In September, Disney’s ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” late-night talk show from the air following pressure from the Trump administration. The Federal government’s disapproval of the network was due to comments made by Kimmel in light of the assassination of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk. This action was rightly condemned by many across the political spectrum as a textbook example of fascist politics permeating the Trump administration. As is in the fascist playbook, the Trump administration, enabled by the giant Disney corporation, stamped out political dissent to consolidate the state’s power against unapproved narratives. This kind of collaborative process between capital and authoritarians is foundational to how fascists wield state power.
However, accusations of the right-wing variety were far from the only ones levied as backlash to Trump and Disney’s action. Following Kimmel’s show being pulled from the air, The Washington Post’s chief economics correspondent Jeff Stein took to X to post a picture of former Korean news anchor for North Korea’s Korean Central Television broadcaster Ri Chun-hee (리춘히). The image was captioned with a snide comment from Stein: “Late night is gonna be awesome.”
In Stein’s view, Trump’s fascist collaboration with Disney to silence even Kimmel’s lukewarm criticism of the right’s response to Kirk’s assassination is indicative of the kinds of broadcasting policy seen in North Korea. The use of Ri is intentional. Her style of broadcasting has become a common point of mockery by mainstream reporting and academia in the West. In 2009, supposed expert in North Korean propaganda Brian Reynolds Myers described her reporting style as “a hate filled voice” reminiscent of “what George Orwell was talking about in 1984… It’s a voice laden with scorn…”
It’s not just her oration style that has made Ri a point of Western mockery. Ri’s unabashed Koreanness in style and politics made her a target for Western mockery. Ri frequently appeared in broadcast wearing either a pink western-style suit or traditional chosŏnot (조선옷; literally “Korean clothes”), the latter of which has been employed as the principal object of Western perception of North Korean state media. Further, the fiery rhetoric and style that Myers sees as allusive to Orwell’s “1984” is employed when discussing North Korea’s enemies, chiefly the United States. Implicitly, the mockery of Ri is demonstrative of the fundamental reason that America and Americans disapprove of the North Korean government: North Koreans refuse to bend to American foreign policy goals and international capitalist development. That Ri represents North Korea’s defiance in the face of the American empire is what earns her and North Korea American disapproval and mockery.
Stein was far from the only one making such a comparison. Many TikToks on my feed appeared with several tens of thousands of likes, making the same comparison between Trump’s vision for media independence (or lack thereof) and Ri. The assumption is that Trump, through his fascist politics, is seeking to devolve America’s sacred liberal institutions into ones of sham politics and leader worship, as supposedly seen in North Korea.
This analogy has been a favorite of American liberals since Trump’s first administration. For instance, disgraced liberal darling and former presidential candidate Kamala Harris described during her 2020 run for the presidency that she would not “cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong Un, who are rooting for Trump.” Also, former Trump ally John Bolton accused Trump of wanting “Americans to treat him like North Koreans treat Kim Jong Un.”
It is clear, then, that in the liberal imagination there is perhaps nothing worse than the degradation of democratic institutions as seen in North Korea. These statements are, oftentimes made from a place of total ignorance about what North Korea actually is and why the US has an interest in separating itself from the country. Everyday Americans operate on presumptions of North Korea that are blatantly false, as circulated uncritically by media and academia alike. American perception of North Korea thus operates on news of supposed “unicorn lairs” and totally “unprompted” missile tests. Rarely are actual North Korean voices consulted on what life in North Korea looks like and their rationale for foreign policy.
North Korea, referred to constitutionally as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is far from the secretive dictatorship that America portrays it as. Rather, the DPRK is a state like any other with a complex, multi-organed political system, complete with distinct separation of powers. The country has a judiciary, a legislature, and distinct separation of executive power through a triumvirate consisting of a Premier, Chairman of the Standing Committee, and the President of the State Affairs Commission.
The DPRK’s living standards also do not match the common Western narrative. In terms of poverty, life expectancy, and infant mortality, the DPRK performs on par with or slightly above that of comparable developing countries. The very real economic and societal concerns that cause poverty and underdevelopment in the DPRK can, however, be traced back to American meddling and imperialism towards the DPRK.
Korea was one of the first victims of the Cold War and, following liberation from Japanese colonialism, the country was split into Soviet and American occupation zones. Generally speaking, the Northern Soviet-backed DPRK was formed from the organic resistance movements and grassroots socialist organizations that fought back against Japanese colonialism while the Southern, American-constructed Republic of Korea (ROK) was formed from the remnants of the Japanese colonial system. This situation was far from tenable, and war erupted between the DPRK and ROK in 1950. The ensuing American intervention saw a brutal bombing campaign against civilian targets and American-committed massacres against Koreans that led to the deaths of up to three million people, the majority of which were Korean civilians.
Following the war’s end in a stalemate, the United States continued its aggression towards Korea by occupying the South with nearly 30,000 troops to date and implementing a comprehensive sanction regime against the North that causes immense harm to everyday North Koreans. America’s expansive nuclear umbrella also directly threatens the DPRK’s security. It is under that context that the DPRK launched its own nuclear weapons program to develop a deterrent against a potential American attack.
North Korean security is thus constantly being threatened by the continued presence of the American military, which has demonstrated time and time again that it would like to see the DPRK’s government toppled. Therefore, North Korea’s foreign policy is not pursued out of an irrational desire to lash out against its enemies or threaten the United States. Instead, the DPRK is being forced to build socialism while under siege.
This is why the comparison of Trump’s fascist consolidation–which includes a renewed effort of American imperialism, seemingly this time without the respectable mirage of liberal imperialism–to North Korea is so insulting. North Korea is far, far from the irrational, Western-hating hermit-kingdom that the West portrays it as. It is a state operating from a position where it is constantly under existential threat from the world’s largest and most aggressively expansionist empire in history. When liberals use their false perceptions of North Koreans to smugly insult Trump, they reaffirm these negative–frankly racist–stereotypes about North Korea. Their behavior demonstrates a disinterest in actually tackling fascism and oppression in all of its forms, as it is only when these oppressive politics come home that liberals seem to care that they are happening at all. That the United States is wielding such politics of domination and coercion overseas is uninteresting to figures such as Stein and Harris. Liberals spreading this kind of rhetoric demonstrate that American imperialism and resistance against that imperialism is something to be made light of. It is a silly Korean woman in pink chosŏnot speaking with passion about how dearly North Korea despises the United States; it is Trump supposedly obsessing over “love letters” from Kim Jong Un; it is making a state that suffers directly due to a genocidal war and subsequent sanctions conducted by Americans into a cheap joke to be levied at a political opponent.
Liberals should not be surprised that Trump is leading America straight into domestic fascism. In this manner, North Korea acts as a similar litmus test of empathy and political education as Palestine does. Just as liberals are unable to fully understand the Zionist and American root of imperialism against Palestinians, they are unable to comprehend that North Korea, too, is a victim of American imperialism. Instead, they rationalize their imperialism. Liberals employ a “liberal Zionism” towards Palestine through calls for a two-state solution and condemnations of Hamas. In the same manner, liberals apply a “liberal imperialism” towards the rest of the world; they continue to operate on imperialist logic that sees states opposed to the United States as irrational and inherently worthy of condemnation. So long as liberals are unable to deconstruct that insistence on imperialism abroad, there is little hope that we can prevent it from coming home.
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