“[…] “perverse” and “Stalinist” approach to social control, adding: “It is an encroachment on civil liberties, and it is a page out of the East Germany playbook. With the 15-minute city, you will have to, in effect, apply for an internal passport to go and visit your granny.”

That’s nothing new. Fossil fuel funded desinformation and their not-less-desinformation-loving right-wing friends have a long history of telling the fairy tale of 15-min cities as a kind of population control.

It’s all based on the basic premise that car-brains can’t understand that “you cannot go there freely by car” is not the same as “you cannot go there freely at all”. So when you tell them that you can only drive somewhere a limited number of times per year before paying a fee for using their car, their brain-damage automatically translates it to “I’m not allowed to go there anymore”.

PS: Bringing the “East-German playbook” into this story makes it even more absurd, given the (non-)availability of cars and thus the quality of public transport in the ex-GDR. But that’s another thing car-brains can’t understand, so they will not see the problem.