All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line, I've got the great Jim Bovard, of course, he's the author of most of the books in the world, a bare majority, but still most of them.
The latest is Public Policy Hooligan, which is a lot of fun.
And then of course, there's Attention Deficit Democracy, which is perfect.
And also his website is jimbovard.com.
And also he writes for USA Today and the American Conservative Magazine.
And this one's at TAC.
It's called How Washington is Ramming Real ID Down Our Throats.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going?
Hey, doing good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Happy to have you here.
And yeah, I really favor your brand of anti-government extremism.
I was thinking of you actually the other day.
I was traveling, giving a speech and at the, whichever airport it was, they had a big sign saying warning, real ID coming in effect.
You won't be able to get on a plane starting real soon here.
And it's been a long time coming, unfortunately, in Texas, they had the real ID even before the Real ID Act was ever even passed, when it was just being proposed, they started implementing it here in Texas in 1995.
Digital thumbprint, digital photo, digital signature.
And some of the other states have been dragging ass, but it's been 25 years now in Texas.
But anyway, so it really is all coming to a head here and you've got a really great article here full of reporting as well as your perfectly agreeable opinions.
So why don't you take us through a little bit about how it's coming to a crisis right now with this?
Well, yeah, what's happened is the Real ID Act was passed in 2005.
Ron Paul was one of the heroes fighting against it.
He was very clear headed.
He had a staffer, Kent Snyder did a lot of great work on that.
A lot of liberal groups joined the bandwagon fighting this as did some of the more principled conservative groups.
And it was slowed down.
But with the Trump administration, they're finally ratcheting up the pressure.
And so there's an October deadline for states, for people to have Real ID compliant driver's licenses or else TSA supposedly is going to stop them from flying.
And that's the storyline that's being echoed in the news media.
But it's actually a whole lot worse than that because what's happening here in Maryland, the free state, is that the state government, the Motor Vehicle Administration has canceled over 8,000 people's driver's licenses solely because they were sent a notice telling them that they had to come in and prove their identity with more papers and they didn't come.
These are people who already qualified, already received a driver's license.
And this is a good example of how politicians down the road can use the Real ID Act to make new demands, like maybe DNA samples or retina scans or who knows what.
But it's completely arbitrary.
It hasn't gotten much press coverage.
But this is part of the reason why a lot of people feared Real ID in the first place, because it was perceived as a blank check.
Well, and you know, it just goes to show, too, that you have something that probably most American adults would never question, that somebody's got to be in charge of making sure that people can see well enough and can check the right boxes enough to be allowed to drive a car on the road.
But then it just becomes this ax they're holding over your head all the time that they can take away from you, not for moving violations, but for refusing to give in to extremely invasive things.
Like you're saying, very soon it'll be eyeball scans.
Yeah, I mean, this is interesting, because I've been getting these notices from the Motor Vehicle Administration, the MVA here in Maryland for about four or five months.
And they were getting more and more histrionic, oh, my God, you've got to come in and show us your papers.
And I was thinking, dudes, I already showed you my papers.
I showed you these papers when I moved to this stupid state.
And what I was hearing from the media was that, you know, you had to do this or else you would not be allowed to fly unless you have a U.S. passport.
Well, I've got a passport, so I figured, eh, it's not going to be a problem.
So I was planning on ignoring this, and then I did a Facebook thread on this private one.
And there was in my favorite Maryland anarchist, Brian Balcom, a guy who's on Facebook, does a lot of great memes, memes is how they're pronounced, JPEGs with words, was pointing out that Maryland has begun canceling people's driver's licenses because they have not shown up for these summons to show more documents.
So I said, well, maybe I better show up.
So I did, had a bunch of papers, the MVA sent me a notice with my appointed time.
I said, yeah, okay, all right, let's go.
So I showed up and I had my birth certificate, I had my passport.
But there was a problem because both of those identified me as James.
And I had some IRS forms, 1099s to identify me as my social security number, but those said Jim.
And everybody knows that is the first trick that terrorists do, you know, switching out James and Jim and all that stuff.
Happily, I had a shitload of 1099s with me.
So I was fishing through them like, okay, here's a couple of James.
Okay, this will do.
And I'm thinking, damn, that was thorough.
But part of what's fascinating here is that you've got, most of the media has gone along with this and bought in the idea that we need these vast centralized databases with all this personal information in order to keep us safe.
But no one has explained how those databases are going to be kept safe from the government employees, many of whom have run side businesses creating false IDs.
