Episode Details

In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the viral Bricks & Minifigs Lego scandal that’s rocked the Mormon (LDS) community. What started as a $200k consignment dispute involving stolen Lego collections has spiraled into allegations of corporate theft, police corruption, small-town collusion, and a massive cultural reckoning.

Malcolm explores why this story is so damaging to Mormon PR, draws historical parallels to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and questions the Church’s response (or lack thereof). They discuss Mormon cultural tendencies, MLMs, in-group protection, and what this reveals about trusting religious communities when they hold local power.

A must-watch for anyone following the drama, interested in religious sociology, business ethics, or cultural fault lines.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be c- talking about the bricks and minifigures story.

Ooh ... but I want to take it in a different direction than a lot of people have gone on it, and I wanna g- talk about the meta discussion around it, and the extreme damage. And I’ve noticed that, that one, n- usually, the Mormon Church, and Mormons more broadly, are good at dealing with PR disasters. Like the, the, the way that they, you know, turned, The Book of Mormon into, like-

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah.

Yeah ...

Malcolm Collins: advertising and-

Simone Collins: Spinning that Broadway play by Matt Stone and Trey Parker into something where they would just put-

Malcolm Collins: Good PR. Well, yeah,

Simone Collins: in a way, ... missionaries outside the theaters and be like, “Hey, you enjoyed the play. Why not try the real thing?” I mean, it’s great.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and in one of the other episodes we did, even the Mormon tendency to come off like creepy pod people to outsiders, To some outsiders

they’ve been able to subvert that into, like, “Yeah, well, we’re just so wholesome,” right? You know, [00:01:00] like, “That’s, that’s why we’re coming off that way,” right? I mean, I still-

Simone Collins: Mormon is because they’re just that wholesome. Get over it ...

Speaker 3: I heard there’s warm pie

Simone Collins: from

Malcolm Collins: my, my cultural background think they come off like creepy pod people.

Speaker 26: I don’t remember him being that friendly. He’s obviously one of them. How

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And we have a whole episode if you’re interested on what causes that reaction, and I don’t think that Mormons have this emotional reaction, which is why they don’t realize that they trigger it so hard in other people.

Simone Collins: Well, not all S- Scots-Irish people have it. I, like, I don’t feel that. It, a lot of Mormons-

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you don’t have the creepy...

But it’s clearly a common enough expression in humans that there’s multiple horror series just made- Yeah ... out of triggering this reaction. Yeah.

Speaker 7: Stan, take the drug, man, prove it to us. Okay.

Open the door. It is so much better. There’s no fear or pain. It’s beautiful. And you We’ll be beautiful. No [00:02:00] problems or worries. We want you. No pain, Stan? We’re gonna come in here and I’ll show you some f*****g pain!

Malcolm Collins: And, and here I’ll put the scenes from The Faculty or, you know, Children of the Corn or something. But anyway, in this instance it has fundamentally sh- like oh, and more broadly, so for people who know our channel and our stance, we’re generally pretty pro-M