Green Berets Matthew Lewellen, Kevin McEnroe, and James Moriarty approached the Prince Faisal Airbase in Jordan in their vehicle along with one Jordanian military officer. They were assigned the IA mission, meaning inter-agency, as a part of the CIA's Timber Sycamore covert operation to train and arm so-called moderate Syrian rebels. At the gate there was an exchange of gunfire which Jordanian authorities have described as a "chain of unfortunate events." Amidst the bedlam at the gate, a Special Forces Team Sergeant confronted the shooter after failing to deescalate the attack. The Team Sergeant wounded the shooter during the firefight, who is now being held by the Jordanian government for questioning.

Initial reports were conflicted with each other, and a subsequent FBI investigation describes finding no trace of terrorist activity involved in the incident. At first the Jordanians claimed that one of the Special Forces soldiers opened fire at the gate unprovoked. A second story claimed that one of the Americans accidentally discharged his weapon leading to a confused firefight of mistaken identity. However, according to multiple sources inside Special Forces, the shooter conducted a deliberate and pre-planned assault on the 5th Special Forces Group members. Multiple sources confirmed that the shooter is an ISIS sympathizer. Lewellen, McEnroe, and Moriarty, who were in the process of transitioning back to the United States were killed, the Jordanian officer injured.

[Content warning: hate crimes, Trump, racism. I have turned off comments to keep out bad people who might be attracted by this sort of thing. Avoid sharing in places where this will attract the wrong kind of attention, as per your best judgment. Please don't interpret anything in this article to mean that Trump is not super terrible]

[Epistemic status: A reduction of a complicated issue to only 8000 words, because nobody would read it if it were longer. I think this is true but incomplete. I will try to discuss missing parts at more length later.]

I.

A New York Times article from last September that went viral only recently: Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump. It asks whether Democrats have "cried wolf" so many times that nobody believes them anymore. And so:

When "honorable and decent men" like McCain and Romney "are reflexively dubbed racists simply for opposing Democratic policies, the result is a G.O.P. electorate that doesn't listen to admonitions when the genuine article is in their midst".

I have a different perspective. Back in October 2015, I wrote that the picture of Trump as "the white power candidate" and "the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era" was overblown. I said that "the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data", and predicted that:

If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.

Now the votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. You can read the Washington Post article, Trump Got More Votes From People Of Color Than Romney Did, or look at the raw data (source)

Sputnik's Arabic bureau has obtained photos of a decree by Daesh (ISIL/ISIS) leaders instructing its fighters not to attack US-led coalition aircraft operating over Mosul and the surrounding area.

The document, discovered in the recently-liberated Iraqi city of Bakhdida, about 32 km southeast of the Daesh-held stronghold of Mosul, explicitly tells jihadis not to attack any coalition aircraft over Mosul or its suburbs.

The Democratic Party has been the Establishment for eight years, and the Clintons have arguably been the Establishment for 24 years. Since the late 1990s, members of the white working class with high school or less have seen their life-chances radically decline, even to the point where they are dying at much higher rates than they have a right to expect.

A year ago Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Princeton University economists, published a study with the startling finding that since 1999 death rates have been going up for white Americans aged 45-54. It is even worse than it sounds, since death rates were declining for the general population.

One of the big reasons for this increased death rate has been increased use of opiods and other drugs, leading to overdoses, along with liver disease from drinking too much alcohol and increased suicide rates. The problems were especially acute among working class and rural whites with only high school or less, and later studies found that they extended to younger members of this social class in their 20s and 30s. Loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs was clearly a primary reason for this despair.

Compared to 1999, white workers, according to another recent study in the Commonwealth Foundation: "have lower incomes, fewer are employed, and fewer are married." This study found other causes for the increased death rates than just the ones mentioned above, but didn't deny the Princeton findings. Here is their chart:

Let's not dance around it - Reince Priebus is part of The Establishment, and Trump just picked him to be his Chief of Staff for the incoming administration. This selection has already caused some people to question whether or not Trump was ever serious about fulfilling his campaign promise to "Drain The Swamp", but such concerns this early in the game are totally unfounded and more alarmist than anything. In his first post-election interview with CBS, Trump directly addressed these criticisms head-on, saying that:

"Everybody's a lobbyist down there, that's the problem with the system -- the system. Right now, we're going to clean it up. We're having restrictions on foreign money coming in, we're going to put on term limits, which a lot of people aren't happy about, but we're putting on term limits. We're doing a lot of things to clean up the system. But everybody that works for government, they then leave government and they become a lobbyist, essentially. I mean, the whole place is one big lobbyist. I'm saying that they know the system right now, but we're going to phase that out. You have to phase it out."

Paying attention to the President-elect's words, it's plain to see that he's resorting to his characteristic businessman pragmatism in accepting the reality that he must work with some elements of the Old System as part of his historic quest to replace The Establishment. Supporters and detractors alike should temper their enthusiasm and criticisms of Trump and realize that he was never going to instantly transform the US with the snap of a finger. His election was revolutionary because it's the first time that an American President was elected who is fully dedicated to changing the entire status quo and upending it to the betterment of the average American, and Trump's "political incorrectness" and unceasing attacks on "liberalism" during the campaign testify to his commitment to see this happen.

