The 'Gonzalo Lira is an SBU asset' debate
And the danger of confirmation bias
Intro to Gonzalo Lira
In my post Where am I getting all this from?, I credited Gonzalo Lira with being one of the first people to give me a glimpse through the cracks of the media blackout surrounding the Ukraine conflict, back in March 2022. I knew that what our news was saying was hugely biased and sometimes untrue, but once Russian news was blocked, although I had the Russian MoD Telegram channel I was at a loss knowing where to look for truly independent voices. I first saw one of his videos reposted on Facebook with no mention of his name, but within hours the video had vanished without a trace. I saw him again a few weeks later on YouTube and immediately followed him, and that introduced me to The Duran, Eva K Bartlett, Patrick Lancaster and many others.
Gonzalo is a fifty-something US-Chilean man, best known before 2022 as ‘dating coach’ blogger and vlogger Coach Red Pill. In February 2022 he was in Kiev (his wife is Ukrainian, but she was not with him) and he started making videos extremely critical of both the western media and the Ukrainian government, and by extension the US government. The first video he made on the subject of Ukraine was very short, recorded in the restaurant of the five-star hotel in Kiev where he was staying, and in it he called out all the ‘system pig’ journalists sitting around him, eating dinner in comfort while writing lies about the Russian invasion. Turns out that that video got him kicked out of the hotel by the manager.
The first video on his Gonzalo Lira YouTube channel, Punching Up: Zelensky, Kolomoyskyi, Ukraine, and What’s Going On came a few days later, a 2-hour long livestream (watched by ~1500 of his fans, and some trolls) in which he detailed the events that had followed the hotel video, and another video that he made afterwards, which had been cut up and had gone viral all over the world, including in Russia. This viral video was the one that I had seen a clip of on Facebook.
In Punching Up, he recounts how he had by sheer luck evaded a group of men who were looking for him, whom the receptionist at his apartment block had called ‘Banderistas’ - i.e. followers of Stepan Bandera, therefore likely either SBU (the Security Services of Ukraine, also abbreviated to SSU) or one of the nationalist battalions. They were after him as a result of the video that I saw on Facebook going viral, and it wasn’t just him. This was the same day that the pro-Russian mayor of Kremenna Viktor Struk was abducted and later found dead in the centre of his town. The linked Daily Mail article quotes Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the Interior Minister of Ukraine as saying of Struk, “One traitor of Ukraine became less!” - and the Daily Mail gives the impression that they feel the same way.
Although it’s 2 hours long, Punching Up is still worth listening to in its entirety as a time capsule of what people thought was going to happen in the early days of the SMO, and of course for his detailed summary of Zelensky’s rise to power, as the puppet of Ukrainian-Israeli-Cypriot oligarch and failed politician Ihor Kolomoisky. It’s a long, rambling video in which Lira gets visibly angry talking about how NATO led Ukraine down the garden path with empty promises of membership, and about the thugs in power in Ukraine, and how Russia was forced to take action to stop these thugs from massacring civilians in the Donbas. He’s also obviously shaken by his own escape from the goons that were looking for him - he says in the video that he is now in a safe location in Kharkov.
As the videos on his Gonzalo Lira channel began to attract quite a lot of views - although even now, the most that any one video has is only 360k - the mainstream media clearly decided he could no longer be ignored. The Daily Beast published a hit piece on him, focusing on his ‘seedy’ past as a dating blogger and calling into question the veracity of his claims. The Bulwark did the same, dredging up some vulgar tweets he’d made in the past as evidence of his latent bigotry and therefore general untrustworthiness.
After the Daily Beast article came out, Lira published a video titled The Daily Beast Is Trying To Get Me Killed in which he lays out exactly how the author of the article simultaneously acknowledges that the SBU has been looking for him, and admits to contacting the Ukrainian authorities for comment about him. He is again clearly angered by the cowardly behaviour of the writer of the hit piece (whom he doesn’t name), and he declares that if he winds up dead or disappeared, his blood will be on the hands of The Daily Beast.
He kept making videos and doing livestreams, the last one being a livestream on April 11th 2022 in which he hosted a discussion with Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector who tried to prevent the Iraq war and who is one of the alt-media voices speaking out against the media narrative on Ukraine.
Lira’s first disappearance and reappearance
On April 15th 2022, he stopped posting on Twitter. He had tweeted (on his now-defunct original account) that “If you haven’t heard from me in 12 hours or more, put my name on this list [of people who have run afoul of the Zelensky regime]”. There was a lot of concern for him and speculation online as to what might have happened to him, especially given that tweet.
