Not Even RFK Jr. Wanted to Come to This Vegas Convention of Anti-Vaxxers and ‘Free Speech’ Brands

There’s nothing unusual about throwing a convention in Las Vegas. But RePlatform Vegas, held at the Horseshoe hotel on the Strip this past weekend, was remarkable in its very premise: the event aimed to gather influencers and brands fixated on the problem of perceived censorship and “cancel culture,” giving them a public stage on which they could describe to an admiring audience all the ways they’ve supposedly been silenced.

But it wasn’t always clear what attendees wanted to accomplish by airing familiar grievances about the consequences of expressing or amplifying controversial views. Even the organizational logic of the conference was somewhat muddled, with speakers delivering a hodgepodge of medical misinformation, Bitcoin hype, alt-tech pitches, attacks on mainstream media, sermons evangelizing Christian banking services, warnings of population collapse, and predictions of a “national divorce.” Walking from the casino floor into the conference as it began, the first thing I overheard was a woman falsely proclaiming to another attendee that the Covid-19 vaccine has the same effect on the human body as HIV. He readily agreed.   

All these concepts were meant to fall under the umbrella topic of the so-called parallel economy, a term describing conservatives’ efforts to establish and support un-woke businesses instead of the big corporations they regard as nauseatingly liberal. The result was more anemic than cohesive, however, in part because scheduled keynote speaker Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had pulled out following a February article from Mother Jones. The piece noted that another RePlatform speaker, Lonnie Passoff, president of financial services providers Green.Money and GabPay, the latter being the payment system of the far-right social media network Gab, had endorsed antisemitic comments on a prominent conspiracist’s streaming show. (Kennedy’s team did not respond to a request for comment on his reason for canceling his appearance. Passoff did not respond to a request for comment on whether he felt his remarks led to Kennedy dropping out; his own presentation with GabPay chief operations officer Dan Eddy, “We Will Not Be Debanked,” apparently went on without incident.)

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Multiple vendors dropped out after RFK, Jr. did, and RePlatform CEO David Ragsdale subsequently announced the conference was parting ways with Stripe, its original payments processor, because the company was temporarily withholding money from ticket sales that they needed to produce the event. (On its site, the company says it typically places reserves, or temporary holds, on clients’ funds “to ensure that when a customer initiates a refund or chargeback, the customer can receive their funds in a timely manner.”) Ragsdale further claimed in a statement that “a significant number of incoming registrations were lost at the point-of-payment due to Stripe’s disruptive actions,” meaning that “RePlatform is pivoting from a mass event to an intimate gathering.” Stripe does not comment on specific users but has a policy of “limited or restricted” support in highly regulated industries including “pharmaceuticals or medical devices,” and any business that it regards as high-risk.

Barely more than a dozen exhibitors set up booths at the downscaled RePlatform convention, and these displays included dubious wellness novelties like a skateboard-like vibration plate meant to burn calories while strengthening your legs, as well as a zippered sauna bag that bathes the occupant in heat generated with “far infrared energy.” There was also a woman advertising on-the-spot “facelifts” through an ambiguous “emotional trauma release technique” that evidently involved some kind of inner breakdown, as it caused at least one woman to break out into sobs. Attendance was sparse, and ballroom panels — often falling behind schedule — drew about 75 people at most. Examples of cancelation or authoritarian suppression sometimes bordered on the ridiculous, as when Judith Horvath, an entrepreneur and rancher who works on regenerative agriculture through her consultancy Fair Hill Farm, complained that the sale of raw milk is restricted or illegal in some states.

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“The conference is okay,” says John Johnson, CEO of Patmos, a cloud-computing platform that positions itself as an alternative to censorious, privacy-invading Big Tech. He tells Rolling Stone that the proceedings were lacking in “order” and “vision.” While the eclectic nature of RePlatform is a positive feature insofar as “you meet all kinds of people and you’re open to new things and new ideas,” he adds, “usually conferences have some sort of direction.”

