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The left seems to not understand that the more they try to micromanage our freedom – whether it be from taxes, social media censorship, subsidies or any other brilliant ideas they have – the worse things get.

Take Monday’s unmitigated Iowa caucus shitshow, for example. But that hasn’t stopped left wing social media companies from continuing to think that they are so integral to the integrity of our democracy that they need to actively do even more to “regulate” their platforms now that it is an election year.

Because after all, we can’t have a repeat of 2016, right?

For instance, yesterday YouTube announced it was going to be selectively removing “election-related” videos that are “manipulated or doctored” to mislead votes, according to Yahoo Finance.

Who is going to determine what is misleading, you ask? Well, the fine folks on the far left in Silicon Valley, of course. 

YouTube says it’ll be taking the measures as it strives to become a “more reliable source” for news and to promote a “healthy political discourse” amid heightened fears over video fakes around the world.

Leslie Miller, YouTube’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, said: “…the service’s community standards prohibit content that has been technically manipulated or doctored in a way that misleads users… and may pose a serious risk of egregious harm.”

The announcement was made just hours before the Iowa caucuses and comes amid heightened concern for “deepfake” videos that are altered using AI and can create credible looking events. Google had already committed last year to “stepping up efforts” on election misinformation. 

Paul Barrett of the New York University Center for Business and Human Rights said: “The underlying standards YouTube explains and illustrates today do not appear to be brand new, but the company deserves praise for setting them out in clear terms and warning that it intends to enforce them vigorously.”

“YouTube’s statement today appears to reiterate its determination not to allow its users to be conned during the 2020 election campaign,” he continued.

Twitter, meanwhile, has taken a different step and banned all political ads for candidates on its platform. Facebook is now maintaining a “hands off” stance on the ads. 

Karen Kornbluh, a German Marshall Fund researcher who follows political disinformation said: “Each platform is weighing free expression against voter manipulation, but the information operations work across platforms and exploit these loopholes.”

Recall, last year, YouTube banned Zero Hedge friend and Cornell professor Dave Collum from its platform for “hate speech” after he participated in a podcast about libertarian politics and alternate theories regarding the Las Vegas shooting and 9/11. 

And another question: who is going to monitor the mainstream media sources and make sure they’re not the ones using deepfakes?

Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

Many years ago, I was giving a lecture on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to a class at a public high school here in Virginia. During the course of my talk, I made the following statement: “The First Amendment does not give people the right of free speech.”

I asked the students whether my statement was correct or incorrect. Everyone immediately told me that I was wrong. They said the First Amendment did in fact give people the right of free speech.

I held my ground. I said it didn’t, and I pressed the students to figure out why I was maintaining my position. They were just as steadfast in their position, until a girl raised her hand and said, “Mr. Hornberger is right. The First Amendment does not give people rights. It prohibits the government from infringing on rights that preexist the government.”

She was absolutely right.

The First Amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Notice that the Amendment does not give people rights. Instead, it prohibits Congress from enacting laws that abridge people’s rights.

But what is that all about? Why did our ancestors deem it necessary to enact such a prohibition? Isn’t Congress our friend? Isn’t it composed of people who we elect to represent us? We often hear that we should trust the government. It doesn’t sound to me that the people who enacted the First Amendment had much trust in elected representatives.

After all, the only reason for enacting such a prohibition is the concern that in the absence of such a prohibition, Congress would enact laws that abridge freedom of speech and other fundamental rights. That sounds like Americans believed that the members of Congress needed to be told that they were prohibited from doing so.

The First Amendment and the other amendments in the Bill of Rights reflect how leery people were of Congress and the rest of the federal government. They were convinced that if they approved the Constitution, the federal government they were calling into existence with the Constitution would destroy their rights and their freedom.

That was also why Americans opposed enormous, permanently standing military establishments. Given their conviction that the federal government would destroy their rights, they understood that the way governments historically had done that was through their military forces.