Yeah, you talk about that in this.
You have, first of all, a link to the employees crime wave, which has the search results.
That was so funny.
Was it the Just Department site or something, the search results there?
Yeah.
The site is the Just Department, the page for the U.S. attorney for Maryland, the chief prosecutor for the feds in Maryland.
And so I was, you know, when I started this out, I'd seen one or two mentions of these cases of the MVA clerks who've gotten busted for fabricating false IDs.
And I said, well, damn, that's shocking.
So I started Googling and then like, oh, here's another one.
Here's another one.
Holy crap.
And so what I did is, you know, just went to that Just Department page for Maryland for their prosecutions, typed in MVA and oh my goodness, it's like I'd won the lottery.
There are so many of these MVA employees who have been indicted, convicted, sent to prison for fabricating IDs and for sometimes using the identities that they get from people who apply for licenses.
Yeah, well, of course.
Well, actually, I guess I'm surprised there's any accountability here.
I guess the feds went after him.
So that's something.
Well, yeah, I mean, I was bantering with folks on Twitter on this this afternoon and, you know, it got to the point that the Just Department, the U.S. attorney for Maryland, should simply set up a branch office at the MVA to make it easier to book their employees who have been caught fabricating IDs.
That's funny.
Might as well.
And they don't even notice the irony and the fun in that, I guess, the way we do.
But hey, now, so and this brings up a whole thing to where, you know, well, geez, we got to have some kind of ID so that everybody, you know, knows who's who and you can verify and this and that kind of thing.
And yet, once you centralize that, then that can be completely corrupted.
Like you're saying, pass out driver's licenses with a million names on them all day long.
And now they have the official state of Maryland stamp of approval on them.
They might be fake, but they're made by the state itself.
So they're pretty good looking fakes.
And so and also they can be hacked and all that information compromised away, too.
Yeah, I mean, this is something that's happened to the feds.
The Office of Personnel Management had a massive database of 19 million confidential files on federal employees and contractors and stuff like that.
Somebody hacked that, vacuums it all up.
You know, there are lots of honest employees that work for the state of Maryland.
However, however, the system doesn't give sufficient protection for the ones that do decide to be ripping off people's identities, fabricating IDs.
And yet, yet the politicians and the bureaucrats and much of the media just tell us to trust the system no matter how many, how many of their people get sent up the river.
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What's really their incentive in making this so difficult?
As you say, purging all these people and making them come back.
And then you link to Julia Ioffe, however you say her name, from the New Republic, which it's actually nice to think of her having a sit at the DMV because I can't stand her and the horrible Russiagate truth there.
Pretty representative, though, of the hell that people got to go through to just get their government ID card.
Yeah, and there are some places it's worse than others.
She's in the District of Columbia, if memory serves, and I lived in D.C. for a while, but it was most—well, D.C. was very, very difficult government, and it was so predatory that the thing that the police were doing, people get their driver's license, vehicle registration for a set number of years.
So what the cops, what the D.C. government was not doing was not sending people notices that they had to get renewed.
So people didn't realize that, and then police would arrest them and, you know, boy, we made a lot of arrests this week, we're really keeping people safe.
Too bad about the murder rate, but hey, you know, we got 9,000 drivers this week.
Yep, it's just business, is raking in that money.
That's, you know, much of it—they always make—well, just because of when it's a matter of an offense and a fine, and that's much cheaper to prosecute, right, that's the lowest hanging fruit of all, you can just essentially harass people all day long and make more money than chasing—what'd you say, diverse criminal, actual criminals?
Where's the buck in that?
Murderers.
Yeah, I mean, you know, there are laws in D.C., there's something called a Youth Rehabilitation Act, which was put in under Mary and Barry.
So it basically means that if somebody, some district resident does some horrendous crime and they're under the age of 24, that they basically often get simply a wrist slap.
And you got—a couple years ago, the Washington Post reported that almost half the murder victims in the city were people who had either been, you know, part of that program, or the killers had been part of the program.
So, I mean, it's a law that's generated an incredible amount of violent violence, but, you know— And support for the cops in turn, of course.
Which is funny because—go ahead.
No, no, proceed.
Yeah, but just—probably if you ask anybody, conservatives or liberals or anybody, they'd like to see nonviolent criminals not have to go to the penitentiary, except in the most extreme circumstances.
You know, you rip off 10,000 grandmas for all their retirement savings or something.
Otherwise, you know— Or something like jaywalking.
Yeah, I'm sorry, what?
