Replatform A Conference Fighting the Virus with David Ragsdale

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We chat with Replatform conference organizer David Ragsdale about the emerging parallel/freedom economy arising due to woke cancel culture and government overreach. Topics include the diverse mix of disaffected groups converging (social conservatives, libertarians, ex-Dem health freedom advocates), false historical view of corporations as right-wing, mechanics of cancellation methodologies and triggers, looming systemic collapse irrespective of politics, intergenerational investment in ideological camps, and why clusters of hucksters signal the shape of the future.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I keep wondering is when are we going to be able to talk about, like, what the science has actually said about Special K's post Special K?

David Ragsdale: Good news. Good news. There is, there's always a lag, right? And so the Google gods who, who control a lot of what we can talk about on your show on this channel, there's probably going to be a lag, but today in the journal of medical ethics, there was this peer reviewed paper and I'll send it to you. By these six Dutch researchers that looked into the scapegoating did not take the interventions and their conclusions were it was misinformation to scapegoat them because the pandemic risks were overstated and the efficacy of the intervention was also overstated.

Number two, the media. created this misinformation. Three, the disinformation is incredibly [00:01:00] harmful. And the fourth thing they looked at who was doing the scapegoating and by and large, it was liberals. And they looked at it by ideology and that people on the right were not scapegoating, even if they had had the intervention, they refused to scapegoat.

Liberals were the ones who were doing that. So I, you know, we have a lot of liberals in our movement and it's been very difficult I think for them and I feel for them, but there's something about this. Like all encompassing liberalism that we are told we live under and it doesn't really appear to be the thing itself.

Well, it's

Malcolm Collins: interesting that you say that. I'm actually interested to see if this video gets flagged in a way or something like that. Because I don't know if we're allowed to say this yet. Like, I, I genuinely don't know. That's not the only study that shows that we were, there's actually been a number of, of pretty good studies that just do not [00:02:00] agree with the mainstream narrative.

David Ragsdale: Always follow the advice of the medical experts as acknowledged by the Alphabet Corporation and their subsidiaries.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello everyone. We're super excited to be joined today by David Ragsdale. He is the CEO of Replatform, and he's also the Chief Operating Officer of Defeat the Mandate.

Operations Director. Operations Director, basically. Basically. But yeah, you do. So you do ops and to be the mandates. And we, we met you as you were organizing the replatform conference, which is going to be happening in Vegas in April. Well, no, in March, March of next year of 2024. We're super excited for that because we're, we're intrigued.

Like we, We have been through all these different angles approaching different, like sort of alternative economies, alternative cultures, like ways around the mainstream, because of course the pandemic had sort of been like a crisis of [00:03:00] faith moment that, that was like the death knell on top of, I think the crisis of faith that happened in 2016.

So like when Trump was first elected, I think a lot of people were like. Wait a second. Like I was prompt, like it was, it was, it was very clear that like Hillary Clinton was going to win and that things were going to be a certain way. And then like that completely went off the rails. And then, and then also like there was just this crisis of faith in the media after that.

And then of course, with the pandemic that happened again, it's like, wait, you told us that masks weren't important. And then he told us that they were important and that it turned out that they didn't do anything at all, unless they were fitted and 95s. So anyway, We feel like this has been a growing movement, but also it's so fragmented.

It's so confusing. I don't like people don't know where to go. So we really want to talk about that. I mean, among other things, though,

Malcolm Collins: before we go further, I do want to, I mean, I think the history of the conference is also really useful to our audience in understanding what it's about. So it was originally.

The when you research us about us, the alternative economies are parallel economies. With the idea being that as this sort of [00:04:00] mimetic virus that we talk about, it's much more than woke ism. It's like this broad thing that's in almost every major company right now becomes wider. If you are immune to it, the system spits you out and makes it very hard to work.

And so the primary way to compete with the system is through parallel economies or parallel information networks or parallel all sorts of things like this. And then as the conference evolved, sort of the way that I describe it to people when I pitch it to people is I'm like, it's trying to become like a what's the name?

I'm looking here like comic con, except instead of launching marvel movies, it's where they launched the movies that the mainstream media is going to freak out about.

David Ragsdale: Yeah, that's so originally, so when we were making defeat the mandates our first rally at the Lincoln Memorial in January of 2021, we were debunked Right.

And that was sort of a shocker debate. So we, we [00:05:00] actually had good relations with the Biden administration. They approved our, our permit to be on the Lincoln Memorial. Within hours, and then I think they were probably bending over backwards because the mandates were really heavy and hot at that time, obviously.

So they were probably trying to create a space. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so we had no problem with the federal government. They were, you know, like, here, take the link memorial and we'll give you this and we'll give you that. So it was pretty easy to physically organize defeat the mandates. And remember, we did it a year.

Yeah. After that January 2021 incident, we were nervous because we were aiming for January 2022 and we're like, Oh, is this going to be a problem? And it turned out not to be, but it was apparently a problem and I won't go into details or name names with our bank. And so we were debunked and we were obviously doing nothing illegal, nothing.

[00:06:00] Faithful, nothing violent. We had Democrats, Republicans, independents, but we lost our banking. We also lost a bunch of B2B services, our mass email, you know, so we were always screaming.

Simone Collins: Okay. Wait, did someone try to cancel you? Was this like someone just spamming? We were,

David Ragsdale: we were de platformed and it wasn't just.

Like a social media thing, a lot of different b2b services that, you know, my background, I worked at live nation on the festivals team. And you, you use, when you're making an event, you use a lot of these. Services, especially now, and

Malcolm Collins: this is something that I've increasingly noticed when I talk to people where they've genuinely been removed from all the platforms, they're removed from like major platforms.

