Arun Cacodcar

North Korean defector Yeonmi Park detailed her life story as a victim of sex trafficking during a Young America’s Foundation event at Tulane.

Conservative activist Yeonmi Park detailed her life story as a North Korean defector and her harrowing escape as a victim of sex trafficking during a Young America’s Foundation event at Tulane University on April 9. 

Hosted by Tulane’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter, Park spoke to a crowd of approximately 100 students. 

The conservative student organization is part of a resurgence of young, right-wing organizing on college campuses. Tulane’s chapter of YAF received approval just one week after Tulane’s Turning Point USA chapter was approved as a campus organization.

Park has faced criticism in the past for inconsistencies in the story of her escape, background and her characterization of life in North Korea.

Park began her talk with a brief overview of how Kim Il Sung founded North Korea and consolidated power under the promise of a communist utopia.

“He was a very charming, young man with a huge, beautiful smile,” Park said. 

Park, who now resides in New York City, then labeled democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a communist. 

“I sometimes feel like communism is following me around,” Park said.

When asked about Mamdani’s rising popularity, Park responded, “I don’t think his policy is going to lead to any prosperity.”

Park fled North Korea at the age of 13, crossing the country’s northern border into China. There, she said she was trafficked and exploited for several years before crossing the Gobi Desert and seeking asylum in South Korea.

She then immigrated to the United States and attended Columbia University, which she criticized as an anti-capitalist and woke education system. 

“The brainwashing begins even before college,” Park said. “I actually don’t blame these radicalized students. I blame the teachers and the parents that fail their children to learn about the real world.”

Park said the term “oppression” is overused in the United States, and challenged the broad, academically accepted definition of this concept. 

“If you know that you’re oppressed, you’re not oppressed,” she said. 

Park then compared North Korea’s three generations of punishment rule, where punishment for crimes can be extended to family members, to reparations for slavery.  She said that her half-white child would have “to answer to the ancestral crime of slavery,” despite not personally owning slaves.

When asked whether she believes guilt by association is reflected in the racial profiling of citizens by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, she responded, “I don’t think America practices guilt by association in any way.”