By Cherie Zaslawsky, Truth Be Told
The formerly sleepy suburb of Menlo Park where I live, made a sudden appearance on everyone’s radar in 2011 when Facebook moved in. Then-Mayor Rich Cline presciently called it: “the single biggest event in our town’s history.” And we’re about to make national headlines once more, since we’re facing what amounts to a hostile takeover by progressive change agents, through a perfect storm of political chicanery coupled with undue influence by big monied interests.
Their plan? To turn our inviting, “village character” shopping district into a high-density, low-income subsidized housing enclave, replete with 8-story apartment complexes in our downtown parking lots that would quickly signal the end of our upscale, one-story family businesses.
The storm arrived courtesy of the heir to the Intel fortune, Karen Grove, who, as “luck” would have it, also lives in Menlo Park. In 2018, she formed a group of like-minded progressive utopians, three of whom went on to become members of Menlo Park’s City Council. And three seats equals a majority in our five-member Council.
Philanthropist Grove is the kind of do-gooder C.S. Lewis describes thus:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
Henry Grady Weaver concurs:
The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means.
It’s doubtful Ms. Grove has read the works of these sages.
INTEL HEIRESS KAREN GROVE’S CRUSADE AGAINST MENLO PARK
Board Chair of the hefty Grove Foundation as well as a multimillionaire in her own right, Ms. Grove is on a mission to help “the poor.” And she wants to help them to Menlo Park’s one and only downtown shopping district. I think it was Bill Gates who coined the term “catalytic philanthropy” which may be better described as “coercive philanthropy” masquerading as altruism.
And she has ample support from the Menlo Park City Council. In fact, a key founding member at the launch of her organization in 2018 happens to be our current mayor, Betsy Nash, who got her start in local politics immediately after connecting with Ms. Grove—make of that what you will.
The goal Karen and Betsy share is that of turning Menlo Park’s downtown—an inviting main street lined with mostly one-story, unique small businesses—into an enclave of subsidized apartment towers, aka tenements-in-the-making. It doesn’t take rocket scientists to figure out that removing the parking lots our businesses rely on will force them to close, whether during the four years of construction with its noise, dirt, cement trucks and detour signs, or in the aftermath when the monolithic towers loom over our formerly appealing downtown.
Why would the Mayor of Menlo Park want to destroy her own downtown? Residents have mostly given up on that question and put an initiative on the ballot to override her plan rather than awaiting her answer.
But these ladies didn’t come up with this idea out of the blue: It’s a “vision” of a “walkable,” largely car-less downtown with a mixture of people of all income levels and, um, ethnicities, who supposedly will live and work and find their recreation smack in the middle of our downtown. The World Economic Forum dubbed this paradigm the “15-minute city,” which is actually a refinement of an earlier version that seeks to urbanize our suburbs out of existence, cloaked behind the feel-good label of “Smart Growth.”
SMART GROWTH: NEWSPEAK FOR AGENDA 21 HOUSING PROJECTS
Smart Growth “Revitalization” in Dubuque, Iowa’s Millwork District
Back in the 1990s when Clinton was president, a new concept was born: that of “Smart Growth.” Though he didn’t invent it, Clinton is largely responsible for its early implementation.
And the source of this new paradigm that was to be shortly unveiled in cities all across our nation? The United Nation’s Agenda for the 21st Century, aka Agenda 21—alternatively referred to as Sustainable Development, the Green New Deal, the Great Reset or the New World Order.
Here’s what J. Gary Lawrence, a Clinton advisor on the “President’s Council on Sustainable Development,” had to say in 1998:
Participating in a U.N. advocated planning process would very likely bring out many of the conspiracy-fixated groups and individuals in our society... This segment of our society who fear ‘one-world government’ and a U.N. invasion of the United States through which our individual freedom would be stripped away would actively work to defeat any elected official who joined ‘the conspiracy’ by undertaking Local Agenda 21. So we will call our process something else, such as ‘comprehensive planning,’ ‘growth management,’ or ‘smart growth.’
Here’s a translation by Freedom Advocates founder Michael Shaw in 2003: “Smart Growth is designed to depopulate rural areas and transition human populations into high-density occupation zones.”
