Is Columbia University Just Like North Korea?

Good morning—I awoke at the ungodly hour of 7:00 AM to an email from a Japanese news site asking me for permission to translate and reprint my New Lines magazine article about Yeonmi Park, the North Korean defector who has joined the battle against the Woke Mind Virus, by which I mean that Turning Point USA is now paying her to talk about how her time at Columbia University convinced her that liberals want to transform the United States of America into a communist hellscape where we all eat mud, are forced to push passenger trains when the engines fail, and where children must eat rats who will in turn eat the children when they die so that more children can eat the rats in a recursive rat-child totalitarian nightmare.

This email from Japan came as a surprise, since I was not aware that the article had yet been published. Apparently it was published on December 7th. These things do happen.

There were signs, in retrospect, that publication was about to happen. I was told in early December that the article would likely be published that week and was asked to send in a headshot and provide a brief bio. I was also, apparently, tagged on LinkedIn when the article dropped; the idea that I am the kind of responsible young professional who checks my LinkedIn is, in its own way, charming, but catagorically false.

In my defense, this article has been finished and awaiting publication for approximately four months. I started writing it in June. Seven months for a three thousand word article. Please kill me.

I am going to tell you the story of the story of Yeonmi Park, but if you would like to read the actual article you can do so here. It is the story of Park’s career trajectory and motivations for moving rightward framed around an incredibly improbable phone conversation that began with Park telling me she had no desire or motivation to speak to me, since I would surely just twist her words, and then continuing to talk to me for another 45 minutes. I think it’s pretty spectacular: she told me some things I haven’t seen or heard about elsewhere, and I think it provides an important snapshot of what totalitarianism does to the human brain. Please check it out. You would hardly believe the amount of time and effort that went into producing it.

Here’s what happened.

Back in mid-June, Charlie Kirk’s conservative youth-organization-turned-far-right-juggernaut Turning Point USA held their annual Young Women’s Leadership Conference: an event that mostly involves telling women in high school and college that getting married and making babies is the only thing that could possibly fulfill them. Obviously, the moment I heard about it I knew that if I did not attend this conference I would die, literally perish, and that I needed to find someone to pay me to go.

I have learned over the years, however, that “this will be the coolest thing ever omg you don’t understand” is not a compelling pitch for magazine editors. No, I needed a hook. Some reason to go that went beyond “seriously, THERE ARE DISCO BALLS ON THE INVITATION, how can you not want an article about this.”

I looked at the speaker list and there she was, my one-way ticket to the event of the summer: Yeonmi Park, the North Korean defector whose tearful Joe Rogan appearance launched a thousand memes. Those claims I referenced above, about eating mud and pushing trains and rats who eat children? All mentioned on the podcast whilst Joe Rogan credulously nodded in somber horror.

Many people with a cursory knowlege of physics, or experience attempting to push a car that has stalled, find it difficult to believe that any number of people would be able to push an entire train, whose engine alone weighs somewhere between a blue whale and the Statue of Liberty. Credulity strains further when one listens to her similarly tearful memories of her time as a full-ride student at Columbia University, where she was subjected to tortures she compares to her indoctrination in North Korean schools, such as being told that her love for Jane Austin, enthusiasm for Beethoven, and skepticism towards the existence of trans people subjected her to horrific totalitarian oppression. From the article:

Yeonmi Park got a ton of fawning coverage from the liberal media when she first began to talk about her experiences in North Korea in 2014, but as of mid-June 2023 had received little in-depth coverage since her turn towards the far right. I wrote The New Republic, whom I have worked with many times before, with a proposition: let me go to the Young Women’s Leadership Summit (YWLS) and write about Yeonmi Park. It will be incredible. Please give me money.

The New Republic went for it, and I booked my plane tickets. As I suspected, once I arrived, the surreal candy-disco weirdness turned out to be so compelling that the magazine bought a story about it, in addition to the Park story. I cranked out the story about the conference itself first: it was very fun and pretty disturbing and very goddamn weird. You can read that here if you would like to.

Having written the article I wanted to write all along, it was time to write about Yeonmi Park. I did not realize it, but our collective decision to do the articles in that order would plunge me into a seven-month nightmare of repeated rewrites and absolute despair.

On June 21st, I finished 1.5K-word article we’d agreed on and sent it to my editor.

On June 22nd, the New York Times dropped a long and in-depth profile on Yeonmi Park that included an interview, multiple experts, and thorough analysis of her defection to the far right. I don’t know how I missed this. My editor missed it too. I’d moved onto other projects, I wasn’t looking for any more info on Park, I was blissfully unaware that I’d been scooped. Everything seemed great.