Or something like jaywalking.
Yeah, or something like that.
But, no, but I think most people would like to see real reform about, you know, where only violent criminals go free, and that even when it comes to violent criminals, that we have real fair trials for people.
They're not getting railroaded.
Nobody agrees with those reforms.
I don't think I've ever heard anybody saying, yeah, armed robbers need to get out sooner, and this kind of thing, where the actual violent criminals, they're the one exception in everybody's argument about reform, instead of being the point of it all.
But I guess close enough for government work, huh?
Sure enough.
Yeah, might as well.
Why discriminate between this kind of felon and that one?
What's sort of a fence in that one?
Well, let's see.
This one has left a bloody victim, and that one didn't.
I don't know.
There's a difference, but hey.
Yeah, I don't know.
And I don't know about you, but I've known people who've been to prison.
And they'll say that, look, there are some guys in there who, boy, you're pretty glad they're in prison.
But not most of them.
Most of them are just regular people who are being warehoused in there for whatever technical reason mostly, you know.
Yep.
Back in the 1970s, I spent one summer working for the Virginia Highway Department.
One of the things I did was work alongside convict crews.
And there were a lot of, I heard a lot of interesting life stories there.
And there was this one really bulky guy.
I mean, he was huge, and he just, a white guy, looked really menacing.
And you know, so I heard his life story one day, and I guess he was in there because he beat the hell out of his girlfriend's husband.
So it's kind of like, oh, okay, well, you know, I don't want to make you angry.
Yeah, well, and it depends on how bad he beat him, I guess.
But yeah, you know, and even there, there's a difference between did one really bad thing one time and are an actual criminal who goes around being a criminal.
But I agree.
I agree.
I don't know.
I don't know how long he was in for.
But there was another guy, there was a black guy from Richmond, who was got busted for drug dealing.
This was the start of the drug war.
And he was telling me, you know, yeah, I was a drug dealer.
But the you know, but but the guy the prosecutors brought to the trial, and said he had bought from me.
I never saw that guy in my life.
And it's like, oh, that's interesting.
Yep.
And yeah, probably true to buy that.
That kind of thing happens all the time.
So yeah, now listen, let's talk more about all this high tech slavery stuff with the real ID, right?
Because there's a lot more where this came from in terms of the facial recognition.
And you know, the I guess the Chinese are laying down the model right now for just how totalitarian you can get with this high tech grid.
And it's only a matter of how far the technology is implemented.
It's all there already.
Yeah, but but keep in mind, there was a top FBI official who recently testified to Congress, Kimberly Del Greco, she told Congress that facial recognition technology is critical to preserve our nation's freedoms, ensure our liberties are protected, and preserve our security.
She did not offer China as an example.
No, I guess not.
But you know, I read a thing in the New York Times last week, about how Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it's totalitarian and everything.
But man, it's really great.
We should really be more like this in there, you know?
Oh, it's it's obvious.
You know, another thing that's coming up with this is, you know, what Maryland has done, what other states can do is claim that, okay, so we decide we need more information.
If you don't provide it quickly, we're going to cancel your driver's license.
And what they could do is do the same thing for DNA samples.
Now, just last, a week or two ago, Justice Department announced it was going to start collecting DNA from anyone detained at the US border that includes US citizens.
That's almost a million people per year.
And it's laying the groundwork for to collect a whole lot more people's DNA, man.
You know, it's just there's too much stuff going on for anybody to organize effective opposition to any of this.
It just keeps coming and coming and coming.
The bar keeps well lowered or goalposts moved, you know?
Yeah, well, I mean, not only that, but the rules of the game keep changing.
And, you know, it's there is a lot of stuff coming out in the surveillance abuse in the last couple of months.
But all we're hearing about is frickin impeachment in Russia.
And it's like to see, you know, to see the the caliber of the the arguments that members of Congress are making.
I mean, it's one absurdity after another.
It's like foreign aid is going to keep us safe.
And it's like, you know, yeah, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn.
I'll sell you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was just that one the other day about well, I guess a few weeks ago now, the FBI, which any of us would have guessed about this.
And maybe this had been reported in other places already.
But about the FBI's abuse of the NSA's database there, where the FBI is trolling through the NSA's haul more than the NSA is even.
And then doing their parallel reconstruction to trump up cases against people and stuff.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's interesting thinking back to that.
That's what the DEA set up this huge phone, you know, surveillance system where they kept track of all the phone calls between the U.S. and 100 other nations starting in the early 1990s.
