Ben Roberts-Smith Versus The Freak Show

by David Archibald

11 April 2026

 

A couple of weeks ago, while attending the launch of the Australia-Vietnam Chamber of Commerce, I had the opportunity to ask Jonathon Huston, former Army captain and now Liberal member for the state seat of Nedlands, what he thought of Ben Roberts-Smith. Mr Huston replied that Mr Roberts-Smith is a war criminal and rattled off details of five murders that Mr Roberts-Smith is supposed to have committed, plus the additional charge that he was once not completely respectful to a group of officers.

A week later and those same five assertions of murder were used as the excuse for the ongoing torment of Ben Roberts-Smith. The manner of his arrest was political theatre. NSW Police copied the modus operandi of police in the UK in the arrest of Graham Linehan, author of the Father Ted series. Mr Lineham was escorted off an American Airlines flight at Heathrow Airport by five armed police officers and charged with making disrespectful comments online about trannies using female restrooms. To maximise the political theatre of Ben Roberts-Smith’s arrest, journalist Nick McKenzie of the Age, a regime favourite in the fourth estate, was given advance notice of the arrest, as was Channel Nine. Why arrest him in Sydney when they could have done that any day of the week in Brisbane? The persecution was jurisdiction-shopping. A Federal charge of this nature has to be before a jury, not a single judge. The persecution is likely to get a more ‘diverse’ jury in Sydney than in Brisbane. They think they can get one more likely to convict. This also tells us that they know they have a nonexistent case.

Mr Roberts-Smith is being persecuted because he is the antithesis of the freak show that is currently running the Department of Defence since at least 2005. The sort of person they prefer to associate with is another Army captain, Captain Jesse Noble, the Darwin-based subject of the title of this article:

From that article, this is a photograph of Captain Noble wearing his dress, lippy and painted fingernails to work:

 

 

This is the sort of man that the Army’s high command would prefer to have defending Australia, not the fearless Corporal Roberts-Smith. Senior officers backed a bid by Captain Noble that he be allowed to wear a dress to work. That means that those same senior officers are social engineers, who would rather remake society in their own image than be combat-effective. A captain runs a company of about 100 soldiers. In the life and death business of soldiering, soldiers put their trust in their officers to do the best by them, or not if the officer is a bloke in a dress. None could take him seriously. The high command would also be suppressing normal people and promoting their own kind instead.

The importance of trust in having an effective army is mentioned by long time defence analyst Paul Dibb:

The dearth of professional non-commissioned officers means that totalitarian armies are unable to fight effectively because NCOs provide the vital link between officers and soldiers about battlefield decision-making. Military command and control culture boils down to trust, including at the operational level.

You may think that just because a bloke wants to wear a dress to work doesn’t necessarily mean that he thinks he is woman trapped in a man’s body. Which, if that were the case, would be a bad thing because it would mean he has gender dysphoria. This is the worst mental illness to have, because it has the highest suicide rate – 50%. He may look pretty in his dress, and he may feel pretty, but looks can be deceiving. So, if he doesn’t have gender dysphoria, what particular condition might it be? A possibility is transvestic fetishism as described by the American Psychological Association:

Transvestic fetishism is a psychiatric diagnosis applied to men who are thought to have an excessive sexual or erotic interest in cross-dressing; this interest is often expressed in autoerotic behaviour. It differs from cross-dressing for entertainment or other purposes that do not involve sexual arousal. Under the name transvestic disorder, it is categorised as a paraphilia.

Whatever it is, expecting normal people to put up with it is poking them in the eye with a burnt stick. The high command of the Australian Defence Force would have been squealing with glee in forcing a cross-dresser on the lower ranks.

If it makes you feel any better, it is not just the Australian Defence Force that was afflicted. Until recently, West Point, where the cream of the U.S. Army officer corps start their careers, had a course entitled “Uniformed Perspectives: The Evolution of Cross-Dressing in the Military and Gender Norms”.

Proscriptions against cross-dressing in public are sensible. Because of my attendance at Bible Study, I am aware that this offence against society was  mentioned 3,400 years ago in Deuteronomy 22:5:

A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does such things is abhorrent.