One of the core reasons is they're talking about, I guess what I'll call for this podcast. So we don't get in trouble. It was during the special case here. The, the, the big K and everyone, during that period is, is, is where there was a [00:07:00] huge waves of de banking, de platforming, everything like that and what was demonstrated was the people in positions of power was in our society when they felt that they could, and whenever they tried to ban somebody with anything like this, they're like, we're saving lives.

So that's what they'll always go to is we're saving lives, we're saving lives. This is when they say, Oh, this person's being, you know, whatever ex phobic, they'll say they're inciting. You know, attacks against a person, they're inciting, whatever. But the evidence for that has always been fairly slim, historically speaking.

 november 20th was the Transgender Day of Remembrance, where we're supposed to remember the tragic deaths of trans people.

The White House Press Secretary gave us a hard number of this year's trans victims in the United States. Today, on Transgender Day of Remembrance, we grieve the 26 transgender Americans who were killed this year. Year after year, we see that these victims are disproportionately black women and women of color.

No [00:08:00] one should face violence, live in fear. Or be discriminated against simply for being themselves. Yeah, uh, 26. In a nation of 330 million people, where approximately 1% of them are trans, 26 of them were murder victims. That's a murder rate of 7e-05%. Considering that in 2022, there were approximately 21,000 homicide cases in the states.

With that 330 million population, the napkin math comes out to the general murder rate of America being, I think 0.006%. These are both incredibly tiny, so literally who cares, but trans people do seem to have a much smaller chance of being murdered. Rachel Richards, a conservative trans YouTuber, wrote a video titled, who's Killing Black transgender women.

In it, she points out that black trans women comprise 66% of the 202 cases of fatal violence against trans people in the United States from 2013 to 2020. The article she quotes ties the surge of black trans [00:09:00] victimization to the rise of white supremacy and the far right in America. But Rachel digs up the individual cases and discovers the vast majority of the murderers of these black trans women are actually black men.

All that being said, the Williams Institute did state that trans people are four times more likely than cis people to experience violent victimization, not including murder. Like rape, sexual assault, or aggravated assault. The numbers are 86. 2 trans victimizations per 1, 000 people versus victimizations.

Malcolm Collins: And so, as a result of not really having evidence that these people are actually inciting violence when Special K happened everyone Then was in this movement internally felt like now we can actually say they're killing people now we can actually say that this is leading and so we saw the way that they plan to act always as soon as they felt they had to power to act in that way, which was complete banning of people from [00:10:00] any sort of communication network, any sort of mainstream service.

I mean, we saw this was the trucker protests as well in Canada. Where they also have more control in the government's more control actual commie commies where they were debunking people who were associated with the trucker protests, they were banning them from all media appearances and stuff like that.

And I think that this is where for people like us who may have been more towards like fence sitters who may have been, I think generally people look at us and they're like, your politics feels a little moderate. And, and why are you so hard on the right side now, and it is because we saw what the left did the moment they felt like they had a little bit of authority, and they went just full totalitarian and, and we are moving, like if people think, This was a one time thing.

If you look at what they're saying, they want these special K powers, but [00:11:00] they want them all the time for anything they declare to be a potential issue. And they can declare anything to be a potential issue, really as long as they can claim it's hurting people in some way. And so this puts us in a position where it's like, we are genuinely.

Beginning to move to an autocratic framework without full state control, which is really fascinating that they are able to because they have so many operatives in the major banks in the major, you know, social media platforms in the major distributors in the major news sites, they can say, let's throttle.

This individual even without doing it directly from the perspective of the government, which is fascinating for me because we haven't seen this form of fascism before. Yeah.

David Ragsdale: So I mean, to give you to go back to one of your earlier questions and bring it in. So. So we really have three differing groups of people, right?

And so where I see that this [00:12:00] started is this actually started with social conservatives during the gay marriage debate. So you had prop eight, right? And a majority of Californians. In November of 2008, voted for Obama by something like 20 points and also voted against gay marriage and yet the media and corporations were able to turn that so if California's voting a majority on election day to support traditional marriage as opposed to gay marriage, it's not an extreme opinion.

But what happened is the media and more frightening corporations. Like Tim Cook at Apple, they turned that majority into a fringe minority, even though they were the majority. They said, we don't want anyone who voted for Prop 8 to be an Apple customer. Then what you had is the state of California, Kamala Harris.

And [00:13:00] as attorney general, a few years later, when they were working the case in courts to overturn it, they released anyone who had donated to property and people started getting fired up and down the state. So if you had, if you were not even, if you were a Mormon, if you were a Catholic, they started targeting businesses that were owned by people who donate and it was harassment, legal harassment.

And this was at. The behest of the state of California and these corporations and these activist groups, but no one talked about it at the time was happening. You know, people were like Brendan Eich is a great example. He lost his job because he, his company, because he had donated to Prop 8, but because it was gay marriage and no one really wanted to get on the wrong side of that, this whole wave of cancellations happened.

Pre Woke, right? Pre Ferguson.

Simone Collins: This is

David Ragsdale: wild. No, I mean, look it up. Brendan Eich, he's probably the most famous example of someone who got cancelled because of donating to Prop [00:14:00] 8. And no one said anything. And even the conservatives kept quiet about it. No one, it was not like hey, this is, you know, so when people talk about like woke and cancellation and Ferguson, my take on that is What we saw, like the wokeness was it was very simply black Democrats saying, we want that same thing that to the Democrat liberal establishment that you had just given the LGBT movement.

