I’ll jail critical journalists, vows wife of South Korean presidential candidate

Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo
Thursday January 27 2022, 12.30pm GMT, The Times UK

South Korea’s presidential election has been electrified after the wife of its leading candidate promised to jail critical journalists and suggested that women who claim they are sex assault victims do so for money.

Kim Keon-hee, 49, wife of the conservative candidate Yoon Suk-yeol, fought unsuccessfully in court to prevent a television station from broadcasting recordings of her conversations with a journalist. Her husband’s poll ratings have risen since the broadcast, suggesting some South Koreans approve of her outspokenness.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/south-korean-presidential-candidates-wife-kim-keon-hee-promises-to-jail-critical-journalists-6267glfsg

This is the wife of the candidate the US and Japan support. Unfortunately this report is behind a paywall at The Times of UK. Kim Gon-hee has been lampooned in the French press as well recently. Yoon's family is corrupt through and through as I have been posting about for almost two years. He and his chaebol and fundamentalist supporters on the right have thoroughly corrupted the administration of justice in South Korea. If he is elected South Korea will be on the fast track to authoritarian dictatorship.

Yoon's election will also shift the balance of power of power in northeast Asia in the direction of instability. Yoon's incompetent foreign policy statements indicate he will totally capitulate to US-Japanese demands to adopt anti-China policies and abandon attempts at rapprochement with North Korea. Yoon even has a guru shamanist exorcist assigned to his party's campaign committee, believe it or not. A demonstration by the supporters of the latter is planned at Yoido (the seat of the National Assembly) the day after the extended Lunar New Year holiday weekend, on Tuesday. Promoters of the demonstration, claim they will have 150 to 300 thousand participants. No doubt this is intended in part to discredit the current democratic administration with more increases in covid numbers just before the scheduled March 9 presidential election.

Yoon had said, before the 7 plus hours of recorded conversations were revealed, that his wife disliked politics and wasn't interested in an active role as first lady at the Blue House. The recordings of Kim Gon-hee reveal this to have been a blatant lie. The question now arises as to whether the prospective first lady, who believes she has shamanistic powers, won't emerge in fact as the gatekeeper of power in South Korea much as Choi Soon-shil did in the impeached Park Geun-hye administration.

Yoon's poll ratings have risen in part because of the rampant misogyny among young male voters. Economic frustrations including lack of job opportunities, affordable housing, and the public health restrictions incident to the pandemic have caused younger voters to target "feminism" as the cause.

Kim Gon-hee offered to pay the reporter who recorded the interview as much as 100 million won to become her "person," suggesting the mechanism by which the so called "press prosecution" collusion operated while Yoon was Prosecutor General of South Korea. The offer was an election law violation. She also requested that he inform on fellow journalists or others who were critical of her husband or family members.