While on the subject of Army captains, Andrew Hastie, former Army captain and Liberal member for the federal seat of Canning, has broken cover as a socialist and outed himself as a Malcolm Turnbull supporter. He spoke of a ‘father-son dynamic’ with the reviled former Prime Minister — stomach churning. In his preselection for the seat of Canning, Hastie was supported by Julie Bishop. This was a sign that he would prove to be a continual disappointment. Turnbull, Bishop and Hastie all pretended to be conservatives in order to get into Parliament. Being a weasel, Mr Hastie MP is jealous of Ben Roberts-Smith and told tales about him:

 

From a Sydney newspaper, weasel on the left and authentic hero on the right

 

A doctor who served with the SAS in Afghanistan, Dr Daniel Mealey of Melbourne, sheds further light on Mr Hastie’s moral failings in this article.

Back to the freak show. Australia has made no effort towards using drones in warfare, or defending against them, even though drones are causing over 90% of the casualties in the Ukraine War. We will be wiped out by any aggressor using them, as was shown by a recent NATO exercise in which 10 Ukrainian drone operators destroyed two battalions’ worth of armour in a day. We have made baby steps towards the prior overarching technology by assembling missiles in Australia. The bloke put in charge of this missile project is Air Marshall Leon Phillips. The first thing he did, before any missile was assembled, was to produce a ‘harmony’ cookbook:

 

Phillips in his cosplay as a military officer, the cookbook paid for by taxpayers, and being transfixed by an attachment to his blender.

 

Screwdriver assembly of missiles in Australia is useless because production stops when the supply of the parts stops. We are going to make missiles for the HIMARS launchers in Australia, but all the parts will come from Lockheed in the U.S.  If Australia is going the wrong way about it, what is the right way to make missiles? The Russians make a lot of missiles and this is how they go about it at the Krasnoyarsk machine building plant that makes intercontinental ballistic missiles:

 

 

Some 40% of the effort involved is machining of castings in CNC lathes and another 23% is assembly. The only real specialist knowledge is in designing the castings. Assembly is so simple that Russia imported Ugandan females to do that (the average IQ in Uganda is 76).

That fact reminds us of another consequence of Captain Noble’s dress, fingernail polish and lippy. People have resigned from the Australian Army because, in their words, they ‘didn’t join the army to salute a bloke in a dress’. For that same reason, parents are discouraging their children from joining the army. Our armed forces aren’t meeting their recruiting numbers. Our high command interprets this as being due to Australians not wanting to defend the country anymore. So, they concocted a scheme in which soldiers from Papua New Guinea could transfer to the Australian Army and be rewarded with citizenship. One problem with that is that, like Uganda, Papua New Guinea has an average IQ of 76. The US Army found out back in WW2 that there was no role in the army for anyone with an IQ less than 83. In Papua New Guinea, only 32% of the males would have an IQ of 83 and higher. There is another problem with mercenaries that Machievelli pointed out more than five hundred years ago:

Now, mercenary and auxiliary forces are useless and dangerous; and any ruler who keeps his state dependent upon mercenaries will never have real peace and security, for they are disorganised, undisciplined, ambitious, and faithless.

The U.S. Department of Defense solved its recruitment problem by firing all its kooks and tranny-lovers. Their recruitment numbers then went through the roof. Ours will too once we do the same.

Next up in the freak show is the bloke in charge of the Army, Lieutenant General Simon Stuart. In the Army he is considered to be an intellectual because he wrecked a Bushmaster truck by replacing the diesel engine with batteries. General Stuart must live in a world of magic in which you can wish things into existence. Because there is no way of recharging electric trucks on the battlefield. The Army is now considering towing a generator behind it. (Humans normally blink every five seconds or so. This is a video of the general reading from an autocue. This takes so much brain power that his autonomic processes shut down to cope and he doesn’t blink for minutes on end.)

 

 

Of course the Australian Defence Force has a Net Zero strategy. It is a completely stupid, useless thing to do. The Bushmaster was born diesel but identified as electric. Lieutenant General Stuart sensed this need to transition.