We want that we're a loyal constituency of the Democrat party, and we want that same thumb on the scale, that same cancellation power. That you just gave to LGBT Americans. We deserve that, too. So this wokeness, it had been in the background for many years because, you know, there had been a real incarceration explosion among Black male youth, but Democrats ignored it, [00:15:00] ignored it, ignored it. And finally, after the whole gay marriage thing, Black Democrats were like, no, you've just done this for another important group of yours.

You're now going to do it for us. And so that's where we saw wokeness really explode on a lot of the racial issues. But the, the beginning of that was really directed towards social conservatives. So that's a very long answer to say that's one of our core groups and they are actually the most patient.

They're the most calm because they've been in this. for a while. They've been denigrated, hated on, canceled for decades now. And so, our social conservative people in our movement are very patient people, and they're not very surprised by stuff, right? They're used to it, they're used to being against the world, and it sort of aligns with a lot of their theology.

This world is not our home. Right. Then we have another group of people like your libertarians, [00:16:00] your Ron Paul types, your crypto types. And they've sort of since the great financial recession of 2008 and all that stuff, they've been working on their finance, crypto, other things like that. And then the third big group are Democrats, right?

You're Robert Kennedy Democrats. Ah, okay. Big corporations are evil. Big pharma is especially evil. I remember what tobacco did in the seventies and eighties and we're a Democrat, but then they, this group of people like your health freedom and have big pharma people, they were buying into what the media was saying about the other groups, about the libertarians, about social conservatives, but what we, and, and a lot of them, when Trump got elected, believed a lot of the stuff that the media and corporations were.

But what happened is there was a convergence when the [00:17:00] 2020 medical thing, I know you're on YouTube. So I want to be very careful. I'll call it, you know, the medical, I

Malcolm Collins: like that, especially when special K happened.

David Ragsdale: Yeah. Yeah. So when that happened, there was a real convergence of these groups. And especially when the mandate started coming down.

And that really confused a lot of people in the health freedom movement, because they had thought, well, it will be okay for me not to take this medical intervention that's experimental because Trump did it. So I'll be fine. And as it turned out, the establishment. Turned on a dime and then started making them the enemy.

So a lot of these people who had never been really an enemy of the establishment in a way, even though they were very anti Big Pharma, now all of a sudden found themselves being in the same boat that social conservatives had been

Malcolm Collins: in. And to be clear, you know, a [00:18:00] lot of these people are like hippie types, like, like these are traditional and I think, you know, the, the story that you're saying here really rings true for me as individuals who on the outside, like, I do not think that the government should be legislating against gay marriage.

Like I would, you know, stand that. I think that. It is wrong. And it was a big shift in history. The idea of let's begin to fire people. Let's begin to target people's livelihood for their political beliefs and for what if you have pointed out is a mainstream political beliefs. It

David Ragsdale: was Obama's belief on election day of 20.

2008 Obama, he didn't make his term until right before the 2012 election. Right. So it was, but it was a, but he was obviously lying about it and everyone knew that he was obviously like, sure, I'll go to Saddleback church and to Rick Warren and tell him this. But everyone know, everyone really knows I'm lying.

[00:19:00] And so it was even worse than that because to get elected, they would say, I have this position. But really, anyone who actually does hold that position needs to be targeted. And again, whatever your views on gay marriage are. Right? Just like whatever your views on this medical intervention are, right? It's the fact that government and corporations and the media colluded to cancel people to remove their livelihoods from them.

So I'm

Malcolm Collins: going to push back here. I don't think Obama was lying. I think that the, the right has made the mistake of buying into the less propaganda and they fundamentally do not understand how homophobic and how racist. the left is and has always been. And that they believe this media narrative of homophobic, racist, right, non homophobic, non racist left.

And so they get confused when they look at the record and seeing things like

Obama's standing against gay [00:20:00] marriage.

I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.

With respect to gay marriage, I, uh, I do not support Uh, gay marriage,

Malcolm Collins: and they're like, wait, That doesn't ring with what I have been told and it is because the media establishment is what is steering a lot of this and it is what is steering a lot of these waves in a way that is incongruous with where the winds are actually blowing within each political party.

What it is is you have a fascist faction and a non fascist faction now. A faction that thinks that it should be able to control what people think and and, and exercise. any political will it wants to if people are not thinking and acting like members of their cultural group which is where I think things have stepped over the lines it was black lives matter.

I actually don't know if it was tied to the, the thing that happened with the LGBT movement at all. I think that they had begun to build up a. culture where it was okay to target people in this way, like this [00:21:00] just became normalized. This is what we do to people we hate. This is, you know, people we dislike.

We try to ruin their income streams. And then they began to target that within this, this movement. And the media had begun to become so far left, even like mainstream conservative media outlets. It had gotten used to just like lying or covering up, you know, the mostly peaceful protest line, right?

Like, oh, here's the mostly peaceful protest. And and, and they had done this, as you had said, with the other movement. And then they naturally did it with this movement because they just got so used to how much power they had. And they got so used to the belief within the leftist media that there is a rightist media that's opposing them.

And that illusion I think has made them act in a way that is more totalitarian than they would if they actually tried to find this rightist media they're aware of and they realize that no, this rightist media is actually like mostly banned from [00:22:00] social platforms now and there really are not too tight.

sides to the spectrum. There's this one side that controls most of the companies in the country, most of the political apparatus in the country, and most of the media organizations in this country. And then there's another side, which is almost entirely silenced at this point.

