Over two decades since its inception, Real ID is finally being enforced nationwide even after it received major pushback from parts of the American Right alarmed over its potential to enable constitutional violations.
Real ID has been in the works since the Bush era as part of the War on Terror reforms that have included the Patriot Act, FISA secret courts and ubiquitous NSA spying. It is a de facto national identification system that proved controversial after its passage back in 2005. Ultimately, a movement of state-level resistance forced the Real ID Act to be sidelined. The states refused to comply, believing Real ID was a fundamental violation of their sovereignty.
The implementation of Real ID kept getting delayed, but its time has finally come. With a flooding of mass migration and major election integrity concerns, the idea of Real ID is becoming more appealing to conservatives in search of answers to lingering national crises. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is telling Americans that they must comply with Real ID mandates to board airplanes.
“You will need a Real ID to fly. Real IDs make identification harder to forge, thwarting criminals and terrorists. If you plan to fly, make sure you get a Real ID so you won’t be denied from your flight or face travel delays!” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in an X video.Mass-Surveillance
POTENTIAL CONCERNS
Less than five years ago at the peak of COVID hysteria, mandates were being widely proposed for individuals to submit their biometric data to be able to go to work, worship in church and shop at grocery stores. The precedent has been set for these actions to be taken during a crisis, and Real ID would be a powerful tool for bureaucrats to enforce such a ghastly set of circumstances.
Real ID creates an information-sharing culture between the state and federal government where sensitive personal information about citizens is continuously flowing back and forth. This data will be stored and eventually harvested. It is not difficult to imagine personal health details eventually being stored on a Real ID card with individuals forced to submit their papers to show they have submitted to a battery of experimental vaccines in order to conduct basic transactions. Real ID, in the wrong hands, could contain social credit scores to determine whether an individual is guilty of wrongthink and subsequently frozen out of society.
A PALENTIR DATABASE?
At the same time of the Real ID rollout, additional announcements have alarmed constitutionalists worried about the emerging surveillance state. The Trump administration recently announced a deal with Palentir, the defense contractor and technology firm closely leaked to Peter Thiel, to oversee a massive data pool collected from Americans. This is based on language from an Executive Order signed on March 20 by President Trump titled: “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.”
Palentir is an industry leader in providing AI tools that allow large firms to be able to leverage massive amounts of data. It is not surprising that the federal government, a byzantine entity renowned for its bureaucratic bloat, would tap Palentir to improve its efficiency. However, Palentir will now be lording over a database that spans various federal agencies and will have the potential to merge granular data to create the most intricate and invasive profiles on Americans ever devised.
“It’s dangerous,” Congressman Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio, said to Semafor. “When you start combining all those data points on an individual into one database, it really essentially creates a digital ID. And it’s a power that history says will eventually be abused.”
MTG SOUNDS THE ALARM
A provision hidden deep within the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), a funding bill being pushed hard by the Trump administration because of its large tax cuts and substantial increase in border enforcement, imposes a new regulatory framework on artificial intelligence that would hamstring states and prevent them from putting restrictions on the potentially dangerous technology.
The provision in the act creates a 10-year moratorium that would prevent states from passing any restrictions on AI that are unapproved by the federal government. States and localities would be prevented under the OBBB from enacting “any law or regulation…limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial language models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems entered into interstate commerce.”
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, is sounding the alarm and refusing to vote in favor of the final version of the OBBB until these provisions are stricken from the legislation.
“I’m not voting for the development of skynet and the rise of the machines by destroying federalism for 10 years by taking away state rights to regulate and make laws on all AI,” Greene wrote in a tweet where she also noted AI’s negative impacts on employment within her district.
Real ID is already proving to be a springboard for additional Orwellian overreaches. The federal government, after all, is not known for its judiciousness when expanding their authority. The Trump administration is certainly well-intentioned in pushing these measures, but they are unwittingly continuing the mission creep toward a nightmarish future where every individual is cataloged, their privacy continually eroded, and steadily deprived of their humanity. Cleaning up waste in government is a laudable goal, but remember that the Founding Fathers did not want to make the government too efficient for a reason. That reason was to prevent the enactment of tyranny, and no tyranny is more permanent and unforgiving than Big Brother.