Young Voices, the PR Shop That Launched the Career of North Korean Celebrity Defector Yeonmi Park, Helps American Journalists and Foreign “Dissidents" Peddle the Gospel of Capitalism

Thanks to the group's support for Park, the world knows North Korean children eat rats and "then the rats eat the children back,” as she told Jordan Peterson when he interviewed her on his podcast.

The website of Washington-headquartered Young Voices bills the organization as a talent agency that recruits “freethinkers fresh out of college and promotes them in the media to raise their profile as budding experts, leading to new jobs...book deals, and claims it presently supports more than 100 journalists and placed nearly 2,000 TV and print stories last year. Young Voices isn’t a conventional business, though, but a political organization that exclusively recruits and promotes conservatives, such as its best known alumnus Yeonmi Park, the North Korean celebrity defector and fabulist it helped transform into a global right-wing star.

Established in 2013 by the Atlas Network, a nonprofit based in the Virginia suburbs just outside of the capital that creates and connects a web of right-wing think tanks in the US and around the world, Young Voices subsequently spun off and currently operates as an independent organization. It remains closely affiliated with Atlas and has close ties to a number of prominent conservative outlets, including the Federalist Society, which it recently partnered with on a media fellowship program for law students.

Casey Givens, the group’s President and Executive Director, is a former Policy Analyst for the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity Foundation. Vice President Scott Barbee, the controlling shareholder of the investment firm Aegis Financial Corporation, and Treasurer Dan Grossman, the owner of a chain of office supply stores, both have board seats at Atlas.

Young Voices received donations of about $2 million last year, according to its most recent nonprofit tax filing with the the IRS. It doesn’t disclose its donors, but they include Stand Together, which was founded by Charles Koch, and the Bradley Foundation, a leading funder of conservative causes.

In 2014, Young Voices began promoting Park, who was then a 21-year-old who th group described as “a young North Korean refugee who escaped by walking across China to Mongolia using a compass.” Before long Park was appearing at events at the US and abroad, where she riveted audiences with tales about her life in North Korea, where she routinely witnessed public executions, and her agonizing flight from the country, when her father died and her mother was raped in front of her. Park and her mother were both sexually trafficked before they finally managed to escape from their captors.

Life in North Korea is bleak, but Park’s litany of horror stories seemed almost unbelievable, which is probably because she made most of them up, as has been extensively detailed over the years by actual North Korean defectors. Park’s own accounts have shifted over time; in some, her family was wealthy and in others they was dirt poor, to take but one example.

But for years, Park’s fairytales were swallowed by the ever credulous US press. In 2018, the New York Times posted a video story narrated by Park and the same year the newspaper’s columnist Nicholas Kristof cited her memoir “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom — which Penguin gave her a $1.1 million advance for — as Exhibit A on his list of “What to Read if You Want to Know More About North Korea.”

Screenshot from Park’s 2018 New York Times video, which helped springboard her to fame.

Park was “steeped in propaganda and anti-Americanism,” wrote Kristof in unquestioningly recycling her version of events, even in her math class where “a typical problem” was “If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?” What finally opened Park’s eyes, was when she watched a pirated copy of “Titanic,” Kristof wrote before citing the author’s own words: “I was amazed that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were willing to die for love, not just for the regime, as we were…This pirated Hollywood movie gave me my first small taste of freedom.” I can’t definitively say Park made those anecdotes up, but they seem pretty fucking suspect if you ask me.

Park’s slop was also initially lapped up by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and numerous other outlets. She gave at least two TED Talks, flew with Jeff Bezos on his private plane, and addressed a conference called “Women in the World,” where she joined Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power as VIP speakers.

In recent years, Park’s credibility has taken a hit, but she’s still embraced in most corners of the right, and regularly speaks to audiences about “wokeness” at US universities, where she says the political environment is even more oppressive than it is in North Korea. Park is also a contributor with Charlie Kirk’s Turning Points USA and has been interviewed by blockheads like Joe Rogan, telling him that “North Korea has one train and sometimes people have to push the train,” and Jordan Peterson, who wrote the foreword to her latest book, “While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America,” who was aghast to learn from her that kids in her her native land “catch this rat, and they eat, and they somehow die from — I don’t know what it is. Then rats eat the children back.”

There’s no longer a single mention of Park on the Young Voices website, which I assume means even it finds it too embarrassing to be publicly associated with her. Nevertheless, Young Voices continues its efforts to promote emerging “Freedom Fighters” through its Dissident Project, which supports critics of official US state enemies — many which are genuinely brutal regimes, but the group doesn’t give a rat’s ass about human rights in countries led by “our SOBs,” as President Franklin Roosevelt labelled Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza back in 1939.

Young Voices has another project called the Contributor Program, which it calls “the cornerstone of our operations” and selects about 80 applicants annually to receive training and guidance from the group’s “media experts.” Past participants in the Contributor Program have gone on to careers at conservative publications such as Washington Examiner, Reason, and the Orange County Register.

The group’s recent crop of bright young right-wing things includes Victoria Churchill, who covered the 2024 election for the New York Post (“Vance reminds Walz that Kamala Harris wants to 'turn every city in this country into Springfield'“), and Jonas Du of Bari Weiss’s dreary rag the Free Press (“Dropping Charges Against Columbia Protesters Is ‘Wrong,’ Says Janitor”). Needless to say, the Free Press continues to promote Park’s drivel.