MY TURN: Stop the KMPO

Imagine it’s the year 2030 and the following were to happen.

A woman we’ll call Jenni in this hypothetical considers herself to be an environmentalist. Growing up in Coeur d’Alene, she conserved water. She sorted her trash.

She also favored Kootenai Metropolitan Planning Organization approving a Traffic Management Center. That’s because Jenni bought into KMPO’s claims that surveillance cameras were needed to keep us safe.

When the CDA city council next approved a plan to become a “15-minute city,” Jenni was also all-in.

Here’s how it worked in this alternate future: Driving limits would be established to thwart climate change. Under the scheme, every store, facility, or service must be located within a 15-minute drive.

At first, Jenni had no problem registering her car with CDA authorities. It didn’t bother her to have her driving tracked by plate readers. Jenni was not to leave her 15-minute city more than a dozen times yearly. That seemed reasonable. Jenni always vowed to bike more.

But then, Jenni’s mother suffered a stroke. It paralyzed her, making her incapable of speaking or doing basic tasks.

Lacking funds to hire help, Jenni had to do the work herself. But Nana lived an hour away. When Jenni asked CDA to ask for an exception, she was denied: “No exceptions due to our climate crisis.”

Frightened, Jenni nonetheless broke the rules.

She drove outside her 15-minute city. And the fines came. But the problems didn’t stop. After her 50th infraction, Jenni’s car simply halted at the city limits. An internal kill switch had been activated.

As Jenni sat waiting for police to arrive, she couldn’t stop crying. ‘If I don’t leave now,’ she wondered between sobs. ‘Who will take care of my mom?’

Now for the reality.

A few weeks ago, the KMPO board convened a meeting to vote on a report detailing plans for a high-tech management center. Over 150 concerned citizens gathered to voice their opinions: Teens, moms with babies, children, the elderly.

According to the CDA Press, “The comments were all in opposition to a regional traffic management center for reasons including invasive surveillance, ‘smart’ cities, government overreach, and more.”

Many people don’t know the threat S.M.A.R.T. cities pose. Or 15-minute cities. Here’s a description of the latter from Spiked-Online, describing what Oxfordshire, UK, residents can expect to experience now that they’ve become a 15-minute city.

Under the new scheme, if residents want to leave their zone, they will need permission from the Council who gets to decide who is worthy of freedom and who isn’t ... residents will be allowed to leave their zone a maximum of 100 days per year, but in order to even gain this, every resident will have to register their car details with the council who will then track their movements via smart cameras 'round the city.

Globalist organizations pushing for an expensive traffic management center will tell you it’s to keep us safe by observing traffic or to aid with congestion. Might the real reason be to establish a control grid to surveil our movements, much like China?

As a Forbes tech columnist and the author of four books on AI, I know technofascism’s dangers. I observed the social credit system in China firsthand. Never have I seen a more defeated, more terrified people. And that was in 2019. Before their draconian Zero-COVID policy.

Returning to KMPO’s meeting, only three board members voted against this measure: Dan Gookin, Bruce Mattare and Jeff Tyler.

I had the chance to interview Tyler. “The World Economic Forum, the UN, and other globalist agencies are preparing a vast surveillance apparatus to spy on us in ways that would’ve been unthinkable a few years ago,” he said. “There will also be steep costs to taxpayers for a whole new local bureaucracy.”

I’ll go one step further. It’s not only that the tech has improved, but also that the will of the people has been subverted, one crisis after another. We just saw this with how a health “emergency” granted leaders extraordinary powers.

Now many of the same people who pushed for control over our movements under COVID are up to old tricks. They want to lock us in our homes again. This time? To save planet earth.

Don’t let them.

Michael Ashley is a Hayden Lake resident.