And that was exposed after Stoughton's leaks.
And people said, well, gee, that's that's that's kind of too much.
Nothing else happened.
I mean, it's like people people are way too tolerant of this kind of bullshit.
So.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, when it comes to the spying and stuff like that, I mean, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is a felony statute.
It's the kind of thing where if we enforced it against these government officials, you'd be talking about locking thousands of people in prison.
You know, any real.
You know, application of the quote unquote law where it really applies to the same government that applies it to us all day would result in catastrophe, right?
You would have to lock up the Congress, lock up half the bureaucrats in the executive branch or more sick, half of them on the other half for all the rights are violating all day.
Yeah.
I don't know how many people that you'd have to lock up, but I mean, the thing that the government and the courts have almost always done is treated, treated federal illegal surveillance as a as a harmless error.
And it doesn't hurt the government.
So, you know, let's just move along.
It's sort of like a really biased football referee.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and it is true because there's no accountability because if there was, it would be from the Congress.
And so that's the end of that argument.
And otherwise, executive branch, they can just continue on and nobody's there to stop them because they're them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's it's sort of funny.
I was I was listening to Congressman Schiff today going on and on about how terrible it was that Trump was, you know, that Trump was trying to get, you know, Trump was using his power to do it, to target somebody for investigation.
I'm kind of thinking, yeah, it's too bad you don't have the same care about federal agencies doing that because there's so many arbitrary, unjustified investigations.
But you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just little people.
That's a different story.
That's it.
That's it.
You know, they don't have lunch with the Washington Post editorial board.
Right.
And by the way, if you were a congressman, you'd be scared of the death of the Justice Department, too.
He's not immune from them, you know.
Yeah.
Well, there was yeah.
There was a great comment 49 years ago from Hale Boggs, congressman, the number two guy in the House of Representatives, who talked about the pervasive fear of the FBI on Capitol Hill.
And maybe there is not pervasive fear now, or maybe there there is and people don't talk about it.
I don't know.
But, you know, a lot of these congressmen have been very intimidated.
Yeah.
Well, and because anything they do or say can be turned into a felony by the DOJ if they want to.
Just like any of us.
It's really a thing that there's that book Three Felonies a Day, where if you get out of bed, you're in violation of some serious regulations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Excellent book by Harvey Silverblatt.
I haven't.
I've never gotten to it.
But I know he's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hell of a good lawyer.
Hell of a good writer.
Yeah.
You know, I'm pretty sure I might be conflating different stories around or something, Jim.
It's been a long time.
I'm pretty sure it was the FBI agent in my taxi cab way back when essentially said and this is sort of a cliche.
It's been said before that, well, you see that guy right there?
I could come up with something and put him in prison for 25 years.
That essentially just pick somebody at random.
And an FBI agent has the power to essentially do whatever they want with a regular Joe.
If you're connected, you got a lot of money or you got politicians in your family or something like that.
It might not be as easy.
But if you're just some random guy on the sidewalk, they can just disappear your ass if they're having a bad day.
That's it.
Yeah.
I don't think it's that bad.
And I don't think the FBI could do that to almost anybody.
But there are a lot of folks.
This is something which libertarians should pay attention to, because the feds have already done a number of efforts to target libertarian groups or kind of fringe groups or radicals, whatever.
There've been all kinds of sting operations.
There was a big one in Arizona around 95, 96.
And something like that could happen again at any point, especially if there's someone who's advocating violence.
It's like, yeah, well, that's a great idea.
Or if there's someone who folks have reason to assume that recently did a plea bargain and maybe as part of their plea bargain, they're going to have to bring a couple other scalps in to make the prosecutor look good.
So you always got to be worried about folks who did a plea bargain.
Yeah.
All right.
So listen, the last time we talked, the whole thing in Virginia was still in the future and was coming to a head here.
And it turns out that if I understand the story right, Jim, that they withdrew the bill to try to ban the AR-15, which even that was going to have it grandfathered in, but they didn't even mess with that.
But they did go ahead and pass, what, four or five other bills, which the governor has promised to sign if he hadn't signed them yet.
But then you had this huge rally the other day with, you tell me how many tens of thousands of people were there, if you know, the vast majority of whom were unarmed, some of whom brought guns, but nobody who did, you know, nobody did anything violent whatsoever.
Of course, it was just they were there to express their rights as citizens in the democracy and all that.
And to threaten political action, you know, in terms of voting next time and that kind of deal.
And I know the governor must have been really disappointed that there was no big crisis to exploit there.
