It’s to easy to explain away this stuff as merely gov deception fooling people. But I’ve seen far too many well educated people on HN making arguments in favour of this stuff. They always have their pet emergencies that are unlike other times in history requiring compromise now and a naive trust in the good intentions of local politicians, who often do care about some real present issue, but lack the capacity to see the longer term consequences and wider picture.

The fact they are more often religiously promoted by people often from EU countries or wealthier cities in the US is a signal but that doesn’t mean they were merely fooled by bad actors in gov hiding stuff. They could just as often see a consistent positive stability in their own local community, then immediately rationalize/correlate that to the popular mantras of the well intentioned local politicians… regardless if such that positive state is a stagnated legacy of prior success, claiming issues in other regions that their country/community never really experienced is because x gov policy (ie, using the absence of negatives to rationalize some norm, regardless if it’s been tested IRL), or merely positives happening in spite of their own govs policies.

Gov policy making / promotion is far too complex and multilayered to dismiss it outright as intentioned manipulative and planned.