On June 27th, the editor sent back comments: he liked it, but had I considered interviewing Park?

I had not considered interviewing Park. I never consider interviewing anyone, because I assume the answer will be no and because interviews scare the hell out of me. Drop me in the middle of a protest surrounded by Proud Boys circa 2020 and I’ll go with the flow. Send me to CPAC and I’ll crash the afterparties and write about MAGA drag queens. Sponsor my trip to a conference full of college-age women swooning over pictures of babies and I’ll bathe myself in disco and film Instagram reels in the swag room. Ask me to talk one-on-one with someone and watch me fall apart as a person both before and after the interview.

Besides, why would Yeonmi Park talk to me?

I found her personal email address, sent her an interview request, and prepared to wait three or four days so I could tell my editor that she hadn’t responded and that we should publish anyway. Forty-five minutes later, my phone rang. “Hi, this is Yeonmi Park,” the high voice on the other end said. “Oh my god,” I said, stupidly, and rushed to set up my recording equipment while she told me that she did not want to talk to me, was tired of talking to reporters, and was convinced I would simply twist her words the way the New York Times had just twisted all her words and made her look stupid.

We then talked for 45 minutes, as mentioned above, and I hung up and freaked out and could not believe my luck and wrote my editor and started to rewrite the article and only then did my overheated and ecstatic brain register that Yeonmi Park had mentioned an article in the New York Times. I read it. My heart sank. As they (sort of) say in The Sound Of Music, when God opens a window, somewhere he closes a door.

Nevertheless, she persisted. I rewrote the article and sent it in on July 3rd, plus a quick note at the end that we’d been scooped, but that it was totally fine because my article was totally different, hahaha, right?

It was not totally fine. We did one more rewrite, but then word came down from on high: The New Republic had wanted something more like the New York Times article, but the New York Times had already done that article, so, you know…here’s a kill fee. Sorry.

I don’t blame The New Republic at all, to be clear. I get it. But I’d been working on this article for a month now (adorable that I thought this was a long time) and I really believed in it. The expert I interviewed, Jay Song, told me I’d gotten quotes out of Park that she hadn’t heard anywhere before, and she’s been following Park for years. Someone had to publish this damn article.

I was, at the time, in conversations with New Lines Magazine regarding an article abotu Andrew Tate, which never did get written but may yet see the light of day, maybe, who the hell knows. I shot the editors a quick note about this Yeonmi Park article which might work well for their magazine, which has a more international focus and might be interested in something that went into the weeds on Park and totalitarianism rather than a brief profile and surface-level analysis. The answer was quick and enthusiastic: Yes! Let’s do this! We can make it into a feature.

Be still my beating heart. I set to work rewriting the article a fourth time and sent it in on July 22nd. I knew it needed work. You cannot write an article four separate times without beginning to both lose both perspective and (to some extent) interest.

It needed a lot of work, as it turned out. The editing process was long and very intense. By the end of August, 3.5 months after I first conceived of the article, we’d mostly gotten the wrinkles out. Publication seemed imminent. Everyone was very excited.

Here’s the thing about evergreen stories. They’re easier to pitch, because magazines can publish them when there’s a slow news day. Also, though, it is 2023 and there is no such thing as a slow news day. Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. I received my check and used it to pay down my credit card debt. Eventually, for the sake of my sanity, I put the whole thing out of my mind.

And now, as of December 7th apparently, it’s done. It’s up. It lives. Please go read it. I lost my summer to this article, which — and I really cannot emphasize this enough — started its life as an excuse to go to a conference that tells young women that the decisions I’ve made to be divorced and childless will lead to suffering and regret and ten thousand cats and wine-o’clock alcoholism.

Happy holidays, everyone. It’s 10:09 AM Mountain Time, I’m in Colorado with my family, and there’s a red blend upstairs that is calling my name. No cats, but my sister brought her small and very opinionated dog which feels close enough. Never call me childless, though. Seven long months I carried this article: that might be premature for an actual baby but with hospitalization it has a 90% chance of survival without any complications whatsoever. Never speak to me of North Korea, or Columbia University, or rats, or trains, again. All of them are dead to me. May they sink into the ocean. I’ve had it.

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• Yeonmi Park image: still shot from the Joe Rogan Experience, Train image by 12019 from Pixabay, Rat image from by sibya from Pixabay. Heavily edited by Laura Jedeed