“The first thing my mom taught me as a young girl living in North Korea was don’t even whisper, because birds and mice could hear me,” Yeonmi Park advised the viewers that had come to listen to her converse in Queens.

“This is what dictators do: they plant a spike everywhere, a distrust between people, a distrust between family, even. The teachers tell their children,” she went on, “‘If your parents say one wrong thing, come to tell the teacher.’”

It was a narrative that Ms. Park has advised typically, on tv units and convention levels and in a best-selling memoir, over the last decade she has spent as one of many world’s most well-known defectors from the Kim household’s remoted totalitarian state.

But lately, she has added a brand new postscript.

“And now,” she advised the gang in Long Island City final weekend, “I see the same thing in America.”

Conservative pundits and politicians have lengthy warned that liberal economics and cultural politics would set the United States on the street to leftist authoritarianism. But till two years in the past, they’d by no means had an ally fairly like Ms. Park. A refugee from the world’s most notorious surviving Stalinist state, Ms. Park, 29, claims to again up these worst fears with firsthand expertise: evaluating calls to dismantle racism in math instruction, as an illustration, with classes she acquired as a baby in North Korean faculties.

Describing her personal current expertise as an undergraduate at Columbia University, Ms. Park advised the Fox News host Mark Levin in an interview final month that the college’s pedagogy “is exactly what the North Korean regime used to brainwash people.” Left-wing indoctrination in American academic establishments, she stated, “is, I think, the biggest threat that our nation, and our civilization is facing.”

She now denounces Hillary Clinton, with whom she as soon as shared a convention stage, as an “absolute faker and liar,” and rails towards transgender-oriented advertising campaigns: “Political correctness has erased women,” she wrote not too long ago on Facebook.

Underscoring all of it is the warning that these complaints add as much as one thing vastly extra sinister than the sum of their Fox News chyrons. “I think so many people in America think that somehow America is immune to tyranny, and somehow a dictatorship begins like North Korea,” she stated on the Queens occasion, hosted by the conservative group Turning Point USA. “It didn’t begin there. It began with amazing promises of equity. They promised a socialist paradise to us.”

“And with that promise,” she added, “they took everything, one by one, from us.” The crowd gave her two standing ovations.

Ms. Park’s transformation from movie star defector to loud critic of liberal id politics is awfully uncommon. Very few of the tens of hundreds of people that have fled North Korea wade into home politics within the nations the place they’ve taken refuge.

But in an American political local weather that rewards hyperbole and alarm, Ms. Park, who turned a U.S. citizen in 2021, has discovered a profitable area of interest.

Her second ebook, “While Time Remains,” a self-described “warning for Americans” revealed in February, has already outpaced the hardcover gross sales of her best-selling 2015 memoir. She is a daily visitor on widespread right-leaning TV networks and podcasts, and speaker at conservative universities and assume tanks.

This spring, she turned a contributor to Turning Point USA, showing at its conferences alongside figures like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and James O’Keefe, the right-wing activist not too long ago ousted from Project Veritas.

Her current trajectory has drawn winces from some previous allies and supporters, who fear concerning the toll that her dive into the American tradition wars might tackle her effectiveness as a human rights advocate. And some observers of her profession, noting her historical past of reinvention and questions raised concerning the accuracy of her account, have lifted an eyebrow at her newest act.

“She’s an amazing entertainer,” stated Jay Song, a professor of Korean research on the Asia Institute of the University of Melbourne in Australia, who research the experiences of North Korean defectors. “She’s very smart. She’s always picking up on keywords.”

A Celebrity Defector

In a current interview, Ms. Park, who now lives in New York, described her personal politics as much less strident than they typically seem in her media appearances. “I support gay marriage, I’m very socially liberal,” she stated. “I never thought I was a conservative.” Asked whether or not she identifies as such now, she stated no.

She likened the preliminary concept for her second ebook to Alexis de Tocqueville. “He comes from France to America — to American democracy,” she stated. “So, like, what if a North Korean sees America and analyzes America?”

Ms. Park has lived most of her grownup life within the glare of media scrutiny, in a single type or one other. Five years after escaping North Korea together with her mom in 2007, at age 13, she was forged on “Now On My Way to Meet You,” a preferred selection present on South Korean tv starring younger ladies who had defected.

The program, which premiered in 2011, made North Koreans newly seen in South Korean widespread tradition. Ms. Park was considered one of its largest stars, an effervescent persona who described her North Korean household as comparatively prosperous and was nicknamed “the Paris Hilton of North Korea.”