David Ragsdale: That's interesting. I look at, you know, I look, I'm obviously very interested or influenced by Avalon and Carlisle.

And, you know, I tend to think everything just is post hoc justification for whatever. You're, you know, you have a political formula and You know, my background, I did classics and economics at Claremont. So I tend to look at these things like more like, you know, we've essentially been living under like a wig patronage system since Queen Anne's time, elaborate.

And so it's, it's, It's just like, you know, if you look at like Google, the wig ascendancy

and realize that we've essentially been living under that for several hundred years, [00:23:00] elaborate,

Malcolm Collins: go deep. I want to hear conspiracy theories. It

David Ragsdale: just goes back to patronage and it just goes back to, and if you look at.

It's just always been a, a, a, a waiting room for losers and it's where anyone who the controlling liberal Right. It's, and it's all factional management for the establishment. So the liberal establishment, which everyone in an English speaking country essentially lives in, and most Western countries since World War II live in too there's always going to be a loser.

And so you just be like, okay, loser, you're now called a conservative. Go hang out there.

Malcolm Collins: That's fascinating. I got to push back strong here, and I think this is true, and it's backed by the evidence, which is if you look even just 25 years ago the conservative party had the large corporations on its [00:24:00] side.

It was the party of moneyed It was a party of success, a party of people who had been economically successful, and the large corporate institutions, whereas the progressive institution had the academic institutions and the bureaucratic institutions. What has changed is that now they're all on one side.

Do you disagree with that? I

David Ragsdale: do. Yeah. So if you go back, I mean, if you go back, even you can go back to the eighties. Go back to the seventies. You can go back to the sixties, fifties for right. The American corporations have always been incredibly progressive institutions, right? A lot of American corporations were even, it goes so far as to say we're even extremely supportive in many ways of the Bolshevik revolution and Lenin and Stalin and trying to get in contracts with there.

I know we only hear about. You know what IBM did in Germany in the mid century, but more corporations were involved in the Soviet Union. Not only that, but even if you go back to like, let's go back to Reagan's days. What you'll see is yeah, of course [00:25:00] Reagan Was a Democrat and he was a liberal in many ways, right?

Most ways. And he was not a, he didn't reform welfare. He didn't even cut discretionary spending. He was a supply center and all the Reagan revolution. And even Thatcher was a liberal. Their whole point. And they talk like, Oh, we need to reduce the size of state. None of that happened. And they didn't actually believe in it.

Their own, their only mission in life was, Hey, the way to pay for this is we cut taxes. That was their only formula, which is we actually like this big welfare as do corporations, right? Corporations love the great society corporations. All they didn't like were the high taxes. And so in what you when you saw corporations becoming close and they were never close on the social issues, even in the.

80s corporations were donating to Planned Parenthood and going in the newspapers and saying, well, I wish the Republican Party's was a little more, [00:26:00] you know, liberal, socially, fiscally conservative, right? They were, they were trying to spend that for decades. And, you know, this whole notion that these corporations.

It is true that these corporations have been getting increasing permission, right, to talk about things that they wouldn't normally have talked about, but that's not a function necessarily of their politics. It's a function of the taboo going away. Right. So there's no longer a taboo for corporations to tell customers, if you support this, don't you dare come to my shop.

And that's what Apple do. That's

Malcolm Collins: really interesting. Yeah.

David Ragsdale: Right. That's what Jim Cook said. He said, if you support this, don't come to my shop. And the way that this comes back to. Like this parallel or freedom economy. And we use both words interchangeably, frankly, [00:27:00] a lot of people haven't heard the word parallel economy and that tends to be an elite word.

And what we're doing at our trade show and convention is we're bringing together what you might call like the normies. In our three different groups with some of the elites, some of the thinkers, some of the doers, and we're trying to see what happens if we bring them together, right? And we think a lot of joyful things are going to happen, a lot of innovation, and there's going to be some good feedback on both sides, right?

Because I think one of the problems in our anti establishment movements is there's not always the best feedback loop between What our elites and we have our own elites, right? What we're doing, what we're saying, what we're messaging. And then, and then what the base, what, what it is that they actually need, what it is that they're [00:28:00] struggling with, right?

So that's what we're trying to do because we want to build like the parallel economy can be grifty. Right? Like if I see Bud Light, I'm going to be like, Oh, okay, I'm going to buy a bunch of unnamed beer at wholesale and I'm going to buy a sticker that says not woke and I'm going to slap it on that beer and I'm going to get on Twitter and I'm going to try to push it and people are going to be like, Oh, I want to buy that non woke beer.

Beer, but it's like, I don't know the quality. I don't know the price. I don't know where it came from. And that's a little grifty. Our parallel economy has to be more than just like the veneer of anti woke marketing. Yeah. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I definitely see this. I mean, I think this is what we saw was like true social and stuff like that.

Was the idea of it's an exclusionary marketplace rather than like we'll, we'll just create a marketplace for the people who have been kicked out of the other marketplace. And if you look at what we're trying to do as a Collins Institute, we've taken a very different approach. [00:29:00] when we launch it, which is we want to create an educational system that is not for people who are afraid to send their kids to the public school, but that is inarguably better than these existing institutions.

And I think that that's easier to do than the grifters would have you believe because the existing institutions have become so wracked with ideological. purity wardens and with bureaucratic bloat that it should not be difficult to create a product that outcompete for them. You just have to really approach it that way.

And yeah, and this is something that I like that you're going into this conference fielding for and vetting

David Ragsdale: for. Yeah, and we have two. So there are two, a little bit competing models of the parallel economy, and we are not deciding on which one we're going to feature both. And it's based on something you said.

