Afterthoughts: The Politics of Disobedience: Just Say NO to REAL ID
Combating the Disinformation Campaign Turning REAL ID into a Partisan Issue to Deceive Conservatives into Supporting It
My first post in the new Afterthoughts series for paid subscribers generated so many thought-provoking responses both in the comments and via email, I plan to publish a future Afterthoughts on that Afterthoughts (yes, it’s getting meta), but in the meantime, I wanted to publish this entry on REAL ID because there is a concerted propaganda campaign to trick conservatives into supporting this authoritarian surveillance legislation, and I feel it is urgent to make people aware of this exploitation of partisan biases given the impending May 7, 2025, deadline and the lie being propagated that US citizens will need REAL ID to fly domestically. If you’ve already signed up for REAL ID, not to worry. See this article on how to switch back to a standard state ID. (Note: One of my eagle-eyed readers discovered the PDF linked to in that article is broken, so here is the correct link along with an embedded document below.)
Afterthoughts: They Know … and They Don’t Care
Last week, after I published They Know … and They Don’t Care by Will T Wilkinson, he and I had an email exchange about my major point of disagreement with his essay.
Afterthoughts: The Politics of Disobedience: Just Say NO to REAL ID
This Afterthoughts relates to a post I published last fall on REAL ID:
The Politics of Disobedience: Just Say NO to REAL ID Before October 15, 2024
“It is incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement. It is t…
It started with a cross-post by Dennis D. Duffy, one of my dear, longtime subscribers, in which he shared this partisan propaganda piece accompanied by a distressing note saying he and his wife had just gotten REAL ID.
Given how alert this reader is to tyranny, I was surprised to read those words coming from him, so I immediately emailed him my concerns. I then raised the alarm on both Substack Notes and X because I knew if someone as awake as him had been misled, it was likely other dissidents have been, too. My suspicion was quickly confirmed in subsequent exchanges on X here (my reply), here (my reply), here (my reply), and here (my reply).
It appears the latest strategy is to paint REAL ID as a partisan issue to corral conservatives into supporting this tyrannical legislation when these freedom-oriented individuals would otherwise instantly sniff out its totalitarian implications.
Once again, the cruelites, philanthropaths, and propagandists are stoking artificial ingroup-outgroup biases so they can weaponize them against the common people, who should be united across partisan divides in opposing tyranny.
To my subscriber’s immense credit, he immediately read The Politics of Disobedience: Just Say NO to REAL ID and recalibrated his position. That demonstrates a rare intellectual humility I wish was more prevalent across society.
Even more honorably, he granted me permission to share our exchange to help clarify the confusion surrounding REAL ID.
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