I give him a pass for going there. First off he was 22, probably not too hip to what was going on in the real world, and second, he was scammed into going there by these North Korean scam artists in China who told him it was perfectly safe. And from what I read their advertisements were directly aimed at young people with the slogan “The place your parents don’t want you to go to” Something like that, it was a fishing expedition by the Norks solely to get young Americans in there to kidnap and use as bargaining chips. My theory is they picked the tallest, best looking guy there to create the most emotional response, and they picked him. As far as I’m concerned though, this is an act of war. This is a foreign government kidnapping our citizen and killing him. What’s the difference if they shot off a nuke towards the USA and killed 100,000 in San Diego? There’s no difference except in numbers. In both cases US citizens died on US soil directly as a result of the actions of North Korea. Personally, I would inform China that if they do not do something to get this fat f**k out of power, that there would be war. China does not want to go to war.
The Norks need dollars. These tours are common “daring” holidays. I know two people who have been on them without incident. One guy took a bunch of semi-illicit photographs and “smuggled” them out on an SD card. People don’t realize the DPRK-China border is fairly porous. They don’t care if impoverished people go back and forth. The DPRK government is most analogous to a mafia crime family and has allies in the Triads and corrupt Chinese government. Another thing most Americans don’t realize is that many South Koreans don’t want the DPRK regime to fall because they don’t want to deal with the refugees.
If he got his education in public schools and did not specialize in real history in college then he likely only knew what he saw in MSM and had no knowledge with which to compare and evaluate.