After all, how else to enforce a law, say, that prohibits people from criticizing the president or Congress? Sure, it would be possible to arrest, indict, convict, and incarcerate them but what if dissent became widespread among the citizenry? That’s where a massive military establishment would come into play — to use massive military force to put down dissent with round-ups, assassinations, killings, torture, executions, and other things that militaries historically have done to oppress people. That’s why all totalitarian regimes have large, permanent, powerful military establishments.

Thus, there is no possibility that our American ancestors would have approved the national-security state form of governmental structure under which we live today, a structure consisting of the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and a vast empire of domestic and military bases. If the Constitution had proposed that form of governmental structure, Americans would have summarily rejected the deal and simply continued operating under the Articles of Confederation, another type of governmental system, one in which the federal government’s powers were so weak that the federal government wasn’t even given the power to tax.

The Constitution called into existence a limited-government republic, a type of governmental system that gave the federal government very few powers. There was an army, but it was relatively small — large enough to defeat Native American tribes but not large enough to threaten the American people with massive tyranny.

In fact, that’s why our American ancestors enacted the Second Amendment. It was designed to ensure that people would retain their right to keep and bear arms as a way to fight against any federal army or national police force that the Congress or the president might employ to enforce their destruction of free speech and other rights and liberties.

Thus, whenever you hear someone lamenting the lack of trust that many Americans today have in the federal government, it might be worth reminding them that the federal government was called into existence under a cloud of mistrust among our American ancestors. And they were right to have that mistrust!

In what is likely a surprise to no one, and solidifies his virtue-signaling to his home state, Senator Mitt Romney said Wednesday that he would vote to convict President Trump of abuse of power, making him the first Republican to support removing Mr. Trump for his bid to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.

“I think the case was made,” Mr. Romney said in an interview in his Senate office on Wednesday morning, ahead of an afternoon floor speech announcing his stance.

As The New York Times reports, Mr. Romney said he would vote against the second article of impeachment, obstruction of Congress, arguing that House Democrats had failed to exhaust their legal options for securing testimony and other evidence they had sought.

“Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.” pic.twitter.com/vDeb890L4n

— Salvador Hernandez (@SalHernandez) February 5, 2020

But the first-term senator said that Democrats had proven their first charge, that the president had misused his office for his own personal gain.

“I believe that attempting to corrupt an election to maintain power is about as egregious an assault on the Constitution as can be made,” Mr. Romney added, appearing by turns relieved and nervous — but also determined — as he explained his decision.

“And for that reason, it is a high crime and misdemeanor, and I have no choice under the oath that I took but to express that conclusion.”

Nevertheless, the Senate is expected to acquit Mr. Trump of both impeachment charges in a vote later Wednesday afternoon, but we look forward to President Trump’s retort to the ‘gentleman from Utah’…

Over the past month, as stocks soared to all time highs (as they are on the verge of doing again today), we discussed on several occasions that virtually all investors classes – from retail investors, to institutions, to systematic quants, CTAs and Risk Parity funds and virtually everyone else – had gone “all in” stocks lulled by the dovish encouragement of the Fed. For those unfamiliar, we suggest reading the following articles:

• Institutions, Retail And Algos Are Now All-In, Just As Buybacks Tumble
• Never Before Seen Market Complacency, As Everyone Goes Even More “All In”

And while the coronavirus epidemic black bat black swan sparked a modest equity selloff just as everyone was all-in, it barely dented euphoric investor sentiment (mostly thanks to a surge in put option buys in recent weeks, i.e., “crash protection”, which provided a healthy buffer to any selloff) and which remains an almost unprecedented 85% in the bullish category, and just shy of decade highs, as the latest Consolidated Equity Positioning index from Deutsche Bank shows.

This also validates the violent surge higher in stocks following several days of “hope” that the coronavirus pandemic is either contained (despite US experts claiming otherwise) or a drug/vaccine is now in the works (it isn’t, as Bloomberg writes in “Why Reports of Drugs for Coronavirus Are Premature“), as investors now deploy a barbell strategy that, on one hand, a worst-case scenario will only prompt central banks to unleash even more aggressive monetary stimulus, while a best case scenario will merely result in the world reverting back to its previous growth trendline.

