Welcome Aboard Flight 1984

Please have your Real ID out and ready to be scanned.

If you’re old enough to remember the pain of forgetting to rewind the VHS tape before you brought it back to Blockbuster, you probably can also recall the golden era of air travel. You know, when you’d get to the airport maybe forty-five minutes before your flight, check your three massive bags (for free!) at the curb, show your crumpled paper boarding pass to a smiley agent, and maybe—if you were in a big, fancy airport—walk through a low-budget metal detector with your shoes on and everything before sauntering to your gate with the water bottle you brought from home (for free!). Non-traveling friends and family could come right along with you, and they would sometimes even stick around after you boarded so you could wave at each other as your plane took off.

Compare that with, say, today, where you have to budget at least three hours to stand in line to get your tweezers confiscated. You toss the $6 water you just bought into the handy bin provided for just this purpose and relieve yourself of your boots, your belt, your jacket, your jewelry, your phone, and your dignity before being herded through a NASA-level space contraption that starts wailing the second you step inside. Congratulations! Please enjoy getting to first base with a surly TSA agent (for free!) while she tries to find the assault rifle she’s positive you’ve got stashed in your pants. After the humiliation ritual of redressing in public, you race to your gate just in time to stand crammed in the equivalent of a mosh pit with 224 equally-annoyed passengers for another hour as you wait for your boarding group (z; it’s always z) to be called, all the while praying that your plane doesn’t have a few loose screws in the wing or a few loose screws in the cabin.

AVIATION OFFICIAL 1: Okay, guys. We’ve had 374 air disasters since breakfast. If this continues, people are going to give up flying altogether, and then we’ll be out of jobs. We need to do something to bring back passenger confidence.

AVIATION OFFICIAL 2: What if we retired some of our old, decrepit planes, hired a bunch of top-notch mechanics, and really beefed up our safety protocols?

AVIATION OFFICIAL 1: Too expensive. Remember, we just need people to feel safer. We can’t go broke doing it.

AVIATION OFFICIAL 2: Gotcha. How about we start requiring some new form of ID? We could tell people we’re doing it to stymie would-be terrorists.

AVIATION OFFICIAL 1: I like it. Continue.

AVIATION OFFICIAL 2: Well, first, they’ll have to go to the DMV to get it. You know, so it’ll seem all official and stuff. And it’ll be a complete nightmare. They’ll have to bring their original birth certificate and social security card—no copies—plus a utility bill, their most recent tax return, a DNA sample, a letter from their dentist, and a lock of their childhood dog’s fur.

AVIATION OFFICIAL 1: I get it, we’re going to make sure they know that we know exactly who’s on every plane! And these will be federal requirements?

AVIATION OFFICIAL 2: Nah, we’ll let each state decide what their residents need to get it.

AVIATION OFFICIAL 2: Even better. People are gonna love this!

Even though Real ID is dominating news cycles right now, it’s actually been decades in the making. In the wake of the “terrorist attacks” of 9/11, Congress passed the REAL ID Act with a supposed goal of strengthening aviation security. (Never mind that all of the alleged hijackers had valid passports and legally obtained visas so the fake ID argument was weaker than water pressure under the Biden administration; the post-9/11 world was all about optics.) In theory, Real ID would strengthen national defense by standardizing identification requirements and making it harder for bad actors to slip through the cracks. In reality, it’s a cross between a corn maze, a screen door on a submarine, and Big Brother living rent-free in your pocket (you know he already does, right?).

Twenty years later, the deadline for enforcement has been pushed back more times than your crazy cousin’s wedding—and for good reason: no one knows what it does, how to get it, or how on earth it’s going to be enforced. States interpret the rules like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, and Americans have habitually reacted with the same energy they bring to flossing: they know they’re supposed to do it, but they’d really rather not.

