After several false alarms over the past two decades, it looks like Americans will soon need a Real ID-compliant form of identification to board a plane. President Donald Trump’s administration has made it clear there won’t be another extension of the deadline, and that’s creating some real tension with some of Trump’s most ardent supporters: batshit crazy conspiracy theorists.
Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist and Trump supporter for years, took to his Infowars show Monday to try and explain how Real ID was dangerous and insisted Trump must not understand how it actually works.
“So Trump is being told this,” Jones said, suggesting Trump was being manipulated to support Real ID. “We have to explain that you’re against the central bank digital currency. You’re against this world ID.”
Jones insisted that Real ID must be like Operation Warp Speed, the program for developing the covid-19 vaccine during Trump’s first term, which conspiracy theorists believe is dangerous and filled with things like tracking chips that communicate with 5G cell towers. People like Jones insist that Trump was manipulated into believing the vaccine was good. And now they’re saying the same thing must be happening with Real ID.
On Monday, Jones went on to tie in some of his favorite villains who are supposedly behind Real ID, including China, the United Nations, and Bill Gates.
“This Mr. President was developed in the U.S., given to the UN, Bill Gates has been heavily involved for 20 years. When you read the documents, he’s on the board of it,” Jones rambles on. “Communist China is involved in this standardization. It is this international system taking over America, which is what the globalists did.”
Jones actually has a surprisingly long history with Trump. The president appeared on his show in 2015 before he was successfully elected to the White House in 2016 and Jones was at the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. capitol as Trump supporters tried to keep the fascist president in office. But Trump’s ascent to the highest office in the country made things a bit uncomfortable for Jones, given the fact that he’s been warning about the dangers of the U.S. government since the 1990s.
Jones has tried to thread that needle, and he appears to have landed on the idea that anything the conspiracy theorist doesn’t like is simply a product of Trump not understanding what his own administration is doing. Officials from the Trump regime are trying to sell the idea of Real ID to supporters by saying it’s all about fighting illegal immigration, something that Jones also opposes from a bizarre angle that wouldn’t normally fit into a more libertarian worldview. A memo from the Department of Homeland Security was pushed to Fox News with the idea that undocumented people will eventually be rounded up thanks to these new ID requirements.
“Under Biden, illegal aliens used non-compliant IDs from sanctuary cities to board flights, but REAL ID’s higher security standards make it nearly impossible to forge legitimate documents, ensuring only verified travelers can fly,” the memo reportedly reads.
And DHS clearly sees it within the context of fighting terrorism as well, invoking the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in the same memo.
“This closes the gaping vulnerabilities Biden’s policies created, preventing criminals and potential terrorists from exploiting our aviation system, as seen during 9/11 when fraudulent IDs enabled attacks,” the memo reads.
Some folks on social media have tried to claim Real ID will help not just with fighting terrorism and illegal immigration, but also will stop non-citizens from voting. But permanent residents to the U.S., people who are not citizens, are able to get a Real ID. Conspiracy theorists on the right, including billionaire oligarch Elon Musk, are convinced that large numbers of non-citizens vote in U.S. elections, something that’s simply not true.
Jones tried to rationalize on his show Monday why previous Democratic presidents may not have fully instituted the Real ID Act, which passed in 2005, and he literally didn’t make any sense.
“The left didn’t want, completely want to implement it because that would have stopped their invasion,” Jones said, without explaining what he meant in any way.
Jones went on to say that Real ID would be used as a way to form a social credit score system in the U.S., another claim for which he provided no evidence. Real ID is simply a more secure form of ID with extra tech that’s harder to forge and one that requires more identity documents, such as a birth certificate and passport. And while you can critique the hurdles for that on their own merits, there’s no evidence Real ID is going to be used in the ways Jones claims.
Jones has a long history of spreading lies and sensationalist accounts of popular news stories, finally getting hit with the defamation lawsuit that would bankrupt him after he called victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012 a “hoax” with “actors.” But Jones appears to have nine lives, at least where his media empire is concerned. After being forced into bankruptcy, Jones was initially supposed to sell the company’s assets and The Onion even successfully bid on the Infowars website last year. However, that sale was reversed by a court.
If you don’t already have a Real ID-compliant identity card, you may want to make an appointment at the DMV to make that happen. Now that the deadline appears to be real, there are reports of very long lines and widespread inability to get an appointment. Starting May 7, anyone 18 years of age or older who tries to get on a flight may be denied if they don’t have a Real ID.
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