Kendall Stanley: Conspiracies galore!
Cities are wonderful places, crackling with the promise of a great life enjoying world-class restaurants, the arts, educational institutions and the buzz and creativity that occurs when people from all walks of life from throughout the world gather in one place.
Imagine now that you’re a professor and you’ve worked up a concept called the 15-minute city, where cities would cluster schools, stores and offices such that you could walk to any of those amenities within 15 minutes.
Glorious! A human-size chunk of the city that provides all you need.
Carlos Moreno came up with that and things were going swimmingly, that is until the conspiracy mongers started with the attacks.
“I wasn’t a researcher anymore, I was Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler,” Moreno told The New York Times. “I have become, in one week, Public Enemy No. 1.”
The article on Moreno noted that those in the public eye — Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates were used as examples — are used to spread misinformation about them and threats and hostility. It goes with the territory for those in high-profile jobs.
But now it is spreading to scientists and researchers and, in the case of Moreno, a scientist and business professor.
As reporter Tiffany Hsu reported, “In recent weeks, a deluge of rumors and distortions have taken aim at Mr. Moreno’s proposal. Driven in part by climate change deniers and backers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, false claims have circulated online, at protests and even in government hearings that 15-minute cities were a precursor to “climate change lockdowns” — urban “prison camps” in which residents’ movements would be surveilled and heavily restricted.
“Many attacked Mr. Moreno, 63, directly. The professor, who teaches at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, faced harassment in online forums and over email. He was accused without evidence of being an agent of an invisible totalitarian world government. He was likened to criminals and dictators.”
Ahh yes, the one-world conspiracy raises its ugly head.
According to Wikipedia, “The common theme in conspiracy theories about a New World Order is that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian one-world government — which will replace sovereign nation-states — and an all-encompassing propaganda whose ideology hails the establishment of the New World Order as the culmination of history's progress. Many influential historical and contemporary figures have therefore been alleged to be part of a cabal that operates through many front organizations to orchestrate significant political and financial events, ranging from causing systemic crises to pushing through controversial policies, at both national and international levels, as steps in an ongoing plot to achieve world domination.”
There have been various theories on the one-world order going back centuries — the Illuminati, Freemasonry, etc., have all been implicated.
The fallacy of the one-world order? No one over the course of centuries has managed to pull it off. You’d think that if this cabal (whichever one you choose) were all that powerful, then we’d have a one-world government already.
That is little comfort, one supposes, for Moreno, who just wanted to make cities a little better for their residents.
That was before the loonies came out — QAnon supporters said the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals in Ohio was an intentional move meant to push rural residents into 15-minute cities, according to Hsu’s report.
So there you have it — from a city improvement to forced internment in a 15-minute city.
Please make the whackos just go away, please, please.
Collateral damage
“What Can’t Be Unseen” is a jarring look at the one group that longs never to again have to handle a mass shooting — the crime scene investigators.
Jay Kirk in The New York Times Magazine writes about the investigators tasked with handling the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School where 26 were killed.
It’s an ugly read, focusing on the emotional toll taken on the investigators as they chronicled what happened at the school.
Such as:
Setting aside a banker’s box for collecting the personal items of all the children.
Taking nearly 1,500 photographs of the carnage.
Having to work around the shooter’s body after he had committed suicide.
Cleaning the jewelry of those who had worn it.
And how did they cope? By doing what they always did at a crime scene, only this time doing it 26 times.
Read the piece and remember we all need to work harder to ensure another Sandy Hook will never happen again.
Even though we know it probably will.
— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Kendall Stanley: Conspiracies galore!