“If we’re talking about replatforming, that implies a foundation, so what is the foundation of that movement?” Johnson asks. It’s a question that seems to permeate discussion of RePlatform, which aims to become an annual parallel-economy summit, as overlapping themes — Christianity, belief in Big Pharma conspiracies, and libertarian attitudes toward government oversight — struggle to find some kind of synthesis.

Johnson represents the digital infrastructure element of the equation along with Sean Tarrio, a managing partner of MARK37 (the name is a reference to the Bible verses Mark 3:7-8 but also happens to resemble the word “market”), a retail hub for secure “ghost” phones and laptops that can’t be accessed or monitored by tech companies, as well as gadgets including “anti-spy mic blockers,” and tools for detecting secret cameras. “If Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are the ones that control your device,” he says, “what’s going to prevent them from saying, ‘We don’t agree with what you’re saying, it’s part of the wrongthink’ and just turning off the device?” Asked for an example of one of these corporations remotely shutting off a customer’s phone or computer because of their personal views, Tarrio instead argues that mainstream tech is peddling a “narrative” to convince the American public “that our government is what gives us our rights and our sovereignty.”

Because RePlatform had been unable to hold the convention on Stripe’s terms, GabPay, the payment processor affiliated with Gab, a known haven for neo-Nazis, stepped in to salvage the forum of “uncancelable” figures. In addition to taking over the convention’s sales transactions, it was featured as a “national sponsor,” with perks that carried a price tag of $50,000, per RePlatform’s website. Dan Eddy, GabPay’s COO, tells Rolling Stone he’s focused on ensuring that major tech players and banks don’t exert undue influence on individuals’ speech, raising the Stripe vs. RePlatform dispute as a pertinent example.

The more eyebrow-raising case Eddy cites is that of the white nationalist website VDARE, which Stripe cut loose in February, leaving GabPay to sign them as a new customer. “It was a real simple proposition,” Eddy says. What it came down to, in his mind, was whether GabPay was exposed to a risk of chargebacks arising from VDARE failing to fulfill refunds on request. He looked at their accounting and decided it was sound. “I don’t care about reputational risk,” he explains, claiming that Stripe had dropped the site “purely because of what they were saying.”

When reputational risk is a concern, right-wing brands may turn to Beck & Stone, a brand consultancy that touts its “deliberate pursuit of beauty and wisdom.” On Friday, founding partner Andrew Beck tells Rolling Stone that he’s been busy putting out fires for the Claremont Institute. The conservative think tank has made headlines lately for its role in fomenting outrage over diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. But Beck hints that another story will drop soon. (Sure enough a Guardian exposé published Monday revealed that the organization’s president and another senior official are closely linked to Society for American Civic Renewal, or SACR, a men-only fraternal group that aims for national “renewal” by bringing an autocratic Christian nationalist regime to power.)

Beck recalls that he was an ordinary Madison Avenue suit for years before realizing that the right-wing intellectual movement, with its underexposed culture and political publications, was a niche market with strong potential. “What they were missing was, you know, things like websites, social media profiles,” he says. “The firm started as very tactical, very practical,” helping these clients with graphic design and optimizing their Google search rankings. He was surprised when a former colleague warned him that he was “legitimizing dangerous ideas,” whereas Beck saw himself as merely making his clients “look more professional.” In the decade since he opened his firm, he says, “seeing the ideas and reading them and meeting the people, I kind of found my place in it.”

Malcolm and Simone Collins, founders of Pronatalist.org — you may remember them as the subjects of a viral Telegraph piece last year on couples “breeding to save mankind” from an anticipated population crash, a project that critics describe as eugenicist — take a similar line when describing their embrace of conservatism. Their foundation works to promote fertility planning, reproductive technology, resources for parents and political policies that incentivize having children. Referring to themselves as “media whores,” the pair say they have gravitated to the right because that’s where their messaging has resonated. “People have tried to start left-leaning or totally neutral pro-natalist advocacy groups,” Malcolm says, “and it’s a bit like trying to start a totally politically neutral [anti-]global warming organization. You can say you’re politically neutral, but the media on one side is just going to attack you relentlessly, your staff is going to be overwhelmingly one political orientation, and then you get pushed further and further and further until you’re just like, screw it, okay, we’re a right organization.”

