As a child, Yeonmi Park fled North Korea with her mother when she was 13-years-of-age in 2007. The pair of genuine refugees fell into the hands of Chinese traffickers and later escaped to Mongolia. Park said that she had to walk across the Gobi Desert before reaching South Korea.

The North Korean escapee said ‘anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness’ in American Ivy League universities has made her think that even her motherland North Korea ‘is not this nuts.’

Yeonmi Park, now 27, entered Columbia University from South Korea on an exchange program in 2016. In an interview with Fox News on Monday, she suggested that Americans do not appreciate their freedom or access to their valuable cultural heritage.

‘I expected that I was paying this fortune (school fees), 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. ‘I realised, 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.’

Park said that a university staff member criticised her for loving classic literature such as Jane Austen, because ‘those writers had a colonial mindset,’ and are ‘racists and bigots,’ who were ‘subconsciously brainwashing’ readers.

She compared anti-American propaganda at her university, alongside a so-called cancel culture and constant accusations toward ethnic-Europeans with anti-Western sentiment in North Korea.

‘It was chaos. It felt like the regression in civilisation. Even North Korea is not this nuts. North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.’

Park claimed that she ‘learned how to just shut up’ so as to graduate following disputes with professors and other students.

‘North Koreans, we don’t have Internet, we don’t have access to any of these great thinkers, and we don’t know anything. But here, while having everything, people choose to be brainwashed. And they deny it,’ she stated.

Park asserted that in her opinion American higher education institutions are no longer teaching students to think critically, while people do not want to analyse and question, silently suppressing opposing voices and ‘censoring each other.’

‘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 said, adding that they have ‘zero appreciation of what this country did, what the Constitution says to protect individual liberty.’

Talking about a future for the United States, she suggested that its ‘future is as bleak as North Korea’ as ‘there’s no rule of law, no morality, nothing is good or bad anymore, it’s complete chaos.’