We’re going to have to make an example of one of the billionaires, sooner or later. So let’s start with Jeff Yass who is trying as he might to preserve Tik Tok by bribing pols like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, Andrew Yang, and Ted Cruz.
There was a rather great profile of Yass in ProPublica in 2022 and there’s all sorts of evidence that Yass was behind the judicial takeover that kept Benjamin Netanyahu in power. By some accounts he is the largest donor in the U.S. presidential election, having spent some $34 million and counting. Yass has even staked Kellyanne Conway — granddaughter of the Philly mob — after she did all her work for the Russian-backed Rebekah Mercer.
This is what Chisrael looks like. Haaretz noted that Yass and Arthur Dantchik were the big money behind the Kohelet Policy Forum, which has pushed Bibi’s judicial coup. Sure enough, Yass has also targeted Democrats who oppose Netanyahu’s human rights abuses under the guise of faux moderation.
You’re not supposed to ask where Yass, who is now the Keystone State’s richest man, got all his money or his initial backing. I especially love the detail about Yass’s being backed by the Mob. Forbes is more delicate. “For a college economics class, Yass wrote a final paper titled, ‘An Econometric Analysis of Horse Racing,’ that he eventually published in Gambling Times magazine,” they write. Sure.
Josh Wolfe — another tech traitor — has helpfully noted that Jeff Yass’s stake is worth $30B. “And to even spend $1B in political lobbying for a foreign adversary is economically rational even if traiterous [sic], Wolfe notes — as if treason were ever justifiable.
Wolfe has his own problems with treason as his rather forceful pro-genocide talking points make clear.
Genocide.vc makes it abundantly clear:
Josh hails from Brooklyn, New York, but could easily be mistaken for a right-wing settler based on many of the voices he promotes online.
Even for a venture capitalist, he spends a disproportionate amount of his time sharing his unqualified opinions on social media. He has unabashedly rejected calls for a ceasefire, and supported Israeli war crimes and human rights violations, even at the cost of lives of the hostages he claims to advocate for.
I pitched Wolfe on two companies before I realized that his real job isn’t really to invest but to spy. How the Carlyle Group continues to back him, I have no idea but I’ve been advising my friends in the Middle East and DC to turn elsewhere. We tried with Josh, we really did. This is an error on the part of Mubadala’s Ibrahim Ajami even taking a meeting with Wolfe whose track record as an investor isn’t all that great. Surely the UAE could be smarter at this sort of thing?
For what it’s worth I favor banning Tik Tok … and Twitter … and Facebook … I’d honestly be okay with banning all social media altogether.
Indeed I support the President having the power to unilaterally get rid of these foreign propaganda vectors under his commander-in-chief powers but we should be honest that the real reason so many of the Silicon Valley players dislike Tik Tok is that they aren’t cut in. Where were they when Facebook was systematically harming young girls through Instagram? They had nothing to say about foreign-backed foreign-born billionaires using Twitter/X to character-assassinate American intelligence professionals.
What many of these ultra-Zionist venture capitalists are worried about is how unpopular their pro-genocide position is among today’s young people. They should be worried.
The smarter of the venture capitalists know that this is a time for patriotism and that the best way to be patriotic is to help America achieve her objectives.
For what it’s worth I suspect that giving President Biden these powers to ban Tik Tok will be used as a kind of leverage to get the American investors in Tik Tok to behave themselves politically here and abroad.
The looming threat of nationalization is a powerful one and it can be extended to all manner of Silicon Valley tech companies if the oligarchs don’t behave themselves.
We get a sense of what sorts of leverage Joe Biden might deploy when we see that Netanyahu is talking about invading Rafah — a red line for Biden.
I chuckled a bit when I saw that a General Frank S. Besson Jr class Logistics Support Vessel made way for the Eastern Mediterranean from Virginia. The Navy has always been the most Israeli skeptical of the U.S. military and I’m proud to say that there are quite a few Navy men in my family.
The real General Besson was appointed to be one of the founding directors of Amtrak, the public train service Senator Joe Biden used for his commute to and from his home state of Delaware.
This is a fitting metaphor and Biden ought to celebrate it.
You can almost hear him: “Trump wants to build a wall; I want to build a bridge or a pier. And unlike Trump, who failed to get his wall built, I’ll get it done.”
These are the kind of metaphors that Biden should deploy when he speaks before the Knesset though I suspect he’s going to have to put a bit more teeth into it.
Corridors, like bridges, work best when someone is manning the gates and protecting the flanks.