Gonzalo Lira is dead

For real this time

Gonzalo Lira, the US-Chilean vlogger who got caught up in the Ukrainian government’s massive suppression of dissent after Russia launched its Special Military Operation to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, has died in prison, according to journalist Alex Rubinstein. His father, Gonzalo Lira Sr., made this statement:

I cannot accept the way my son has died. He was tortured, extorted, incommunicado for 8 months and 11 days and the US Embassy did nothing to help my son. The responsibility of this tragedy is the dictator Zelensky with the concurrence of a senile American President, Joe Biden.

Gonzalo wrote this letter to his sister recently, which was passed to his father:

I wrote about Gonzalo in August when he reappeared after a period of absence from posting on social media, in a series of tweets and videos from the Ukrainian-Hungarian border, which he said he was about to try and cross to escape his show trial in Ukraine in which he said he was sure he would be found guilty and sent to prison, where he said he would probably die.

In February and March 2022, Gonzalo was one of the brave souls who spoke out against what was going on in Ukraine - which meant speaking out against Biden, the warmongering uniparty cabal in the US State Department, the complicit ‘system pigs’ in the media, and all the power and money that those interests represent. People like me who listened and passed on what he was saying, saw how the weak and the cowardly would tear down Gonzalo and anyone else daring to challenge the Empire Narrative, and we took abuse and lost friends over it. But we didn’t forget what he was saying, because some of us can still tell when we’re being bullshitted, and we don’t care how many hollow people around us mock us and tell us how bad and stupid we are for thinking for ourselves.

Gonzalo might have said some brutally honest - and by many metrics, pretty offensive - things about dating in his videos as Coach Red Pill, but they were not what he was persecuted for, no matter how the trolls try to tell you that he deserved his fate because of them, or that he was “passing info to the Russians” (give me a break). Gonzalo Lira was killed for speaking the truth. Never forget that.

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Naked Capitalism also wrote a long post about him on Jan 12, which included crediting him with exposing Ukraine war-grifter James Vasquez - something I haven’t even mentioned in my posts about him, but which was significant. As Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism points out, the New York Times and Business Insider later published articles about Vasquez, never mentioning Gonzalo. Quite incredibly, the Business Insider article even talks in its headline about Vasquez’s “stolen valor”; that’s in the headline of an article for which they stole the story and didn’t attribute the original journalist. Gonzalo was a real, actual journalist, whereas these cowards are nothing more than state stenographers.

On Jan 13, Alex Christoforou of The Duran posted his regular daily video which included a tribute to Gonzalo, who was a frequent guest on The Duran.