John Stapleton’s incredible new book Australia Breaks Apart has a surreal quality to it. He taps into the dissonance, the discord, and the disillusionment of those among us who were able, or who dared, to step outside the wall-to-wall propaganda and look at it in real time, or back at it later, in horror.
Through the book’s central character, Old Alex (a retired journalist, coincidentally just like the author), wave after wave of recognition and acknowledgement of pain and anguish and confusion and foreboding wash over the reader, like a soothing balm for the still raw wounds inflicted by our political leaders. It’s just as well – in between the passages where we crawl inside Old Alex’s head, and hear and feel the visions and the dreams for a country so utterly changed, Stapleton catalogues in excruciating detail the things that were done to us. It’s confronting.
Some of the things I knew about, many others I didn’t, thanks to the suffocating censorship of our complicit mainstream media. Still others I knew about, but had tried to forget.
Reading it is like reading Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago – page after page of open-mouthed shock at the things humans can do to one another and the things that power can corrupt. It’s un-put-downable and un-pick-upable at the same time.
It’s essential reading for the dissident, the disenfranchised, the disillusioned. We’re not alone, our eyes were not deceiving us, it was not all just a nightmare from which we will one day wake up. It actually happened. Its legacy will be a millstone Australia will carry for decades. This book won’t make up for the tragedies of lives and livelihoods shattered by wilfully stubborn governments and petty tyrants, but it will certainly help.
Lots of the names and sources will be familiar to the covid dissident – among them McCullough, Malone, RFK, Jr, Naomi Wolf, Rebecca Weisser, Paul Collits, Avi Yemini…the roll call of those we’ve relied on to get an honest point of view.
But helpful as it is for the victims and the protesters to have this book, those who need to read it the most will find it hard going. The laptop class, the ones who learned a new recipe for sourdough, or how to crochet, while truckies and cashiers from the indentured servant class waited on their every need – they are the ones who need to read this book.
The ones who happily observed that the traffic was lighter and the carbon dioxide lower, while mourners grieved alone, banned from attending the funeral. Every single nurse who made a dance video. Every jab clinic manager tallying the day’s injectees and calculating the bonus incentive payment.
What pangs of self-recognition will they find when they read of humans mistreating each other? If they don’t feel any then they could read the whole thing and not be any the wiser, or indeed could take whatever message they want to take from it. If they do feel the pangs of shame, it will take a heroic effort of acceptance and repentance to get through to the end.
There will even be some, the scoffers who only consume a vegan ‘news’ diet from the ABC or the free-to-air presstitutes, who will find the cognitive dissonance simply too much to deal with and toss the book away in anger and disgust. Some of this group would literally never have heard of the Canadian Trucker protest or the Hancock WhatsApp messages scandal, such was the media silence.
Let’s assume some of that group do read it. Where will they find themselves afterwards? My guess is that they will find themselves looking for a scapegoat, an excuse, ‘extenuating circumstances,’ to cover their shame. Alas, none will be found.
Where will a bookstore put this book, among the shelves of thrillers, cookbooks, and travel guides?
Psychology? Self-help? A good case can be made. It explains our distress, it pushes us on, gives us courage. The treatment of the Canberra protests, disgracefully ignored by the mainstream media, provides the cameos of mateship, love, openness, happiness, togetherness, and fearlessness that we so craved when imprisoned, and which our overlords sought to extinguish.
Politics, History? For sure. It’s got a much better claim to be a document of record than any of our newspapers have of being a ‘paper of record.’ The author’s distaste for his former profession rises off nearly every page like bile rises in the throat. Likewise contempt for the political class, and the unelected petty tyrants masquerading as health bureaucrats.
Religion? Fantasy? It sits comfortably alongside CS Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, whose villains thought they could create a new Man, a literally disembodied head, controlled by those at the top. Villains who commanded a private police force in service of a ‘scientific’ institution; who orchestrated the stories to appear in the press and coerced the journalists to write the lies and the propaganda.
Villains who wrought destruction on an innocent English village and its residents. Stapleton’s book is likewise a tale of supreme political hubris and arrogance, enough arrogance to imagine that a riot squad can control an airborne virus. Lewis brought in the gods to resolve the finale; Stapleton, too, brings the supernatural out into the open, spirits portentously looming over the future of our once free land.
If it were up to me, I know where it belongs, apart from on the New Releases and Best Sellers shelves.
True Crime. Read it, before you are tempted to ‘move on.’ Buy it, before they ban it.
About the Author
Richard Kelly, a retired 60 yo, born and bred in Melbourne. He spent a couple of years as a mathematics teacher before moving into Insurance and Superannuation/Investments first as a trainee actuary and then as a business analyst with some of the largest institutions in Australia and worked in Paris France for 3 years (2000 – 2003) with AXA.
Article cross-posted from Brownstone Institute.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.