That effect plays to the parallel economy model, according to Simone. “To keep a pronatalist culture, you have to keep your children within your culture and heritage,” she says, and that creates the necessity for alternative schooling and “independent industry,” away from what the Collinses refer to as the “urban monoculture.” In fact, Simone claims, in-group dating services like Christian Mingle and JDate aren’t even enough to promote higher fertility among religious demographics, and Pronatalist.org is “looking at alliances to create arranged marriages and dating markets — this is how off the grid they need to go to protect their culture.” Collins, currently expecting her fourth child, is running to represent the family’s district in the Pennsylvania state legislature, and says her campaign will stand for “cultural sovereignty.”

“Sovereign” and “sovereignty” are popular buzzwords at RePlatform, a shorthand for independence from norms imposed by the political and corporate establishment. No wonder, then, that among the convention’s biggest stars are prominent anti-vaxxers, some of them staying over from the Covid Litigation conference held at the Horseshoe on Thursday and Friday (it was put on by Defeat the Mandates, an activist group for which RePlatform CEO David Ragsdale is director of operations). Among the fiercest vaccine critics to speak at both events was tech millionaire Steve Kirsch, who went from funding research into off-label usage of FDA-approved drugs like hydroxychloroquine for treating Covid to making apocalyptic, unfounded declarations that the vaccines have caused thousands of deaths. His anti-vax group Vaccine Safety Research Foundation was an exhibitor at both events.

“The shot causes turbo-cancers,” Kirsch says at an “UnCancelled Fireside Chat” on Friday. “It’s just a super large range of symptoms — you can die from bleeding in the brain. You can die from aneurysms, you can die from heart attacks, cardiac arrest.” (“Turbo-cancers,” or fast-growing cancers purportedly caused by vaccination, are a popular anti-vax myth.) On stage with Kirsch is Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, an ear, nose, and throat specialist facing a hearing next month before the Texas Medical Board over her attempt to prescribe ivermectin to an ICU patient at a Fort Worth hospital; a Houston hospital had previously suspended her for spreading vaccine misinformation, and her subsequent $25 million lawsuit against it was dismissed. Moderating the conversation is David Sley, founder of Hestia Tobacco, a cigarette brand with cult hipster status in scenes like New York’s Dimes Square.

Kirsch lists a few of the social media sites where he’s been banned, including LinkedIn, Medium, and Twitter, which twice gave him the boot, except he’s active again on the since-rebranded X, where platform rules are enforced arbitrarily — if at all. “When Elon Musk took over Twitter, I found myself resurrected,” he says. “I felt a little bit like Jesus coming back after being killed twice. Whereas Jesus only got killed once.” In a later interview with Rolling Stone, Kirsch says he is “a little bit” disappointed that RFK, Jr. bailed on the convention and describes what total victory for the anti-vaccine movement would look like: courtroom wins in actions like the $250 million suit he is currently threatening against the publisher of a medical journal that retracted a paper he co-authored on the alleged dangers of the vaccine (a review found it misrepresented data and drew conclusions without evidence), plus a complete overhaul of the medical establishment. 

