Boris Bikes and the UN plot to take over the world

In today’s gentle look at the American lunatic fringe, we will be examining the sinister links between cycling and the impending one-world government of the New World Order.

You’ll be familiar, probably, with Boris Johnson’s brand new London cycle-hire scheme: 5,000 brand new bikes docked around the capital, available to all-comers to hire for a nominal fee. They are, most people* agree, quite a good idea.

People are cycling all round London, seeing the sights and gumming up the pavements, their little legs a blur as they contend with the bikes’ ridiculously low gear settings. They’re healthy, they take the heat off our crippled public transport network, and they look nice. Win-win, and no evidence of the Illuminati at all, surely?

Well, not if you’re running for office in the US, it seems.

Dan Maes, frontrunner for the Republican nomination for the Governorship of the State of Colorado, reckons that bike-hire problems are actually the leading edge of the U.N.’s grand conspiracy to take over the world.

There’s a similar hire-scheme in Denver, inculcated by Maes’ Democratic opponent and the city’s current mayor John Hickenlooper – and Maes does not like it one bit. In fact, the plan is ‘converting Denver into a United Nations community’.

“This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed,” Maes told a small crowd at a recent rally. “This is bigger than it looks on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms,” he later added.

And if you thought, as he once did, that these policies were just innocent means to promote exercise and environmental responsibility, well, you can just think again, buddy: “that’s exactly the attitude they want you to have.”

Maes is referring to Denver’s membership of the UN-run International Council for Environmental Issues – an international association of local governments who have made a commitment to sustainable development, which Denver joined in 1992. The UN, of course, is just a front designed to quietly usher in the New World Order.

He is, I hardly need add, a Tea Party favourite. He’s for things like tax cuts, guns, axing health care and Jesus. He is also the leading Republican candidate, and looks set to win his party’s gubernatorial nomination on Tuesday.

This, of course, is a good thing. It won’t be hard for Hickenlooper, who is undoubtedly licking his chops raw even as I type, to blast the deranged Maes from every angle. In fact the policy section of his own website practically does it for him – it’ll be wildly popular with the third of the electorate who support him, and will turn the stomachs of the moderate majority, who simply aren’t as frothing as he is.

Then there’s the little matter of Tom Tancredo, a former Colorado congressman incensed that he isn’t getting the Republican nod for Governor, who has decided to run on behalf of the Constitution Party. If he goes through with this, he’ll neatly split the Republican vote and leave Hickenlooper – whose chops will be worn down to the bone by this point – an even clearer run at the job.

All you need to know about Tancredo is that he once described Barack Obama as “…the greatest threat to the United States today, the greatest threat to our liberty, the greatest threat to the Constitution of the United States, the greatest threat to our way of life; everything we believe in. The greatest threat to the country that our founding fathers put together is the man that’s sitting in the White House today.”

And these are the guys who would rule the Free World.

*  well, most people amongst my rarefied circle of Liberal media elites.

Image credit: Getty.

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• http://www.yahoo.co.uk/ Firozali A.Mulla

  Crazy I say

• Leigh1940

  For me the most depressing thing is that at least these people stand for something. So-called liberal politicians campaign on a liberal platform and then end up ruling conservatively, thereby standing for nothing at all. So sadly I think that these nuts will become more popular. Will there never be a coherent left to counter it?

• tumper

  For anyone to claim that cycling in London is beneficial to your health is risible.
  Does not anyone realise the amount of carcinogenic fumes pumped out by the motorised traffic there? The emissions from diesel powered vehicles are ten times more likely to give you cancer than smoking unfiltered cigarettes. When you also factor in the ‘exercise effect’ (laboured breathing, forcing pollutants and carcinogens further into the lung tissue) you have a health problem of potentially gargantuan proportions.

• http://twitter.com/lucullus Tim Lennon

  Even if this were demonstrably true, would you prefer we all got in cars in London? We don’t cycle with our lips clapped round the exhaust from someone’s Chelsea tractor, y’know!

  Besides, if this were going to be “a health problem of gargantuan proportions”, you wouldn’t need more people cycling in London to demonstrate it – you’d already have the problem from people walking.

• FrenchLiz

  i hate to rain on your parade, all you cyclists, but here in Paris this scheme has been running for quite a few years and is fast losing its appeal. The bikes get pinched, they start to go wrong and people lose interest in cycling. It’s only the really hardened cyclists who continue with it and, of course, a lot of those have their own bikes. When we were in London recently we were amused to note that a lot of cycle lanes just suddenly stop or peter out. What is the cyclist supposed to do then? Take to the pavement? As a keen pedestrian that would really annoy me.