TikTok, The Philly Mob, and the Deep State
Biden has said "Tick Tock" for mob tech, preferring capitalism to exploitation
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It’s hard to talk about TikTok without talking a little bit about how it looks extremely likely that Jeff Yass, the Chisraeli billionaire who is trying to protect his investment, has an organized crime background and backing.
The mobster publication of record — Forbes Magazine — laid it out in 2021.
"In July 1985, Yass was a 27-year-old trader based in Philadelphia, with a knack for quickly calculating the value of options contracts. On this day, however, he was on his way to Sportsman’s Park, a horse racing track built by Al Capone on the outskirts of Chicago, with a few friends and $250,000 in rolled up hundred-dollar bills stuffed into duffel bags."
Do you honestly expect us to believe that he got his start playing poker or on gambling about horses?
You’re not supposed to talk about that. It’s rude to bring it up and it’s ruder still to talk about what it says about Pennsylvania that the richest person in the state has mob ties. Nobody cares more about his reputation than a mobster. Pay you no mention at all that Yass hired the granddaughter of a mobster — Kellyanne Conway — to lobby for him. Indeed Kellyanne Conway's grandfather was Jimmy “The Brute” DiNatale of Philadelphia crime family.
We’re uncomfortable talking about the relationship between the Chinese state and our own domestic organized crime even though evidence for it is well-documented in Pro Publica. The “m” word is hard for people to digest especially when evidence for it is all around us.
We have a hard time talking about how the creation or manufacturing of genius on the part of these lists — Forbes 30 Under 30 — serve as a selection mechanism for mob fronts. It’s in this context that you can see much of social media — selection — and see how this is really an intelligence fight. Who gets picked and who doesn’t, which voices get amplified and which get shadow banned and suppressed has been the key issue with social media since its inception. I myself have litigated about these “free speech” issues — only to lose at the California Supreme Court.
These issues are at play once again in the Supreme Court case of Biden v. Missouri, the oral arguments for which are taking place next week. At issue is whether or not the federal government has control over the ideological terrain on social media and whether they might censor people online.
My view is that the commander-in-chief — and by extension his executive agencies — absolutely has power to censor foreign malefactors — or their agents — online. A prudent policy, however, would be explain why those decisions were made and give people who wrongly got into a government drag net a chance for redress or appeal and not simply ban them for life.
No one seems to have yet made the connection that Leonard Leo, who worked closely with mob heiress Kellyanne Conway to pack the Supreme Court, ran his first attempts in Alabama and Missouri and that Eric Schmidt, the U.S. Senator who brought the Biden v. Missouri case back when he was Attorney General, was a star recruited at Leonard Leo’s front — the Republican Attorneys General Association. Attorneys General are very important for rigging an economy and collecting bribes campaign contributions. And we all know that AG stands for “Aspiring/ Almost Governor.”
Now there’s a fair case to be made that much of the fight over TikTok is itself a distraction from Israeli spyware which has been detected in hundreds of countries. If you think Speaker Mike Johnson who stood up only once and for Israel at the State of the Union — is going to do much of anything about these issues you have another thing coming. The inability of the Republican Party to adequately highlight or even address the Netanyahu problem is why the majority continues to dwindle.
We’ve been on this over and over about the organized crime connections of some of our alleged tech luminaries. From Elon Musk to Sheryl Sandberg to Sam Altman it’s all there. Just search this website’s archives and you’ll see it for yourself.
For what it’s worth I more or less agree with Matt Stoller’s characterization of the issues at play and see the TikTok bill as a large push by the Biden Administration against exploitation that’s become all too common.
Proponents of a TikTok ban like Congressman Mike Gallagher argue is that it’s Chinese spyware — not that people are not going to share their data — they just don’t want to share it with a foreign frenemy. Curiously Gallagher doesn’t have much to say about Israeli spyware which is implicated in still far more problems than TikTok ever was.
I don’t agree with the characterization about this being a push back in favor of privacy — that’s too easy — but I think we’ll look back on this period as a pushback against GenExploitation. "You've heard me say before: Capitalism without competition isn't capitalism. It's exploitation," President Biden said. "And I'm determined to end the exploitation."
Competition is important, no doubt, but when it comes to new technologies, I suspect the State will take a more dirigiste approach. More likely the State will pick and choose which companies make it and which do not operate here and that those companies will be headed by Americans or close U.S. allies.
Our system isn’t going to let a foreign kid with a dad with mob ties — Hoan Ton-That — run Clearview.AI. The facial recognition technology is much too powerful as recent news of its transnational successes makes all too clear. Ton-That hired someone directly from Leonard Leo’s orbit to run Government Affairs and he moved closer into the Israeli orbit as I continued to be smeared.
Jeff Yass had Trump defend TikTok the same week that Sergio Gor started a new PAC. The Malta-born Gor was Deputy Chief of Staff to Senator Rand Paul and even sat in on a 2017 meeting between me, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, Paul Behrends and Senator Paul to discuss the status of Julian Assange. Yass, for his part, is the biggest donor to Rand world. It’ll be wild to see what the FEC Q1 filing shows and who else he’s contributed to.
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There’s a long history here of Yass being right where the Chisraeli action is.
Black Monday was apparently the first big Chisraeli modern financial market shakedown. Here’s Pro Publica discussing Yass without using the “M” word.
"One of Susquehanna’s landmark moments — involving perhaps both skill and luck — occurred soon after the firm launched: the Black Monday stock market crash on Oct. 19, 1987. Thanks to an option bet that would pay out if stocks went down, Susquehanna was one of the few firms that made money on one of the worst days in stock market history."
The line between predicting things — and causing them — is a very blurry one indeed.
Let’s not forget that Yass was a major backer of the judicial coup in Israel.
What does he have planned for our country? Trump has floated Yass a potential Secretary of the Treasury.
And, as former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin allegedly readies a bid to purchase TikTok we’re left wondering why would the former Secretary of the Treasury — flush with Saudi money — want to buy a Chinese spyware app that bails out a potential future Treasury Secretary?
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