“Changing laws, for example, to make it impossible for people to mandate vaccines anymore,” says Kirsch, who has a habit of smirking a bit when conjuring anecdotes about people he believes died from the jab. “Change the law to enforce transparency of medical information so that people know what the truth is, instead of keeping it hidden since the beginning of time. You know, that would be nice.” He’d also like an “admission from the CDC that the vaccines actually killed more people than they saved.” These ambitions seem to go well beyond anything that a parallel economy or alt-tech platforms can achieve, as he acknowledges. “It doesn’t fundamentally solve the engagement problem, because the other side refuses to engage,” he says. Kirsch, who continues to freely and prolifically share anti-vax misinformation on his X and Substack accounts, received the vaccine before he developed his current opinion of them, but says he has mitigated any potential harms with “detox protocols” that involve enzyme supplements like nattokinase and bromelain.

If all this seems a bit dreary for a Las Vegas event, rest assured that RePlatform had a party element: at an “Astral Ball” on an upper floor of the Horseshoe with a view of the Sphere on Friday night, attendees donned evening wear and Eyes Wide Shut masks that, of course, left mouths and pointed, Viking-style beards (too many of these to count) well exposed. While the majority of revelers waited in a long line to be served by an overworked bartender, some deigned to wander closer to a stage where a succession of readers tried to provide entertainment that never quite landed. One offered what he characterized as a Dean Martin-type roast of banks; another rhapsodized about how Vegas was “cleaner” in the days when it was run by the mafia.

Saturday night’s function is more successful, yet still a bit awkward: the red-carpet premiere of Plandemic: The Musical, filmmaker Mikki Willis’ capstone to a trilogy of viral “documentaries” that have spread false claims about Covid and the vaccines to millions. On hand to sign posters of AI-generated imagery are the cast of the 20-minute video, including conservative YouTuber JP Sears (his Rebel Lion T-shirts and supplements on sale at tables nearby) and Judy Mikovits, the discredited research scientist interviewed in the original Plandemic.

“I would love to move on entirely from this genre of work,” Willis tells Rolling Stone ahead of the screening. “I wish the world was in a place where I knew that the future was secure for my children.” But “we’re just not in that position yet,” he says. Willis reveals that he’s in the process of producing four different films at the moment, and one will tackle environmental issues. Given his résumé, you might figure him for a climate denier — not so. “The climate is absolutely changing,” he says. “Humans contribute to that, all living things contribute to that. What I am opposed to is the way that the climate has been politicized, terrorizing our young people so much that they’re vowing to never have children,” he explains, echoing the Collinses concerns of a depopulation crisis.

Like a couple of others at the conference, Willis expresses mild amazement that his interview concludes without any “gotcha question.” I tell him, truthfully, that I was only hoping to hear his perspective. He calls this “refreshing.” It’s hard to dismiss the sense that a distorted view of the “liberal media” has conditioned many in this orbit to expect a fiery confrontation with an outside reporter instead of journalistic curiosity. It’s a misapprehension that seems to reflect their flawed framing of the war against Covid precautions, which they’ve already won but continue to fight as though it were 2020. Plandemic: The Musical, for instance, shows people in a grocery store liberating themselves from face masks, a fantasy that depends on the premise that anyone is still forcing you to wear one.

One wonders, too, what value RFK, Jr. could have added to a convention of proudly unvaccinated people acting like they’ve been canceled in any meaningful sense — besides bigger crowds, that is. During the Plandemic red carpet photoshoot, as I’m hovering near the empty booth with a sign for Kennedy’s anti-vax organization Children’s Health Defense, an attendee notices my media badge and walks over to chat. This is Jesse Simpson, founder and CEO of Abundance Codes, a “5-D” financial services company.    

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“I like freedom,” he says when asked why he bought a vendor spot at RePlatform, and came to meet like-minded entrepreneurs. The low turnout, he says, has not been ideal. He shows me the convention hall map that persuaded him to sign up — it’s another, much larger hall, packed with as many as a hundred tables. With a sad shake of his head, Simpson says he wasn’t even alerted in advance that RePlatform would have to relocate to a smaller venue, discovering as much only when he arrived to set up shop in our meager surroundings. His experience may represent the most significant problem for the parallel economy overall: just because you build it doesn’t mean anyone will come.