There's a access model where we want to build like and I hate to use this, [00:30:00] Because I've just attacked the whole wig model, but it's called the classical liberal model, right? Where you're like, Hey, I just want to buy a pair of jeans. Stop talking to me about abortion or about mandates. Just sell me the stupid jeans, right?

That's one model of the parallel economy. So it would be like access to all it's not promoting any values. It's decentralized. Usually it's. Not neutral, but it doesn't promote anything more than the product itself, right? That's one model. There's also a second model, which is very much values aligned.

Where you're saying, and this works better for some products than others. For example, a pro life diaper company, right? The CEO of Public Square, Michael Seifert. I'm not pronouncing that way. His wife came out with this pro life diaper company. Now, to me, a values, but that makes sense, right? That [00:31:00] values alignment for that product makes sense to me, right?

It doesn't always make sense, but on some things you have people Often social conservatives, but not all we also see this in the health freedom movement where if you did not take that intervention and you were attacked for it, you are probably more likely to want to purchase health goods and services from people who share your values on that issue, right?

But on other things, like maybe some tech things and some financial things, maybe you don't want values aligned. You actually want products or goods or services where it's all about neutrality of access, right? It's a mixed bag and there's a lot of debate in the parallel economy about that. And we're not taking a side on that.

We're going to have people from both [00:32:00] sides. There's probably going to be a lot of heated discussion about it at the convention, which makes

Simone Collins: it way more fun. So, so one thing I'm actually curious about when it comes to like people being shoved out of the, the mainstream economy and sort of forced into parallel economies.

Personally, I've, I've only encountered. To people who've told me about how it's, it's been and in each case they were specifically targeted by either one group or one person. And that one group or one person is the one responsible for like shopping them around and basically sending this like form letter to all of their banks, every new employer, like every existing employer, you know, this person did this, this, and this, like these crimes against our culture, you know, how dare you have them with you, you must remove them.

And. For example, like, well, one of these people preempts this and lets every new employer or contractor, like, no, like, you're going to get this letter from this person just heads up. And whereas like this other person, another [00:33:00] person that we know this happened to just like literally just removed himself.

So my impression is that often, like, it's this really weird situation where like everyone on the receiving end of these messages, who's part of woke or mainstream culture is just going to comply. But then it's actually a very small number of people or actors in the world that like we'll, we'll take the time to remove these people.

When you got unbanked How could you say that

Malcolm Collins: it won't go broke? Like, it's not actually a big audience that they're appealing to. It's just the perception of a big audience The very squeaky wheel. Which is that people who don't have jobs or, or, or friends or other things going on have more time to make a stink online.

Simone Collins: However Are you seeing this happen in different ways? Because I also think that people should know a little bit more about, like, the mechanics of how this happens, because I think this is going to happen to more and more people. People should know the signs to look out for, know how to preempt it, or what to expect.

When you were unbanked for the Lincoln Memorial rally do you think it was one group? Do you know who it was? Or do you think that the impetus actually came from [00:34:00] banks and other providers directly? Like, from within them?

David Ragsdale: That's a good question. So we were definitely the target of I, you know, I'm, I think we were in the Twitter files as defeat the mandates.

We were suspended several times from under the old regime on Twitter. We were. It was funny. We, it's really mixed bag because I do feel that on the one hand, we were targeted by a lot of these Twitter, um, COVID doctors, right. Where they got a lot of prominence and they got a lot of very suspicious amplification, and I'll just say that during the 2020 medical global emergency.

And so we were definitely targeted by them. But, and I will say this, and we weren't given a fair shake by the major media, but in their own way, I think [00:35:00] we did get a little bit lucky in that we, we presented ourselves in such a way as to make it very difficult for like a New York Times reporter to just hate on us.

Like in everything we did, we put like everything, like we have people from all parties, we have people from all vaccination status. We have people from, you know, we, we did do, I think, a good job of making it hard to be. And so we got a lot of backhanded positive coverage from like the media, which is odd, right?

So, and this, so it's hard to say like, and as a group, we weren't targeted by like certain groups that now go around. Telling Elon, they're targeting him. We've never been targeted in that way, but we didn't get to bank [00:36:00] so, and we weren't really told why, and for us, because of the period of time we were in, we didn't have the energy to like, we just had to find a new bank.

We just had to, we just had to roll with it. And it's just one of those things that we're like, okay, we're going to note that that happened. And again, when we were making, we also produced the COVID litigation conferences. And when we did that, a couple of things happened as well with like these B2B services, where we couldn't use like the best option because we just because of the name of our conference, we get kicked off.

Oh,

Simone Collins: okay. So this is a lot of what you encountered too is what one could argue is like keyword based or trigger word based deplatforming.

Malcolm Collins: This is really fascinating to me as well, because one thing I keep wondering is when are we going to be able to talk about, like, what the science has actually said about Special K's post Special K?

David Ragsdale: Good news. Good news. There is, [00:37:00] there's always a lag, right? And so the Google gods who, who control a lot of what we can talk about on your show on this channel, there's probably going to be a lag, but today in the journal of medical ethics, there was this peer reviewed paper and I'll send it to you. By these six Dutch researchers that looked into the scapegoating did not take the interventions and their conclusions were it was misinformation to scapegoat them because the pandemic risks were overstated and the efficacy of the intervention was also overstated.

