Rogan recently had a compulsive liar who escaped from North Korea to join right-wing think tanks and appear on Hannity to compare speech rights on college campuses to North Korea.
Of course she has a crazy huge rack. So she gets on ahead of the sincere defectors without embellished stories.
Thing is that people who don’t know better cry their eyes out and go, “Thank God I live in America!” before considering who she is and how she basically got mocked in South Korea for spewing bullshit about being in North Korea.
Rogan’s shtick seems like harmless silly fun when he’s doing dumb shit like questioning the moon landing or talking about Bigfoot or whatever. Then he starts questioning vaccines and suddenly we realize that maybe it’s a bad idea to make these incurious morons celebrity figures. Same basic theme with Trump.
Problem is that being a defector isn’t much of a life to live. Some people opt to become a celebrity defectors for big bucks in giving lectures and making appearances. Telling the same story repeatedly gets old fast. Embellishing it and yourself makes big bucks.
But the problem I have with Yeonmi Park is stuff like this.
TLDR: She embellished her story of leaving North Korea, turned that into 5-figure lectures which then turned into pushing right-wing talking points on FOX News thus completing the grift.
Questioning the moon landing isnt fun harmless dumb shit. Its blatant anti-intellectualism. Ya know, one of the gigantic major problems in our country right now.
How do they explain that there must have been literally hundreds of people in on the fake moon landing scheme and after all these years, not a single one of them has blown the whistle? Same with really all of these conspiracy theories. These are some very dedicated secret keepers.
Like the North Korean defector grift isn’t all that destructive. Exaggerating the abhorrent nature of North Korea isn’t going to hurt people. Most North Korean defectors don’t talk because they have family or friends still there who could be punished by them if they out themselves. So it’s kind of necessary to have celebrity defectors even if they are embellishing.
Rolling that grift into trashy right-wing grifting is the problem. That’s way more destructive and of course in this fucked up world, more profitable.
Maybe we shouldn’t judge the intention of someone who escaped NK. We have no idea what her life was like. One of the headlines said she was sex trafficked.
I guess if you all have proof that she is lying about everything fire away but I’m not going to rush to judgement on anyone who probably has had a 100x tougher life than anyone on this forum.
Also she isn’t 100% to blame for right wing media using her story to advance their narrative.
It seems that way in the moment, but it’s really not harmless at all. Just like Trump being a silly reality-TV buffoon seemed like harmless dumb shit until suddenly it wasn’t. Elevating these idiots and giving them celebrity power and eroding our popular culture has real consequences.