“I think a lot of South Koreans learned a lot from that show,” stated Jean H. Lee, a journalist who reported from each North and South Korea for The Associated Press. “But it also created the celebrity defector culture.”

In 2014, Ms. Park was invited to talk on the One Young World convention in Dublin, the place she revealed a far darker story of her life in North Korea and of her escape.

Amid sobs, she stated her mom had been raped by the human trafficker who introduced them throughout the border into China, and described a flight on foot throughout the Gobi Desert into Mongolia. Later, she would say that she herself had been offered as a youngster to a Chinese husband. She needed to work in an grownup on-line chat room, she stated, earlier than she and her mom escaped from China.

A video of her quick speech — a horrific story delivered by a slight 21-year-old girl, sporting a conventional hanbok costume and trembling with emotion — went viral, making Ms. Park a world humanitarian movie star. Within months she had a ebook cope with Penguin Random House for a memoir written with Maryanne Vollers, Hillary Clinton’s ghostwriter.

There have been some famous inconsistencies among the many tales Ms. Park had advised to her South Korean viewers and those she now told. Mary Ann Jolley, an Australian journalist, revealed a detailed account of conflicting and implausible particulars, from the federal government atrocities she described to the geographical particulars of her escape, her father’s loss of life in China and her expertise in detention in Mongolia.

Ms. Park has disputed a few of Ms. Jolley’s criticisms however acknowledged others. Some have been a results of language difficulties, she stated, or the consequences of trauma. She stated others stemmed from liberties producers took together with her id on the present in South Korea.

“It was not a documentary,” she stated. “It was an entertainment show.”

Ms. Park additionally stated she resisted for years publicly divulging her full expertise in China due to the stigma connected to it in conservative South Korea. “If I say I was a slave for two years as a kid, there’s no respected family that would take me as their daughter,” she stated.

North Korea consultants are fast to level out that Ms. Park’s inconsistencies, whereas distinguished, weren’t wholly distinctive. Ms. Song, who has interviewed quite a few North Korean defectors, famous that the nation’s refugees are sometimes unreliable narrators of their very own experiences. Inside the nation, she stated, many realized to say no matter they wanted to say to outlive — “whatever works for them to find a safe haven,” she stated.

But Ms. Lee stated that the early questions surrounding Ms. Park’s account of her escape, in addition to her historical past of self-promotion, restricted her impression in North Korea coverage circles.

“It’s a shame, because she has important things to say about what life is like in North Korea,” she stated. “But I think it’s been clouded by a desire for attention or a platform.”

Disenchanted With the Gala Circuit

When she wrote her first ebook, Ms. Park and her writer have been aware of the skepticism Ms. Jolley’s article generated, she stated. Both she and Ms. Vollers have said they corroborated as a lot of the story as attainable with interviews with members of the family and fellow defectors.

“In Order to Live” has offered greater than 130,000 copies in hardcover and paperback mixed, in line with Circana BookScan. Ms. Park was showered with media consideration, and she or he fielded invites to non-public retreats hosted by Jeff Bezos and took selfies with Scarlett Johansson. She attended the Met Gala with Joe Gebbia, an Airbnb founder, and shared a talking stage (at an occasion in partnership with The New York Times) with Mrs. Clinton, who appeared her within the eye after her speech and “promised she would do everything in her power to help the women of North Korea,” Ms. Park later wrote. (Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, stated neither Mrs. Clinton nor her workers who have been current on the time recalled Mrs. Clinton saying that.)

In her new ebook, nonetheless, Ms. Park writes about being disenchanted by her brush with elites. They have been extra eager about emotional gratification than in motion, she got here to imagine.

She started finding out at Columbia University in 2016 and majored in human rights, in hopes of changing into knowledgeable advocate. But some individuals who encountered her on the time recalled that she appeared to battle with the transition from movie star dissident to extra policy-focused activism.

She tried to lend her star energy to a bunch known as Freedom for North Korea, which raised cash for a sister group in South Korea that rescued North Korean refugees from China — her private ardour. But Jin Park, a former human rights activist who labored together with her within the group on the time, stated Ms. Park was unsuccessful within the function and shortly moved on.

“We thought that she could be a good fund-raiser because of her connections and networks,” he stated. “I think she tried, but getting people’s money is not as easy as it sounds.” (Ms. Park says she shortly realized she was too busy for the function on the time.)