The challenges of actually implementing such a program have led bureaucrats to keep kicking the can down the proverbial road (ostensibly to allow states additional time to meet the obligations). But evidently, the national hall pass is set to expire on May 7—this time for real, they’re serious, no more messing around—and anyone who hopes to enjoy the luxury of being squished into a tiny seat between two human hippopotami and pay $8 for Wi-Fi that doesn’t work is going to have to present the new, convoluted, state-specific, may-or-may-not-be-the-last-stop-before-a-brain-chip ID.

“Border Barbie” Kristi Noem is pushing the thing harder than a used car salesman with rent due tomorrow on X, insisting that “Real IDs make identification harder to forge, thwarting criminals and terrorists.” Call me conspiratorial, but what’s to stop a person from bringing a fat stack of someone else’s proof-of-life to the DMV and making their fake identity official? (I knew a gal in college who literally did this; when the “borrowed” ID she’d been using to barhop expired, she waltzed right into the DMV and got a shiny new one—this time with her own actual photo on it.)

“If you show up [to the airport] without a Real ID, expect delays,” ABC News warns. (Um, I’m betting you can also expect delays if anyone in line ahead of you showed up without it, too.) It’s worth noting that a valid passport or Global Entry card—plus a dozen other forms of documentation—will satisfy the enhanced identification standards even after May 7, an oft-overlooked fact that sort of makes the frenetic fuss over this “new requirement” feel more than a little bit overblown.

PERSONAL DETOUR: I have Global Entry. Not only did I not complain about Uncle Sam looking up my skirt during the application process, I paid him to peep on my entire family. And we had to wait several months and drive four hours for in-person interviews and be fingerprinted in order to be violated. I’m sure my card is microchipped and GPS-enabled and possibly harvesting my trust data while it sits in my safe. But it comes with TSA pre-check, so I get to keep my shoes on when I go through security! (I know. But I’ve had it for over a decade and I got it before I woke up to our corrupt puppet masters’ plans for us and I’ve already admitted the smart money would not have been on me, so you can save your side-eye for someone who does dumb things and doesn’t realize it.)

The reaction to Real ID online is definitively mixed. On one side you’ve got pissed-off patriots in matching DON’T TREAD ON ME hats howling about surveillance states and social credit scores and the final nail in freedom’s coffin. Over their dead bodies, in case you were wondering, will they willingly sign up for this infringement. The irony is, lots of them probably already have it without even knowing it (I did!). Many states have been issuing Real IDs for more than a decade without announcing it; it just suddenly got a whole lot more complicated to get your driver’s license renewed.

On the other side is a mob of anti-Karens refusing to lose it, cackling at all the commotion, and basically calling anyone who opposes the new beefed-up IDs child-trafficking accomplices.

I get the concern: Today it’s an ID to fly, tomorrow it’s a retina scan to buy a Slurpee or return the questionable sweater vest you bought on a whim. (In your defense, it did look adorable on the mannequin.) On the other hand, official identification has always been required to fly. Plus, I’m not sure how providing government-issued documents to the government increases their ability to track and trace our every movement and motive. I’m fairly certain our smartphones, social media accounts, fitness trackers, browsing histories, credit reports, and the army of digital assistants we have on standby 24/7 do an excellent job of that already.

You can buy this notebook for five bucks!

The funniest part to me is that if they’d positioned Real ID as the unequivocal way to ensure secure elections and thwart voter fraud, the flag-waving freedom fighters would have been the first to line up. But because they framed it as “for our own good,” hordes of pandemic-traumatized Americans are looking for any loophole they can slip through to opt out of Big Brother’s latest Trust Us project.

Are you freaked out because I’m not freaking out (or did you decide to stop trusting me when you found out I have Global Entry)? Let me have it in the comments! :)

P.S. Reader Big E put together an excellent reference guide to all things Real ID-related in a nuanced Substack note, for folks seeking additional details on state requirements, alternative ID options, and more.

And if you just want a book without all of that messy commitment, you can do that here.