How anti-vaccine activists and the far right are trying to build a parallel economy

Entrepreneurs and influencers from across a spectrum of conspiracist and religious communities gathered in Las Vegas in March to discuss building an "uncancellable" future together.

But the conference almost didn't happen. A few weeks before the RePlatform conference was scheduled to begin, the event organizers lost access to their money from ticket sales. Their payment processor, Stripe, had frozen their account.

"Stripe just said, well, we're going to hold 70%. And what they do is they say, we'll give it back to you after the show," speaker Dan Eddy told the audience from the Vegas stage.

Conveniently for everyone involved, Eddy is the chief operating officer of an alternative payment processor, GabPay. It's a third-party company that works with the social media platform Gab.

"We'll process for you. No problems, no questions asked. We'll do it," Eddy described telling the event organizers.

For people in the business of opposing vaccination or unwelcome election results, mistrust of big financial institutions and tech companies is common. Increasingly, they can find alternatives being built by a community with a head start in developing the tools of the so-called freedom economy: the far right.

"Leave all these woke corporations behind"

At RePlatform in Las Vegas, GabPay got to be the hero. But it's also possible that the company was part of why Stripe froze the conference's money in the first place. A few weeks earlier, a news story by Mother Jones about the event highlighted a promotional appearance that GabPay's executives had made on far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters' streaming show.

GabPay founder Lonnie Passoff's interview with Peters included an exchange where the two sarcastically dismissed the idea