Number two, the media. created this misinformation. Three, the disinformation is incredibly harmful. And the fourth thing they looked at who was doing the scapegoating and by and large, it was liberals. And [00:38:00] they looked at it by ideology and that people on the right were not scapegoating, even if they had had the intervention, they refused to scapegoat.

Liberals were the ones who were doing that. So I, you know, we have a lot of liberals in our movement and it's been very difficult I think for them and I feel for them, but there's something about this. Like all encompassing liberalism that we are told we live under and it doesn't really appear to be the thing itself.

Well, it's

Malcolm Collins: interesting that you say that. I'm actually interested to see if this video gets flagged in a way or something like that. Because I don't know if we're allowed to say this yet. Like, I, I genuinely don't know. That's not the only study that shows that we were, there's actually been a number of, of pretty good studies that just do not agree with the mainstream narrative.

And they have been put out in mainstream publications, like mainstream scientific publications, but like for a lot of this stuff, like, I don't know, [00:39:00] like we know a lot of stuff about special K that even isn't in the media that one day I do want to be able to share because we have a lot of friends who are very well connected in large pharmaceutical companies and very well connected in the testing that was being done on this.

One of our best friends actually runs the mask lab at Cambridge. Or is it Oxford? I don't know. One of the, one of these places. It was time.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

David Ragsdale: Well, what if we say this? Always follow the advice of the medical experts as acknowledged by the Alphabet Corporation and their subsidiaries.

Malcolm Collins: I agree. Yes.

I think that is what we need to do. Well, they're very good at determining what's true and what's not true. And you know how I know that they're good at determining this? Because when they determine something's not true, people stop saying it. So, why would that happen if they weren't good at determining what's true and what's not true?

So, No, another thing that's really interesting is, you know, when you talk about progressives, and I think we could have been thought of as traditionally Fairly progressive [00:40:00] minded in a lot of our belief systems. Like, you know, I'm really pro gay marriage. I do not think that, that the government should be getting involved in this, but then I look at where things have gone and like special K was the moment where I was like, okay, you guys, I've sort of lost track.

You're going like full totalitarian. And then recently, you know, we've been talking to our friends who are on the fence recently and they're like, wait. Like they're just like pro Hamas now. Like, are we, are we f*****g serious? Like, I did not think they had gotten just like out there. Super villain comically, like at the, at the front level, like just evil, evil.

Like they're doing like pro Hamas protests where they're not like, they're not like, let's find peace. It's like, yeah, Hamas is in the right. These people are colonizers. Let's kill them all. aNd. I think for a lot of people that was really shocking because they didn't realize, you know, and then there was the and a lot of people, um, I want to be clear.

I think, you know, black people in American society do not get a fair shake. I think that the police [00:41:00] violence against these communities is horrible. But I also think that the statistics show that if you look at the black people in these communities where this violence is taking place, they do not think the solution The majority is to defund police.

This is mostly a white movement. And we were joking about having an episode where the title was, why do criminals want to defund the police? But it's a problem because a lot of these people who are, who are pushing for this, they have an antagonistic view towards police because police have primarily, and this is what's going to be the case if you are a middle or upper class white person who regularly breaks, you know, laws.

In regards to things like drugs and stuff like that, your view and your relationship to the police is going to be primarily antagonistic, whereas it's often not in these poorer communities where they have in part an antagonistic relationship with the police because the police do treat these communities unfairly, but they also can reduce crime in these communities and stuff like that and improve the daily lives of citizens.

And so this is, this is, [00:42:00] I think for a lot of people, they're like, okay, so like, Criminals want, it's like a group of criminals who want to defund the police and who are pro Hamas and who, when they gained the littlest bit of power, immediately started firing and deep banking, like everyone who disagreed with them, like, am I really still on the good guy side?

And I think that it's become increasingly unambiguous, not that the Republicans are good guys at all, but they're not like. Comically evil. And I think there were times in American history where they were, you know, I, I think if you look at like, actions we took in, in South America, you know, under some Republican leadership, I think that that was pretty comically evil stuff that was done.

But no. So

Simone Collins: on that front, I actually have a question here for both of you. Because, you know, there has been this huge crisis of faith in government, in institutions, et cetera, but this is like. Definitely not the first time that government and institutions have, have lied to us either knowingly or just not really know what they were doing at the time and like did the [00:43:00] best they could, but misrepresented things to the people.

But there wasn't the same like crisis of faith of like, oh my gosh, I, I, I can't trust this anymore. Like, for example, at the university where Malcolm went for undergrad in St. Andrews, like still some of the old houses you can see metal has been clipped off of, of like the fences outside old houses.

And this was part of where we assume that this was cut off at a time when during World War II, Winston Churchill had encouraged citizens to contribute metal like pots, pans, pieces of their fences for use in the war effort. And Where did that go? It was all dumped. It wasn't actually used, but Winston Churchill had sort of decided, like, we need to give people an ability to, like, feel like they're contributing.

David Ragsdale: Well, he also very famously did that because he wanted to punish Stanley Baldwin, who had been the prime, two prime ministers before him. And so he ruined his gates on purpose. I'm going to get Baldwin's gates because Baldwin was like, [00:44:00] Excessively proud of the gates to his country house or something was not, you know, there's a, there's another side of Churchill that's been a hundred years going to come out.

Churchill wanted to get bold ones gates. The only way to do that was to get everyone to do this nonsense thing where like, oh, we're going to do these clippings and that's somehow going to help. It was, it was out

Simone Collins: of state. Yeah. I, well, I, but see, that's things, but then like after that, there wasn't this whole like, well, we can never trust the government again.