Peter Rosenblum, a professor of human rights legislation who taught Ms. Park in her senior seminar, recalled being unimpressed by her as a pupil. But he stated he was sympathetic to her scenario, as somebody who appeared to be trapped by the persona that she had been forged in at a really younger age.

“In the human rights world, you spend a career studying how people deploy victims’ stories, and the degrading effect of having to be a professional victim,” Mr. Rosenblum stated. “I saw her very much as that person: the celebrity victim who was going to get her degree but hadn’t had the time and space to become a real student.”

By the tip of her time at Columbia, Ms. Park says, she was disengaged from faculty and barely there, commuting to her courses from Chicago, the place she was dwelling together with her then-husband — an American buying and selling agency government whom she has since divorced — and younger son.

And at Columbia, she now says, she was shortly delay by a campus tradition she describes as obsessive about secure areas and pronouns.

“My classmates were almost like giant adult babies,” she stated.

In her ebook, she writes that she was criticized for her enjoyment of Jane Austen novels and Western classical music. She describes the First Amendment as “a law Columbia teaches its students to hate” — although she doesn’t point out that she studied at Columbia with Lee Bollinger, the college president and a distinguished First Amendment scholar identified for his expansive view of freedom of speech and for defending conservative and far-right audio system’ prerogative to seem on campus. Ms. Park declined to touch upon the contents of the category. Columbia declined to remark.

Shortly after graduating in 2020, Ms. Park was assaulted and robbed of her pockets whereas out strolling together with her son in Chicago. As she used her cellphone to file her assailant, a Black girl, she stated one other girl shouted at her for doing so and known as her a racist. (The assailant was later arrested and pleaded responsible to illegal restraint, in line with court docket data.)

The incident, she wrote, was a turning level in her personal politics, “a sign of how far advanced the woke disease really was in America by that point, and how inhumane it was making otherwise normal people.” She started to hunt out allies who felt equally.

After studying a ebook by Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and widespread conservative media persona, she sought out his daughter, Mikhaila, a podcaster and social-media life-style influencer, who invited her on her podcast. Hearing that Mr. Peterson was a collector of Soviet artwork, Ms. Park despatched him a North Korean postcard she had saved.

Mr. Peterson invited her on his podcast, the place she described her expertise at Columbia. The interview led to a flurry of conservative media consideration and, shortly thereafter, a $500,000 ebook cope with Threshold Editions, Simon & Schuster’s conservative imprint. Mr. Peterson wrote the ebook’s foreword.

‘It’s a Free Society’

Ms. Park maintains that her current outspokenness has price, not made, her cash. The advance for “While Time Remains,” whereas vital, was nicely in need of the $1.1 million she acquired for her earlier ebook. Invitations for well-paying company talking occasions that used to make up a lot of her earnings have slowed to a trickle, she stated.

She now earns $6,600 a month from Turning Point USA, she stated, and maintains a busy itinerary of talks earlier than different conservative audiences who’re extra keen to listen to her warnings about “cancel culture” and “woke” id politics. After a current speak in Brookfield, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee, a neighborhood faculty board member, Sam Hughes, posted on Facebook concerning the energy of Ms. Park’s presentation.

“The North Korean regime created schools not to teach children how to think, but what to believe,” Mr. Hughes wrote, warning concerning the risks “groupthink and collectivism.” Considering his district’s fairness packages, “North Korea’s example should come to mind,” he wrote.

Jihyun Park, a North Korean defector and a Conservative Party politician in Britain, who is aware of Ms. Park, stated that Ms. Park’s trajectory rang true to her. North Koreans have notably necessary insights into the perils of taking Western liberal democracy as a right, she stated.

“The U.K. teaches me English and their culture, I’ve taught them freedom and democracy,” she stated. In the United States, “Yeonmi also does this,” she stated.

Ms. Song is extra skeptical. She described Ms. Park as a perceptive reader, and reflector, of cultural and political expectations. “Her story in South Korea was a mirror of what South Korea was back then,” Ms. Song stated. “Now,” she stated, “it’s a mirror of the contemporary U.S. politics, U.S. society.”

Ms. Park, for her half, advised that her newest flip won’t be her final.

“I might write a completely different book in five years,” she stated. “I might say everything that I wrote in the second book was dumb. But that’s O.K.”

She laughed. “It’s a free society,” she stated.