Conspiracy Theorists Are Coming for the 15-Minute City
Carla Francome campaigns for better cycling routes in Haringey, North London, where she moved a few years ago in search of a community—“an area where I could make friends that would go to the park with me on a Saturday,” she says. “And where there are cafés nearby, and everything is in walking distance (15 mins).”
But nothing has compared to the stream of vitriol she’s received on Twitter since, on February 12, she posted a thread about the benefits of 15-minute neighborhoods—a concept in urban planning that suggests services should be spread out around cities, and that no one should be more than quarter of an hour away from parks, shops, and schools.
“That’s not freedom, that’s a socialist prison,” said one reply to her thread, from an account with the user name @pauldup80977540. Another account, @BusinessLioness, whose feed is peppered with anti-vaccine messaging and retweets of far-right commentators, sent Francome an image of the Warsaw Ghetto with a message: “There were already 15-minute cities in Poland during the Nazi occupation … In 1941 the Nazis introduced the death penalty for going out.”
Francome had unwittingly blundered into the middle of an evolving conspiracy theory, which has bundled up innocuous ideas in urban development, from traffic calming and air pollution measures to cycle lanes, into a kind of meta-narrative—a meeting point for anti-lockdown activists, anti-vaxxers, QAnon adepts, anti-Semites, climate deniers, and the far right. With help from right-wing figures in the US and UK, including the author Jordan Peterson, the 15-minute city concept has become entwined within a much bigger universe of conspiracies based around the idea of a “Great Reset” that will see people locked in their homes by climate-obsessed autocracies.
The 15-minute city conspiracy theory has become entrenched in the UK’s political fringe, referenced in interviews on GB News, a free-to-air TV channel that has periodically promoted conspiracy theories. On February 9, Nick Fletcher, a member of parliament in the ruling Conservative Party, referenced the conspiracy while asking a question about 15-minute cities in the House of Commons, calling it an “international socialist concept” that would “take away our personal freedom.”
https://www.wired.com/story/15-minute-ci...te-denier/
Carla Francome campaigns for better cycling routes in Haringey, North London, where she moved a few years ago in search of a community—“an area where I could make friends that would go to the park with me on a Saturday,” she says. “And where there are cafés nearby, and everything is in walking distance (15 mins).”
But nothing has compared to the stream of vitriol she’s received on Twitter since, on February 12, she posted a thread about the benefits of 15-minute neighborhoods—a concept in urban planning that suggests services should be spread out around cities, and that no one should be more than quarter of an hour away from parks, shops, and schools.
“That’s not freedom, that’s a socialist prison,” said one reply to her thread, from an account with the user name @pauldup80977540. Another account, @BusinessLioness, whose feed is peppered with anti-vaccine messaging and retweets of far-right commentators, sent Francome an image of the Warsaw Ghetto with a message: “There were already 15-minute cities in Poland during the Nazi occupation … In 1941 the Nazis introduced the death penalty for going out.”
Francome had unwittingly blundered into the middle of an evolving conspiracy theory, which has bundled up innocuous ideas in urban development, from traffic calming and air pollution measures to cycle lanes, into a kind of meta-narrative—a meeting point for anti-lockdown activists, anti-vaxxers, QAnon adepts, anti-Semites, climate deniers, and the far right. With help from right-wing figures in the US and UK, including the author Jordan Peterson, the 15-minute city concept has become entwined within a much bigger universe of conspiracies based around the idea of a “Great Reset” that will see people locked in their homes by climate-obsessed autocracies.
The 15-minute city conspiracy theory has become entrenched in the UK’s political fringe, referenced in interviews on GB News, a free-to-air TV channel that has periodically promoted conspiracy theories. On February 9, Nick Fletcher, a member of parliament in the ruling Conservative Party, referenced the conspiracy while asking a question about 15-minute cities in the House of Commons, calling it an “international socialist concept” that would “take away our personal freedom.”
https://www.wired.com/story/15-minute-ci...te-denier/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"