This specific idea seems to be a mix of climate change denialism (they want us to stop driving) mixed with COVID time authoritarian scares (forced internment, stay at home etc) and while we know Russia has helped push parts of these ideas before or pushed this after I think this one really did originally come direct from the right wing American billionaire owned think tanks.

This specific idea caught on for some reason but they’ve been chucking out variations on this crap for years