But I wonder, you know, what is your overall take of the rally and the results of that or what you think the results of that might be there?
Well, it's a very positive rally.
You had tens of thousands of people show up and they were, you know, well behaved.
So part of, I think part of the reason that they didn't have trouble is that the state of Virginia has a mask law for protesters.
And so it'd make it a lot more difficult for Antifa to come in and start attacking people.
And which could have, you know, that's something we've seen a lot of different places where the small amount of attacks spirals out of control.
And I was wary about how this would play out because it was two and a half years ago in Charlottesville where you had the Charlottesville police who basically caused a violent confrontation by pushing the two sides together and doing that intentionally.
You had a boatload of state police there who also failed to take reasonable steps to prevent violence.
So it's kind of, you're kind of waiting to see what the state government does there.
But the, but the gun owners of Virginia stood up and made their voices loud and clear and came across as reasonable as far as what I've heard.
I wasn't there, but no, a very impressive, I don't know how it's going to play out.
I mean, it's certainly made the Washington Post editorial page unhappy.
So, you know, they've, you know, those folks have got my deepest condolences.
Yeah.
I'm scared about making them mad though, you know, they could start a war.
They can certainly encourage the, you know, well, this is another reason that, you know, which we've got a bomb.
Yeah.
So, I mean, this is one of the paradoxes of the whole impeachment thing.
I mean, if you ask a place like the Washington Post editorial page, almost any president presumably has a right to bomb practically any country on any pretext.
But if you're going to delay foreign aid, whoa, that's impeachable.
Yeah.
Holding up an arms deal as Andrew Coburn put it.
That's a nice way to put it.
Very nice.
Very nice phrasing.
Yeah.
But now really, so when it comes to the gun issue there in Virginia, well, I'm interested.
Did you see any reports?
Did the Antifa guys even show up at all for this thing?
I saw stuff ahead of time.
People were sending me stuff ahead of time.
So I don't know.
No guns, no revolution guys.
So if you're that far to the left, you kind of need to be good on the gun issue, don't you think?
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't see the fight, but.
Right.
Don't know.
I mean, I've been chasing other rabbits this week, so I haven't paid as much attention to it as I otherwise would have.
But it seemed like a very positive rally.
Yeah.
Well, and I wonder what's going to happen with that.
I think that, I don't know the demographics exactly how it breaks down in Virginia, but it seems like it really is a 50-50 split of these couple of urban centers and then everybody else.
And so, well, they do have to trade off in power, don't they?
It's yeah, the state's trending blue.
But if you look at the homicide statistics, I mean, they are mostly in certain areas and it's not the rednecks in Southwest Virginia accounting for most of the gun killings.
Yeah.
Well, gun control isn't going to help that anyway, even if that's their belief.
You can see how all that does is lead to worse enforcement and the compromising of the safety of the law abiding citizens of those cities.
The whole thing is crazy.
I mean, if there's a problem of gun violence in Virginia, in those cities, that's where they need to legalize guns the most.
Everybody knows that.
Yeah, well, I mean, there's, it's, yes, I mean, it's a mess.
It's a mess, but the politicians are being profoundly dishonest and they're basically talking about how the peaceful gun owners are the real threat, you know, because they've got bad attitudes or because, you know, you know, it might be that they've got this or that on their AR-15.
And so, oh my goodness, that's almost a terrorist, a terrorism attack in practice.
So, so much dishonesty and ignorance on the gun issue here.
It's sad.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, I'm glad that it turned out nice.
No agent provocateurs, no trouble.
And you know, certainly a giant segment of the population making their voices heard in numbers that I think on pretty much any issue really do count when it comes to state government politics, whichever state you're in to be confronted with a rally of that size of people of that level of conviction.
So right.
And a lot of those folks travel a long way for that rally.
I mean, I would not say that there were not any agent provocateurs, but if they were successful, we didn't hear about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a better way to put it.
Nothing.
Nothing got out of hand there.
All right.
Well, anyway, listen, I'm sorry I got to go.
I'm late for the next one here, but I really appreciate your time, Jim.
And I hope everyone will go read this great piece, how Washington is ramming real ID down our throats at the American Conservative Magazine, full of links to evidence for all of his important assertions in this thing.
It's a really well done piece and I appreciate all your time as always, Jim.
Hey, thanks so much, Scott.
Keep up the great work.
All right, you guys, Jim Bovard, TheAmericanConservative.com.
Oh, and JimBovard.com.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, AntiWar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