So while we wait for either scenario to play out, with both the Fed and PBOC lurking in the shadows ready to inject tens of billions in liquidity the moment there is even a modest market hiccup, a new “catalyst” has emerged that could push stocks even higher, all else equal.

As readers may recall, two weeks ago we highlighted the latest risk-parity positioning extrapolation from Deutsche Bank, according to which the best performance investor class in recent years had an unprecedented beta to stocks of roughly 65%, the highest on record, meaning that risk parity levered exposure to stocks had never been greater.

It also meant that – at least in our opinion – it was virtually impossible for risk parity funds to be sources of demand for stocks going forward. After all, they already had record exposure to stocks as measured by their beta.

It turns out that we may have been wrong.

According to Nomura we can add a new, and decidedly bullish, market positioning dynamic which is already impacting the systematic “Vol Control”/Risk Parity community and their deployment of leverage across multiple asset exposures and their Dollar allocation—particularly within equities.

As the Bank’s cross-asset strategist Charlie McElligott writes, over the past few days and certainly as of today, we have seen the infamous Feb 5th 2018 VIXtermination “vol event” – which in minute destroyed the universe of retail-darling inverse VIX ETF – drop-OUT of the 2-Year lookback window time-series utilized by the Nomura QIS Risk Parity model, which in the period since Feb 2018 has, according to McElligott, “dictated a slow-moving, mechanical de-leveraging across our estimated Risk Parity “gross” allocations, particularly in the Equities space.”

As of today, this event is no longer a consideration for the systematic community.

This means that as this enormous cross-asset “Vol Shock” event has largely rolled-out of the lockback sample, going forward there will be the opposite move effectively taking place: a slow-moving “gross-up” as trailing realized vols drop and signal re-leveraging, from Equities to rates to credit to commodities.

In fact, since risk-parity is effectively long everything with various amounts of leverage, one can argue that this is the most bullish thing possible for stocks!

This dynamic can be seen visually in the chart below:

This means that despite already having a record exposure to stocks, risk-parity funds will lever up even more and purchase tens of billions in more equities, simply because an event that took place a long time ago, is now 2 years and 1 day in the past, and this does not impact the buying programs’ vol targeting signals.

It is this releveraging dynamic that, Nomura believes, might be picking-up in its “intraday trade imbalance” estimate analysis over the past 2 sessions in S&P futures, as small lots of 0-20 contracts — which it views as a “systematic” fund proxy flow — have seen outlier “bid only” demand over the course of the US trading day.

To this, all we can add is that those outlier lots may have merely been an artifact of the Tesla meltup, which as of this morning appears to finally be over with the stock tumbling the most on record. However, with Tesla plunging and stocks soaring, it may well be that McElligott is right, and the echoes of the Feb 5, 2018 VIX crash are now being heard, and may serve to push stocks to new all time highs.

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

It is a rare thing to witness a truly iconic moment happen on live television, but that is precisely what tens of millions of Americans had the opportunity to do on Tuesday night. At the conclusion of President Trump’s State of the Union address, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped her copy of Trump’s speech in half in front of a nationwide audience. We have never seen anything like that before in the entire history of this country, but of course so many unprecedented things have taken place during Trump’s presidency. Pelosi is claiming that she did not plan in advance to rip the speech in half, and at that moment she probably wasn’t doing much thinking at all, but it is a moment that will live in all of our memories for the rest of our lives. Pelosi shocked the entire nation by tearing the speech in two, but more importantly I believe that her action was a perfect metaphor for what is about to happen to America.

We are more deeply divided than we have ever been, and during this election season I believe that we will see very frightening eruptions of anger and frustration all across the United States.

