Although it’s fun to mock North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un – after all, the portly despot just watched his newly constructed 5,000-ton destroyer immediately tip over and suffer heavy damage as his hapless regime tried to launch it—but we can never forget that he’s a murderous psychopath who’s all too happy to torture and kill his perceived enemies.

The BBC, usually known on these pages as a mouthpiece for leftist talking points, did some journalism for a change and investigated a cellphone smuggled out of the Hermit Kingdom. The phone revealed some of the striking ways Kim Jong Un keeps his citizens under control. The revelations serve as a warning of what could happen here in the United States if we don’t fiercely protect our First Amendment rights.

Remember, it was just a few short months ago that Joe Biden and his censorious regime, along with their conspirators and Big Tech and Big Media, tried to shut down the flow of information in this country and destroy sites like RedState that insisted on telling the truth.

The details are chilling:

The phone, which from the outside appears no different from a normal device, issued warnings about using South Korean slang words to users, and auto-corrected “South Korea” to read “puppet state,” an investigation from the BBC found.

It would also covertly take a screenshot every five minutes, storing the images in a secret folder which the user couldn’t access, but which presumably were accessible to North Korean authorities.

Watch:

The BBC recently got a hold of a phone that was smuggled out of North Korea. The North Korean Regime auto-corrects popular Korean terms and takes a screenshot of the phone every 5 minutes. pic.twitter.com/8kNPyRds9v

— non aesthetic things (@PicturesFoIder) May 31, 2025

I frequently get annoyed by my phone’s spellcheck, and one copyediting piece of software I use keeps wanting to change “Vance” to “Pence,” but this phone has autocorrect on steroids:

When the user tried to type in the word “oppa,” which means older brother in Korean, but has come to be used to refer to a boyfriend in South Korean slang, the phone would auto-correct the word to the more Communist-friendly alternative “comrade.”

A warning would then flash, informing the phone’s user that the term “oppa” could only be used for older siblings, the BBC investigation found.

The bizarre Orwellian practices with a 21st-century twist were revealed after Daily NK, a Seoul-based media organization, secretly smuggled the North Korean cellphone out of the country late last year.

Next time you hear some clueless Democrat saying they’re leaving the country because they can’t stand another moment of living under Donald Trump’s dictatorship, remind them of what true oppression looks like:

In other signs of a hardening of the rules, using South Korean phrases or speaking in a South Korean accent were officially made a state crime by Kim in 2023.

Members of “youth crackdown squads” are seen patrolling the streets, monitoring the behavior of young North Koreans.

North Korean dissident Kang Gyuri, 24, told the BBC she would be stopped and reprimanded for styling her hair and dressing like a South Korean. She escaped the hermit regime by boat in 2023 and now lives in South Korea.

Kang's escape from the despotic country revealed one thing, however; Kim Jong Un’s efforts are effective. She had no idea how different North Korea is from much of the modern world:

“I used to think it was normal that the state restricted us so much. I thought other countries lived with this control. But then I realized it was only in North Korea,” she said.

This is a stark reminder that we must never forget how hard our own government tried to silence us here in the U.S., from topics to COVID to mRNA vaccines to Joe Biden’s mental health. We’ll keep fighting.

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