Post.

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