Trump is arguably bombastic. He is egomaniacal. He can be rude and misogynistic and childish. He fires off 3 A.M. Twitter tantrums like a drunk raccoon, insults world leaders to their faces, and was busted bragging about grabbing women by the… lady parts. If he were your uncle, no one would blame you for not inviting him to your wedding.
But a dictator he is not.
Let me prove it: In America, the worst thing that happens when you stream a boy band is that Spotify recommends more boy bands. Do you know what happens in North Korea? If you’re lucky, you’re sent to a labor camp. If you’re not so lucky, you could face the death penalty. That is not hyperbole.
According to a new Amnesty International report, North Koreans—including children—are being publicly executed for watching South Korean dramas or listening to music by groups like BTS. (Rich families can sometimes bribe officials to escape elimination, so apparently corruption is universal—although the price tag is often too high for many.) Thanks to Kim Jong Un’s 2020 Law on Rejecting Reactionary Thought and Culture, consequences for consuming or distributing unapproved entertainment range from five to fifteen years of forced labor and a public shaming to being brutally unalived in front of an audience as a gruesome cautionary tale.
But please, Joy Behar, tell me again how you’re living under a fascist regime.
North Korean escapees describe being lined up and marched to public executions as part of their “ideological education,” designed expressly to terrorize citizens into compliance. Tens of thousands of people dragged to a field to watch someone die for enjoying an unapproved TV show. Meanwhile, over here, “ideological education” means attending a corporate DEI seminar with lukewarm coffee, sitting through a required HR video about tone in the workplace, or getting lectured by a celebrity who listened to one podcast and now identifies as a constitutional scholar.
You poor, tortured souls. Please reward yourselves with a matcha latte; your activism must be exhausting.
“This country is an authoritarian hellscape,” the liberal left loves to lament. I know, it feels cool to say. It’s dramatic. It gets likes and comments and retweets. But if your alleged authoritarian hellscape permits you to organize protests against it, pen songs decrying it, record podcasts objecting to it, and sell merch mocking it, then maybe “authoritarian hellscape” isn’t the right term. Maybe it’s more like “stable, open society with Wi-Fi and too many microphones.” (Also, if it’s so dystopian, feel free to expatriate yourself. No, really. Flights leave hourly.)