Recently, on Saturday Night Live, Weekend Update Host Colin Jost made fun of Donald Trump for saying he was going to fight ‘de-banking.’ “I don’t know what the hell de-bank means,” he said to the raucous applause of the clapping seals in the audience. Unfortunately, for a growing number of Americans not lucky enough to attend Harvard or marry Scarlett Johannsson like Jost, de-banking and de-platforming are becoming a terrifying reality. However, a new event in Vegas seeks to fight back and help the people and companies being silenced.
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It’s a tactic being used by elites to silence law-abiding citizens who hold dissident and contrarian beliefs. You wake up and discover you’re not allowed to use regular banking services, accept credit card payments, host a website, or email your subscribers. It was weaponized during the lockdowns to shut down anyone who questioned the orthodoxy.
Fortunately, people and companies are offering solutions to counter this trend. David Ragsdale is one of the most vehement voices in organizing a resistance to this techno-tyranny. A lifelong Angeleno, he became involved with helping to organize the “Defeat the Mandate’ rallies around the country. For the crime of peacefully assembling, the organization was immediately deplatformed.
I spoke with Ragsdale to learn about censorship and his plan to fight it.
“When we were doing Defeat the Mandate, we got de-platformed from a lot of B to B services, and our payment processors. We would join MailChimp and immediately get kicked off. You need these services to produce events,” he explains.
“It was really scary because we had a permit from the Biden administration to do our Lincoln Memorial rally, but we can’t use Stripe?”
Instantly, the organization was thrown into what is being called the parallel economy, where political refugees are now forced to try to survive outside the normal financial institutions like banks and credit cards people take for granted.
In this exile, Ragsdale decided there had to be a way for companies and individuals to unite and help each other. This hope was the genesis for RePlatform, a conference taking place in Las Vegas, March 8-10th. It seeks to assemble a group of innovators, including inventors, financial institutions, payment networks, developers, investors, entrepreneurs, and creators, to develop practical solutions that address the challenges of inefficiency, stagnation, and censorship in corporate America.
They hope to draw in a diverse group of citizens from social conservatives, awakened progressives, people of faith, classical liberals, libertarians, and populists to dismantle the mandate system nationwide.
“I hope that all these really solid people I’m bringing together will spark some magic of innovation,” Ragsdale told me. He explained that while it’s easy to write op-eds or tweet about this new corporate censorship, it’s much harder to build viable companies offering alternatives. He hopes by bringing together startups, companies, consumers, and investors, a real industry can start to form.
A conference like RePlatform is badly needed in our country at the current moment. Blaze will be covering the event, and we look forward to reporting on the companies and people fighting for our rights to speak our opinions. If you want to learn more or attend the event, please check out their website.