© Paulo Whitaker / Reuters

Everyone must stop saying they are "stunned" and "shocked." What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren't paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair.YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them all "You're fired!" Trump's victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only strengthened him. - Michael Moore on the failure of both political parties in America

How delusions become reality

This past week, as I put together my coverage of Hell Week, I read how some liberals are creating petitions for the west coast to secede from the union. I read about the Canada immigrations web site being overwhelmed after the US election by visitors looking for an escape route from the US. I read about high-school kids who once sat peaceably next to each other in class rising up in class to beat up their classmates who voted for Trump. Prior to the election, I heard my own liberal friends say how they'd have to leave the country if Trump won.

Globalist investor in murder and mayhem George Soros is at it again, funding his MoveOn.org to organize post-election "sour grapes" protests around the country in response to underdog Trump's surprising President-elect victory. Complicit crime partner mainstream media is having a field day deceitfully spinning these top down, billionaire driven demonstrations as a spontaneous, grassroots populist uprising against racist dictator Donald. From a press release from MoveOn.org:

The gatherings - organized by MoveOn.org and allies - will affirm a continued rejection of Donald Trump's bigotry, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and misogyny and demonstrate our resolve to fight together for the America we still believe is possible.

The Soros-affiliated machine further boasts:

Within two hours of the call-to-action, MoveOn members had created more than 200 gatherings nationwide, with the number continuing to grow on Wednesday afternoon.

The Washington oligarchy's propaganda ministry wants the world to believe a groundswell of concerned, mindful citizens have taken to the streets in a surge of moralistic patriotic fervor determined to derail the spread of Trump's legitimacy as the so called leader of the "free world," that is if you still believe living in a fascist totalitarian police state called Amerika is still "the free world." Thanks to the likes of the Clintons, Obama and the Bushes who've for decades conspired to strip away all our constitutional rights and freedoms in the name of New World Order deep state tyranny, "the free world" no longer exists on this planet. But the self-righteous, follow-the-leader sheep of befuddled malcontents rioting in the streets across America haven't a clue with propaganda lies now owning them.

Political establishments in Washington and Europe are in shock over Donald Trump's US presidential win. And it's far from over. Europe is bracing itself as elections loom in several member states.

Germany and France could be next big shocks. If their pro-EU governments should fall, then the European bloc as we know it is over.

The era of popular revolt is upon us. Disaffected and defiant, the mass of citizens are fed up with unresponsive, unrepresentative governments, on both sides of the Atlantic, that seem to only serve an unelected oligarchy.

First we had the Brexit vote to leave the European Union earlier this year. Now, we have the election of the "anti-politician"business tycoon Donald Trump who becomes the 45th president of the US with no prior experience of elected office.

Britain's Daily Express called his election this week a "Trump Tsunami" - a monumental wave now heading across the Atlantic to the shores of Europe. "EU braces for 'revolution' amid Austria, Italy, France and German elections," reports the Express.

"Third day of protests against the election of Donald Trump for president." The leading global news broadcasters and news agencies begin emissions with this sentence. The main event for media corporations such as CNN and BBC are the ongoing demonstrations against the new US head of state. Thousands of American citizens took to the streets. It is noteworthy that these are mainly young people who do not want their future to be sacrificed. Most of those involved in the protests are intelligent, active citizens, united in the fight against discrimination against women, xenophobia, Islamophobia and racism. America, they say, is out of the path of progress and democratic values. Participants in television broadcasts, mainly of civil and human rights organizations, are adamant that they will not settle for the results and insist on reviewing them. More and more celebrities get involved in the movement. Producer and director, Michael Moore, was one of the first who supported the protests. "I was very proud of the fact that so many people came out, because right now, we have to oppose his election," Moore said to Don Lemmon, leading the show, 'CNN Tonight'.

Since the beginning of his presidential campaign, Trump had been savaged by the National Security establishment, castigated as unfit to lead, dangerous, incompetent, and ignorant. These criticisms were woven together in an August 8 letter signed by fifty former National Security officers, denouncing a possible Trump presidency. His national security team was also severely ridiculed by establishment media from the New Republic's "Trump's Court Jesters", as "a rogues' gallery of outcasts and opportunists, has-beens and never-weres, conspiracy-mongers and crackpots," to the "Who?" of 'Top experts confounded by advisors to Donald Trump" from the New York Times. Trump responded to the letter stating that these are the same people who brought us two decades of war - and his advisor Sam Clovis sardonically remarked that the National Security team is composed of people who "work for a living."

Putting aside these castigations, Trump's most egregious national security faux pas is his contestation of the Russophobic paradigm that has dominated US foreign policy since the end of WWII and the establishment of the National Security Act of 1947. Trump's contestation further amplifies his purported hubris to even raise the question of NATO - and his contemplation of the end of the seven decade US occupation of Europe ("We cannot afford it"). Such perspectives fly in the face of the entire history of the National Security establishment, which, since the founding of the National Security Council (NSC), has sought to contain its former allies (Russia, and then, China) and maintain US hegemony on the European continent.