THE WAR ON OUR SUBURBAN HAVENS
In California, the high-density enclaves are called “Priority Development Areas” (PDAs) or “Sustainable Development Areas (SDAs),” in contrast to land our globalist masters want more or less free of inhabitants: “Priority Conservation Areas” (PCAs).
And while California appears to be the poster child for this radical social engineering project, between 2010 and 2020, the following states likewise succumbed to the U.N.’s Programme on land use, though some use slightly different terminology, such as “Transit-oriented Corridors,” “Node Clustering,” “Priority Funding Areas,” “Urban Growth Boundaries,” and “Conservation Opportunity Areas”—to put us off the track: Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Connecticut, Georgia, Arizona, Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania. In fact, I’d be very surprised if any state in the union is not following suit as well.
But here’s the kicker: the following US governmental agencies also support Smart Growth:
· Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
· Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
· Department of Transportation (DOT)
In fact, under Obama in 2009, these three agencies formed the Partnership for Sustainable Communities.
And the EPA also lists several other federal departments as its partners.
President Trump, however, has moved HUD away from Biden’s “green activism and suburban social reengineering,” as well as ending his and Obama’s noxious Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) program.
Unfortunately, California didn’t get the message.
SMART METERS FOR SMART HOMES
Smart Meters are the wireless network version of the analog meters used by utility companies to charge us for our usage of gas and electricity. Many consider them a health hazard due to their electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and Radio Frequency (RF) emissions. And they’ve been implicated in some serious fires, in part due to the lithium battery backups that some of them have.
But they do possess tremendous surveillance potential.
Again, California likely leads the pack in forcing them on residents, but New York and Texas are close contenders. It seems the Blue State/Red State divide doesn’t apply to “Smartification.” And Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania are not far behind. By 2024, 137 million Smart Meters had been installed in the U.S. This means our energy usage is constantly being monitored, as data on us is collected in increments of 15-minutes or less, day and night.
One analysis put it starkly: researchers could infer “whether individuals sleep in the same room,” detect kidney problems from medical equipment patterns, and identify insomnia.
But why the push to get us to use Smart Meters?
Perhaps so they can micromanage our energy usage by rationing our electricity. Think of it as an aspect of the dreaded Social Credit System as used in Communist China.
Imagine scenarios like this: “Dear Ms. Peon, you’ve used double your allotted energy this week, so we’re shutting off your power for the next 5 days.” That sort of thing.
Which brings us to the next level of nefarious subterfuge: the Smart City.
SMART CITIES: THE MATRIX OF OUR PLANNED DYSTOPIA
One might argue that the purpose of Smart Growth and Smart Meters has all along been to herd us into Smart Cities.
According to that fount of Deep State information, Wikipedia:
A smart city is an urban model that leverages technology, human capital, and governance to improve sustainability, efficiency, and social inclusion, which are considered goals for cities of the future.[1] Smart cities use digital technology to collect data and operate services.[2][3] Data is collected from citizens, devices, buildings, or cameras. Smart city applications are diverse and include, but are not limited to, traffic and transportation systems,[4] power plants, utilities, urban forestry,[5] water supply networks, waste disposal, criminal investigations, information systems, schools, libraries, hospitals, and other community services.[6][7] …Smart cities are characterized by the ways in which their local governments monitor, analyze, plan, and govern the city. [Emphasis mine]
Here are some of the backers of Smart Cities:
· IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge
· Cisco Systems w/$25 million from the Clinton Foundation
· The European Commission of 2012
· Bloomberg Philanthropies Smart City Competition
· The Rockefeller Foundation’s Smart City Competition
· AT&T’s alliance with Cisco, Deloitte, Ericsson, GE, IBM, Intel, and Qualcomm
So in the land of the free and the home of the brave, be prepared to be surveilled, monitored, tracked and “governed” by a consortium of city officials likely on the take from their globalist masters. Well what do you know—we see some very familiar names: Rockefeller, Bloomberg, Clinton... Hmmm… why would people with massive foundations who live in mansions be supporting Smart Cities? Atoning for their carbon footprints by squeezing the rest of us into barracks, perhaps?