Some of the high command’s preoccupations are mildly amusing; following is a story of something more darkly psychotic. In 2004, the Army wanted Black Hawk helicopters but then PM, John Howard, opted for the Airbus offering instead, because Airbus promised $1 billion in offsets which never materialised. Called the Taipan in Australian service, we ended up with 45.

Twenty years later, the Army is getting Black Hawks. The second-hand Taipans would have been worth $20 million each on the second hand market and thus $900 million for the lot. Instead of selling them for $900 million or giving them to Ukraine, the Army pulled the rotors off and buried them in a pit. Which is the same as the fate of the F-111s of the RAAF. Apparently the spares were worth a further $450 million so the whole exercise cost us some $1,350 million.

In psychological terms, this is an example of an Antisocial Personality Disorder based in spitefulness and malicious compliance. If the Australian Army didn’t want them, nobody else was going to get them. Everyone in this saga, up to the Prime Minister, is complicit. Would you put your trust in anyone who maliciously squanders $1,350 million? The upper ranks of the Australian Defence Force are a seething mass of psychoses. Some want to wear dresses and feel pretty; others bury their equipment in a pit.

Normally, with working equipment, you park them up in a shed. With 43 Taipans taking up 400 square metres each, a shed at $1,650 per square metre to house them would have cost $26.4 million. Here are the helicopters in Townsville prior to burial:

 

What do Hitler, Genghis Kahn, and these 43 helicopters have in common? They are all buried in unmarked graves.

 

And then it gets worse. The next piece of evidence that the higher ranks of our Australian Defence Force is unfit for command is the fantasy fiction of a Canberra sociologist, a Dr Crompvoets. It’s a small literary niche–the high command’s need for lurid stories about how unspeakably beastly Australian special forces are. But it pays well.

According to the previous defence minister Dutton, Dr Crompvoets was paid $6 million over a few years. It started in 2016 when General Angus Campbell commissioned a secret report on SAS culture.

Members of the SAS, past and present, were encouraged to contact Dr Crompvoets anonymously and tell tales of what went on in the regiment. Some of the lurid tales were included in her report as fact. For example:

‘The inquiry has found that there is credible information that junior soldiers were required by the patrol commanders to shoot a prisoner, in order to achieve that soldier’s first kill, in a practice that was known as ‘blooding’. ‘Throwdowns would be placed with the body, and a ‘cover story’ was created for the purposes of operational reporting and to deflect scrutiny. This was reinforced with a code of silence.’

As several thousand Australian troops have rotated through Afghanistan, you would expect at least several hundred of those to have undergone the ‘blooding’ initiation. But none were named in the subsequent Brereton Report, which repeated some of Dr Crompvoets’ other fantasy fiction. Take this example from page 120 of the Brereton report:

Clearance Operations. Dr Crompvoets was told that, after squirters were ‘dealt’ with, Special Forces would then cordon off a whole village, taking men and boys to guesthouses, which are typically on the edge of a village. There they would be tied up and tortured by Special Forces, sometimes for days. When the Special Forces left, the men and boys would be found dead: shot in the head or blindfolded and with throats slit.

The implication was that there are a lot of villages in Afghanistan with only women and girls left because Australian soldiers killed all the males. But no such village was named in the report. And none have been found since. Yet the high command of the Australian Defence Force believed these fairy tales. Nobody even raised the possibility that these stories could be fabrications. They read what they wanted to believe, that ordinary Australian soldiers are sadistic murderers.

The fact that the Department’s senior management believed the Brereton Report means that they have no understanding of the troops they are commanding, and precious little grip on reality otherwise. And most likely loathe the troops under their command.

Brereton couldn’t get the stories on atrocities that he wanted until he started paying Afghans to tell them. Basically, Brereton had insufficient mental acuity to understand that if he wasn’t getting stories of the atrocities he wanted, perhaps there hadn’t been any atrocities. Eventually the Afghans twigged to what Brereton was about and made up stories in order to be paid for the effort.