Malcolm Collins: Here's the thing. Churchill was fighting against actual Nazis who were committing an actual genocide. Progressives now are like, they have learned they can just call anyone they disagree with a Nazi while they are. Literally supporting a group that stated AIM is genocide of the same people the Nazis tried to genocide.

Simone Collins: Wait, wait, wait. I know. I get that. But like, let's talk about the great health scarer of the year 2020. Like, I think that a lot of the initial, like, mandates and orders that were [00:45:00] released were, were like, in good faith. People were panicking. They're just like, you know, don't wear the mask. You wear the mask.

Like, whatever. They just didn't know yet and they were making a lot of decisions and not thinking through things fully and running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Like, this wasn't all in bad faith. Like, I, you know, I'm definitely going to, you know, do this to hurt these

Malcolm Collins: people. No, it wasn't bad faith, but it was, I have a little bit of power now.

This is how I act when I feel I have a moral license. To do all of the things I always felt like doing. Bush did this to an extent after nine 11. So you think, well, but

Simone Collins: nobody know, like back to the Churchill example, there were social indulgence in that too, like personal indulgence in that. So what's the difference?

Malcolm Collins: They were fighting literal Nazis. Like, what is confusing about fighting Nazis? Nazis are, there is no way that you can like remedy Nazis. There's no way you can be like

Simone Collins: If it's fighting Nazis, but also like. Satisfying a personal agenda. Is that the worst thing in the entire? By the way, you've

Malcolm Collins: fallen off.

Simone Collins: I know.

I don't know. My camera [00:46:00] died for a second. I'm going to

Malcolm Collins: replug it.

David Ragsdale: I think, I think, I think, like, big picture. I think, I think our system. Is coming to itself by day, and I think people are realizing that, and I think if you had to give a name to a system that we've lived under for a long time, we would have to call it liberalism, and I think that what people are trying to do is figure out what's going to come next, and I think that people don't necessarily, for example, even within replatform, The health free movement, we have people who are like, yeah, you know, I, I'm allies with social conservatives.

I want to build tools with them to build some new thing, but I don't necessarily want to live in the same new thing as them. Right. And so it's like, are we building out these intentional communities [00:47:00] or economies to accommodate what we think will be our tribe?

Malcolm Collins: So this is this is something I really want to elaborate on something you're talking about here.

I think if you take all the politics out of this, if you take all of this out of this, and you just look at, for example, the cost it takes to do simple things, there's this great thing recently, we're like repainting the Golden Gate Bridge and inflation adjusted dollars costs, like, Eight times more than building it.

Okay. I remembered this story really wrong. It was that putting nets under the golden gate bridge costs almost as much as building the golden great Berridge.

And here is a great video analyzing the truth of this report. The U.

S. Department of Transportation publishes a Golden Gate Bridge fact sheet, and it says that the Golden Gate Bridge was constructed using a 35 million bond. Construction began in 1933 and was completed in 37. It was completed ahead of schedule and 1. 3 million under [00:48:00] budget. So 33. 7, which is 1. 3 less than the 35 million bond that they raised from 1933 when they raised this bond adjusted for inflation to today's dollars is about 800 million.

So we're pretty close to the tweets estimate, and it seems like the time it took to construct the bridge is right. It took about four years. Now let's look at the nets reporting from a local news source, SF gate in the year 2008 says that the city government approved the nets and they expected the netting to cost between 40 and 50 million when they approved it reporting in the LA Times says that the netting could cost up to 400 million as of late last year.

And a local news article published yesterday says that the net is currently 80 percent complete and on track to finish [00:49:00] around this year. So, the time estimate for the nets under the bridge, uh, is about right. It started in 18, and it will hopefully, fingers crossed, finish by the end of 23. The cost estimate is a possible cost.

The L. A. Times article goes on to explain that the exact cost is going to be determined by a lawsuit that is currently just getting started. So who knows, maybe it'll even be worse.

Malcolm Collins: It is becoming and this is something we have the pragmatist guide on governance where we talk about the history of governance. We talk about governance theory. And one of the things that we point out is that the longer and larger governments had been alive. similar to a long lived or very large animal, it will have cancers that form within it.

These are parts of it that just are focused on self replication and getting as much resources as they can get for self replication. Within our existing governance system, these cancers are just riddling the entity. In [00:50:00] biology, the way that we get rid of this problem Is we die and we have kids, like, it's a great system, it's beautiful, you know, you don't need to stay healthy forever if you can die and have kids and I think that if you just project forwards cost increases, whether it's on building things, whether it's on infrastructure, whether it's on, like, academic systems, like research, if you look at the amount of money it costs per, like, research thing, it has gone up astronomically, I'm talking, like, you know, 200 times or something, and then you look at a lot of the things our society revolves around, like our power plants, right?

Like a lot of people know this a lot of the nuclear power plants that power our country, almost all of them are over 50 years old, over half a century old. We no longer have the Capacity to replace these things due to how much it would cost to build a new nuclear power plants under current regulations.

That means that as we decommission these, which God knows we're probably going to as leftists, decommission [00:51:00] things they can't rebuild. We have no way to replace them as power sources. That means rolling blackouts. That means, so for so much of this, you're looking at a system where outside of political reasons, outside of overreach reasons, Is inevitably going

David Ragsdale: to collapse, and it's even worse than that.

And I'll give you one little example. There was, I think last week, this article about there's like three or four ammunition factories in America. I don't know if it was the New Yorker or the New York Times or Washington Post went into one of them. And Pennsylvania or something and it's run down and everyone who's working on it looks like they're has to be over than older than 50.