C40 CITIES
And here’s a major player you probably never heard of: C40 Cities. It’s an international group dedicated to Agenda 21/2030 goals like “Zero Emissions.” One of their guiding principles: “Cleaner transport is essential to protect people’s health and shift cities away from fossil fuel use.”
Translation: We don’t want you driving, or using your gas stove, gas heater, or anything else that works.
It gets worse. Their decree: Cities need to build 35 million affordable homes annually until 2030 to meet housing needs globally. Every one of these new buildings is a chance to build clean, efficient, and affordable buildings from the start.
One wonders how a group of pernicious globalist shills figured out how many homes need to be built, who those residences are for, or why they call them “homes,” when “affordable housing” is almost always rental units in prefab high-density apartment towers?
C40’s Board of Directors includes Bruce Lindsey who also happens to be the Chairman of the Board of the Clinton Foundation, and who served as Clinton’s deputy counsel during his time in office, and, coincidentally perhaps, started out as a partner at a law firm in Little Rock, Arkansas—in Slick Willy’s neck of the woods.
Another member of C40 Cities, Mete Coban MBE is the Deputy Mayor of London for Environment and Energy. Mete is best known for founding My Life My Say, the youth-led charity dedicated to increasing democratic participation [i.e. leftist Labour Party supporters] among young people. Britain’s Mamdani?
But the biggest surprise of all is the Top Dog, a traitorous American globalist: Michael Bloomberg! Mr. Bloomberg is the President Emeritus of C40, and his replacement, Antha Williams, leads the Environment Program at… Bloomberg Philanthropies. Small world.
You get the picture. It’s the Big Club that George Carlin pointed out, the one you and I aren’t in.
THE 15-MINUTE CITY: MENLO PARK & BEYOND
Then there’s the low-brow version of the Smart City: its 15-minute city cousin.
The simpler 15-minute city version apparently doesn’t have to be as “smart” because it’s closer to a physical prison—although an outdoor version—whereas the Smart City is a high-tech panopticon geared more for surveillance and micromanagement than for curtailing movement.
And now we’ve come full circle: This is what Intel heiress Karen Grove and Mayor Betsy Nash, along with a cadre of apparently sell-out council members, special interest NGOs on the take, big developers, and assorted “useful idiot” progressives, plan to inflict on the residents of Menlo Park.
But why have I singled out Menlo Park as an example, except for the fact that I’m an on-the-spot eyewitness since it’s my city? And why should this be of national interest?
Because our opposition rightly views it as a test case.
The proposal is outlandish enough, the quality of life and property valuation stakes for the residents—most of whom are homeowners—are sky-high, and the opposition is tantamount to a state-sanctioned public/private partnership merging political power, clout, and huge monied interests.
The question that will be decided at the ballot box by fewer than our 21,000 registered voters, is whether pesky residents who value their community and hope to preserve their own downtown, can trump the plans of their supposed betters.
Put another way, on November 3rd, we’ll see if David can beat Goliath.
I wish Menlo Park were the outlier, but this is happening all over America, and beyond. If we don’t fight this battle in our cities at the local level and in our states by electing sane men and women with backbone who respect the Constitution, our freedom, and We the People—it’s game over.
What we’re facing is a one-way road to global serfdom à la Agenda 21/2030, though the original Agenda 21 formulation in 1992 doesn’t use the euphemism “Smart Cites.” It simply refers to “Human Settlements” as high-density outposts dotting our nation’s recreated “Wildlands” wilderness—a bizarre merging of pre-Columbian America with a futuristic digitized, cyberized, monetized dystopia. “The Hunger Games,” more or less.
The UN’s website assures us that: “In the modern age, settlements must also address new realities, including rapid urbanization, climate change, and deepening social inequalities.” Got that?
Don’t look now but there are even templates for Smart Neighborhoods, Smart Communities and Smart Regions!
In the future, it may pay to be dumb.
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Transit corridors are difficult to develop even with fed state and local incentives. But if ya got the UN weighing in....