Nobody expected Trump and Pelosi to be friendly with one another on Tuesday night, and Trump immediately made national headlines when he refused to shake Pelosi’s hand…

Pelosi omitted the customary language about it being a high privilege and a distinct honor to introduce the president. Trump then handed the traditional copies of his speech to Vice President Mike Pence and to Pelosi, but when she reached out to shake his hand, he turned his back on her.

If you have not seen video of that moment yet, you can watch it happen right here.

Considering the fact that Pelosi has been leading the charge to impeach Trump for the last several months, it really wasn’t a surprise that he didn’t want to shake her hand.

But when Pelosi ripped up Trump’s speech in front of the entire nation right after Trump concluded his remarks, it surprised everyone. The following comes from USA Today…

In a remarkable display, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tore up the text of Trump’s speech and tossed it aside before Trump had left. Pelosi later waved the ripped pieces in the air, and audience members left in the chamber and public-viewing gallery could see Trump’s prominent signature.

WATCH: At the end of President Trump’s State of the Union address, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tears up her copy of the speech. #SOTU pic.twitter.com/sDEkNBD0DW

— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) February 5, 2020

I think that Pelosi will later deeply regret doing that, but I also believe that it will go down as one of the most iconic moments of 2020.

Following the speech a reporter asked her why she ripped Trump’s speech in half, and this was her reply…

“Because it was the courteous thing to do… It was the courteous thing to do considering the alternative.”

So precisely what would “the alternative” have been?

I wish that somebody would have asked Pelosi that question.

Subsequently, the official White House Twitter account harshly criticized Pelosi for her unprecedented gesture…

Speaker Pelosi just ripped up:

One of our last surviving Tuskegee Airmen.

The survival of a child born at 21 weeks.

The mourning families of Rocky Jones and Kayla Mueller.

A service member’s reunion with his family.

That’s her legacy.

Of course the left was absolutely thrilled by what Pelosi did, and they can’t say enough good things about her right now.

Sadly, this is yet another example of how deeply divided we are as a nation.

When Pelosi tore those pieces of paper in half, I believe that it was symbolic of what will happen to our entire country.

In other words, I believe that it is possible that we may have just witnessed what is known as a “harbinger”. The following is how that word is defined by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary…

: something that foreshadows a future event : something that gives an anticipatory sign of what is to come

During the 2020 election season, America is literally going to be torn in half. Right now, many Democrats absolutely hate President Trump, his family and his supporters, and that hatred is only going to intensify as we get closer to next November.

On the other side, many Republicans absolutely hate Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and all of their supporters, and that hatred will also intensify as we get closer to next November.

No matter who wins the election, the coming months are not going to be pretty. In fact, I believe that we are about to witness the most chaotic election season in American history.

And once the election is over, a large portion of the country will not be willing to accept the result. So I actually expect the aftermath of the election to be even worse than the election season itself. We are on a very dangerous path, and I cringe when I think about what is coming.

To get an idea of where we stand at this moment, just consider the results of a recent Gallup survey…

According to Gallup, the 82-point partisan gap between Republican approval of the job Trump is doing (89%) and Democratic approval (7%) is the largest in the 74-year history of the poll. That gap breaks the previous record of 79 points that Trump set in his second year in office, in 2018. (Trump’s first year in office, 2017, was the sixth most partisan in history.)

But of course this trend did not begin when Trump entered the White House.

In fact, Gallup says that the “10 most partisan years in history” have all been within the past 16 years…

The 10 most partisan years in history have all occurred in the last 16 years, as measured by Gallup. Those 10 years include years from the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama as well as Trump.

“There have always been partisan gaps in ratings of president, just not to the degree seen over the past two decades,” wrote Gallup’s Jeffrey M. Jones in an analysis of the data.

No matter who wins next November, it isn’t going to heal this very deep divide.

Instead, we are about to see America ripped apart like never before.

So even though Nancy Pelosi didn’t even realize what she was doing, I think that she perfectly foreshadowed what is about to happen.

Very dark days are approaching, and the United States of America will never be the same again.