Half the lights are out and that's one of our four ammunition plants in America that produces ammunition that is needed by the Ukraine to fight an actual war. Right. But here's the worst part about it. That itself wouldn't be so bad, but we've actually been [00:52:00] governed by neoconservatives for 30 years, for over 30 years, for almost 40 years.

Who, who've entirely run this country on endless war, who we spend gosh knows how much on the military every year. So this is their thing, even on their thing that they say, this is our thing, war. We need war. We need more money for war. We have to always be about war. And we can't produce ammunition and the one of four factors we have looks like a dump.

So even on their own things, the people who are running our systems, they can't, this is why they get so frantic and so hysterical. And so. Lockdown mandate censorship because they can't even implement their own priorities effectively.

Malcolm Collins: And this is what's going on with Taiwan as well. Like, you know, we genuinely cannot produce the [00:53:00] semiconductors of the advanced quality at the level we need that's coming out of Taiwan right now.

I think that your average American citizen does not understand how much of their lifestyle relies on Taiwan. If they're living their lifestyle on the internet or online or with Bitcoin or with like, like all of the advanced technology that we're using relies on a system that is clearly unsustainable and about to collapse.

David Ragsdale: So that's why we have to, that's why we have to build something different and that's why we have to have like our, our really super elite intellectuals who are into this and we have to have the normie people and we have to have the cheesy people and we have to have the health freedom people and the social conservatives and the libertarians and we have to bring them together because we may not all end up in the same tribe when this thing shakes out.

But we can, we can build tools together. And this is why investing

Malcolm Collins: in parallel economies makes a lot of sense now. If [00:54:00] you are an investor and you're thinking like, well, this parallel economy thing, nothing has come of it. Yet. Yes. Nothing has come of it yet. That's the point. But when it happens, it will happen slowly, then all of a sudden.

And the people who built their houses there, ideologically, like our little ideological, you can look at like, people are like, well, you're othering yourself from the system. Why would you take this risk? And it's because we see things as intergenerational and I know where to invest. I know that either us or our children will be rewarded.

for the ideological camp that we are building on the side that's obviously going to win when the other system collapses. So be ready for that and be ready to remember what the other side did to you.

David Ragsdale: Yeah. I mean, in, in the, to the extent that one should always be cautious. about wolves and foxes, especially when they come to dressed as sheep.

One should always be weary and look [00:55:00] at past behavior as potential, you know, a guide to future behavior. But at the same time, again, even for people who are like, okay, so a lot of people, very oddly, I think, but they do, they do not react well. To the word ideology or any variation of it ideological. What do you know what I mean?

For whatever reason they're they've been trained to think of that as a bad word. Right? And so, same with political if it's interesting how those 2 words are bad words, even though. We live in such a system, but it is what it is. But again, all the only ideology you need to have to be in the parallel economy as a decision maker, an investor, a consumer, an entrepreneur is we should start building tools because this.

This mainstream thing [00:56:00] looks a little shaky, but that's the only ideology. You have to have the ideology of, I can see what's happening.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think that this is also really interesting. I mean, we talk about Hucksters, any economy, any new thing like this is going to attract Hucksters. I think this is another thing we've done some things about it.

It's a lot of people can be very. Views as to why people think crypto and web three has so much value. It is because it is one of the potential places the parallel economy might emerge from, but it isn't the only potential place. And it's useful to, and I don't even think it's the most likely potential place where it's going to emerge from.

But, but for people who can invest in things. It is the easiest to invest in place where it might come from. And so with your conference, hopefully you begin to create new nexuses of where it could come from that. I'm excited to see. And this, this has been fantastic to chat with you and we're really excited to be speaking at this conference.

Yeah,

David Ragsdale: we really look forward to your panel and your keynotes. And it's going to be a great time. We're going to have a lot of fun. Most of all, [00:57:00]

Malcolm Collins: I love this. Well, and it's, it's going to happen and it's a great place. I mean, charter cities. This is also why we're really involved in charter cities. That's an example of like where a parallel economy could have it.

These are cities that basically have their own governing structure and are separate from existing governances. So there's so much to talk about in regards to parallel economies and I'm really excited for where it goes. And I think that when people look at a space, they can say that space is full of scam artists.

Therefore it's not the future. And I would say, look, historically, wherever you have seen a cluster of scam artists in the past, it has been the future. Look at the dot com bust, right? It's like the dot com business is a bunch of scam artists. And then it busted and everyone to like, you see, that's proof that the internet is full of s**t and nothing's ever going to come of this thing.

David Ragsdale: Con artists may be con artists, but they have good taste. Exactly.

Simone Collins: That's such a

David Ragsdale: good way of putting it. Dirty, rotten scoundrels. They had excellent taste.

Malcolm Collins: Have a spectacular

Simone Collins: day. Yeah. And we will see you in Vegas [00:58:00] in, uh, God it's March. In March. It's so soon. What are the exact dates so people can register?

Oh, well, and

David Ragsdale: also like, what did you go to the website? Replatformvegas. com.

Simone Collins: Perfect. Good. And is registration open? Good. Okay. Cool. Well then if any of you guys are coming, we'll see you there. And

Malcolm Collins: I want to make clear that this episode is not an endorsement of any naughty or cancelable opinions. We do not, we do not think naughty things on this show.

No. We only think sexually deviant things, which are not naughty anymore. Yes. Those are all okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah. We're sexual deviants. We're just, we're no, no. Yeah. Nothing else. That's fine.

Malcolm Collins: All right. Have a good one. guys. so much.

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