Conservatives scoff at Trump's 'leftist plan' to build 10 new American cities featuring flying cars
* Trump recently announced a plan to build up to 10 new American cities on federal land.
* His proposal for "Freedom Cities" has largely received a muted response.
* But some right-wing critics have attacked it as a "leftist plan" to create walkable "15-minute cities."
Earlier this month, former President Donald Trump unveiled a dramatic, far-reaching proposal to build up to ten new American cities if he's elected to a second term.
These federally-chartered purported utopias, dubbed "Freedom Cities," would feature "vertical takeoff-and-landing vehicles," manufacturing hubs, "baby bonuses," and plentiful single-family housing, delivering a "quantum leap for America's standard of living."
"These Freedom Cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at homeownership," Trump said in a video announcing his plan on Truth Social.
The grand, futuristic proposal was mostly met with crickets and some light mockery from Trump supporters and others on the right.
Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote that Trump's policy would yield "a Trump casino and some mixed-used buildings run by Jared Kushner rising off an unfinished spur of highway somewhere in the vacant portions of the American West, funded by hard-sell fundraising appeals to vulnerable seniors."
Conservative media barely covered the announcement. Fox News left its in-house comedian, Greg Gutfeld, to handle the coverage of Freedom Cities. Gutfeld marveled at Trump's quantum leap as "optimism on meth," while Fox contributor Tom Shillue urged Trump to bring back some of his greatest hits from years past, like building the border wall and buying Greenland from Denmark.
But another Gutfeld guest dove straight into disinformation. Conservative radio show host and Tea Party activist Sonnie Johnson argued that Trump's proposal is "a leftist plan" to create 15-minute cities — the urban planning concept in which people live within a short walk or bike ride of most daily necessities.
She went on to push an increasingly popular conspiracy theory that cities around the world are attempting to trap residents in dystopian, heavily-surveilled communities and strip them of their cars and freedom of movement.
"The purpose of these cities is that everything is in a 15-minute walking distance, so you don't have to have a car, they can keep you in a limited area, you don't go and travel, you're not wasting energy, it helps you cut down on your carbon footprint," Johnson said. "It is a Green Deal initiative made to cut down on energy and stop humans from having the ability to move freely across spaces."
She added, "They're already building them in Saudi Arabia and other countries."
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Originally Posted by David W Pratt