That is the context of the persecution of Ben Roberts-Smith. Others have also seen the darkness in the Australian Defence Force. Defence journalist Kym Bergman wrote last year,

Defence culture has changed into something secretive, suspicious of the outside world and thoroughly unpleasant.

There is a solution to our problem. Australia needs a repeat of the 1940 Canberra air disaster — but scaled up to today’s greater population. Australia had entered WW2 a year before and our operational conduct had been poor. A year later, at 10.15 am on 13^th August, 1940, an RAAF Hudson bomber crashed on approach to Canberra Airport, killing all 10 on board. The dead included the Chief of the General Staff, two ministers of the Crown and other notables. New people were appointed to replace those who died in the crash, and Australia’s conduct of the war improved appreciably.

The higher ranks of the Australian Defence Force have been captured by a claque of self-perpetuating social-justice warriors who rate global warming as a bigger threat than China. They actively discriminate against anyone who doesn’t have the same mindset. The system won’t reform by itself. It requires a decapitation event.

 

The crashed Hudson bomber – our inspiration for a better future.

 

David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.

 

P.S. Many have told the story of Ben Roberts-Smith’s award of the Victoria Cross, in which he took on several machine gun posts in an afternoon. It is also worth recounting the citation for his Medal for Gallantry:

For gallantry in action in hazardous circumstances as a patrol sniper in the Special Operations Task Group – Task Force 637, whilst deployed on Operation SLIPPER Rotation Three Afghanistan, May – September 2006.

On the night of 31st May 2006, Lance Corporal Roberts-Smith was employed as a patrol scout and sniper in a patrol which was tasked with establishing an Observation Post near the Chora Pass in extremely rugged terrain overlooking an Anti Coalition Militia sanctuary. Early in the patrol, after an arduous ten hour foot infiltration up the side of a mountain, the patrol was required to coordinate offensive air support to assist a combined Special Operations Task Group and other Special Forces patrol who were in contact with the Anti Coalition Militia in the valley floor to their north. Following this engagement the patrol remained in the Observation Post to continue providing vital information on the Anti Coalition Militia in the area. This comprehensive reporting had a significant effect on shaping the local area for the subsequent coalition forces operation.

On the 2nd June, the Observation Post had become the focus of the Anti Coalition Militia force and repeated attempts to locate and surround the position ensued. In one particular incident the Militia attempted to outflank the Observation Post. Lance Corporal Roberts-Smith was part of a two man team tasked to move out of their relatively secure Observation Post in order to locate and neutralize the Militia and regain the initiative. This task was successfully achieved.

In another incident, two Anti Coalition Militia attempted to attack the Observation Post from a different flank, Lance Corporal Roberts-Smith again moved to support and neutralise one of these Militia. Lance Corporal Roberts-Smith then realised that the forward edge of the Observation Post was not secure and made the decision to split the team and take up an exposed position forward of the patrol so he could effectively employ his sniper weapon. Whilst isolated, and in his precarious position, he observed a group of sixteen Anti Coalition Militia advancing across open ground towards the Observation Post. Lance Corporal Roberts-Smith effectively employed his sniper rifle to stop their advance whilst receiving very accurate small arms fire from another group of Militia to his flank.

Through his efforts, Lance Corporal Roberts-Smith maintained the initiative and ensured that his patrol remained secure by holding this position without support for twenty minutes. He was eventually reinforced by his original team member and together they continued to hold off the Militia advance for a further twenty minutes until offensive air support arrived.

Lance Corporal Roberts-Smith’s actions on the 2nd June 2006, whilst under heavy Anti Coalition Militia fire and in a precarious position, threatened by a numerically superior force, are testament to his courage, tenacity and sense of duty to his patrol. His display of gallantry in disregarding his own personal safety in maintaining an exposed sniper position under sustained fire with a risk of being surrounded by the Anti Coalition Militia was outstanding. His actions, in order to safeguard his patrol, were of the highest order and in keeping with the finest traditions of Special Operations Command Australia, the Australian Army and the Australian Defence Force.

P.S. 2

The persecution of Ben Roberts-Smith has just become more difficult: https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/2043657255418200463