Five days later, Ritter posted on Facebook that he believed Lira was dead, because he had seen Telegram posts from the Ukrainian nationalist unit ‘Kraken’, in which they appeared to claim to have killed him. He was taking Lira’s tweet seriously, assuming that since five days had passed, Lira was in fact dead.
Then on April 22nd, Lira reappeared. By his own account he was arrested by the SBU and held for 7 days, but he said that he had signed a legal document preventing him from talking about what happened during that time. He said that his cell phone had been seized, so he no longer had access to his Gonzalo Lira Youtube account or his Telegram and Twitter accounts. It should be noted that when he surfaced after his ‘lost week’, he looked healthy and fairly cheerful. This immediately made people suspicious, given what others have said - and what he himself had been saying previously - about the SBU.
He created a new YouTube account, this time posting his solo videos under Videos and hosting ‘Roundtable’ chats with other alt-media commentators in the Live section. He seemed to be in the same apartment in all the videos, and his whereabouts must have been known to the Ukrainian authorities now.
He went on posting videos critical of Ukraine and the US, but they lacked some of the righteous anger that had been in the videos on his original channel. He made some pretty big predictions, with titles like Zelensky Is About To Be Assassinated By The Americans and About The Coming Race Riots. He also took umbrage with Scott Ritter, going so far as to say that I No Longer Trust Scott Ritter, partly because Ritter had announced that he believed Lira was dead.
Lira’s principal criticism of Ritter was that he had asserted publicly that Lira had been “kidnapped, tortured and killed by the Kraken unit, part of the Azov battalion” without proof. I don’t know why Ritter was so sure about the torture and killing part, but Lira himself had tweeted that if he were to go incommunicado for 12 hours, it should be assumed he had been abducted by the Ukrainian security services, and Ritter was amplifying his message. Lira also took issue with Ritter referring to him as Gonzo, when he had never gone by that name.
Lira’s solo videos weren’t bad, but they got more and more rambling and speculative, in a way that IMHO indicated the cabin fever of a man not able to leave his apartment. The Roundtable discussions often did little more than rehash what Lira or the guests had said before, and I stopped watching them fairly early on.
Lira’s second disappearance and brief reappearance
On May 5th 2023, The Daily Beast were happy to report that on May 1st, Lira had been arrested again by the SBU, who this time released a video of his arrest at gunpoint, as well as a short montage showing his ‘Russian propaganda’.
Commentators like Brian Berletic (AKA The New Atlas) had a more sympathetic take on his arrest. A #FreeGonzaloLira online campaign was launched and requests were made to the US State Dept to look into his plight, but they were uncooperative.
He was not heard from again until August 1st, when he suddenly posted a 25-tweet-long thread on Twitter, and three 15-minute-long videos on YouTube, announcing that he was at the Hungarian border, about to try and cross into Hungary to claim asylum in the hope that they would not send him back to Ukraine. He said that he had been indicted and told that he would be found guilty, and would be sent to a labour camp for five to eight years which, he said, would kill him. He posted photos of the indictment against him (in Ukrainian and English) and he described his period in detention since May 1st, including alleging that he was beaten very badly and extorted for $70k.
In his videos he looks noticeably more disheveled and older than in any other previous videos. He says that he has traveled across the country on his motorbike, in which case he must have been tired and quite desperate. He says that if he is not heard from again soon, it should be assumed that he was unsuccessful in getting into Hungary, or that he has been sent back to Ukraine. He asked his viewers to ‘raise hell’ if this was the case.
He has not been heard from publicly (i.e. posted on Twitter or YouTube) since then. However, there has been a huge amount of discussion in the alt-media sphere about him, and this time it has not been as unanimously sympathetic as after his first disappearance in April 2022.
The backlash, and the backlash against the backlash
On August 2nd Eva K Bartlett posted on Telegram a timeline of Lira’s actions since coming to public attention, surmising that although she didn’t wish him harm, she found his story implausible and would not be surprised to find out that he was working with the SBU. She noted that she had been one of those to raise awareness of him the first time he went missing, as had Scott Ritter whom he had then turned on. She also said that he does not appear to her to have the mannerisms of torture victims that she has spoken to.
On August 2nd Brian Berletic published a video announcing that Lira had resurfaced, blaming the US State Dept for being either indifferent about or complicit in his detention, and challenging claims that he could be an SBU asset.
Scott Ritter came out with a long post on August 8th in which he goes into great detail about why he believes that Lira must have been an SBU asset after his initial release.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA agent and vocal critic of US policy towards Ukraine, published a post on August 9th critical of Ritter’s speculation that Lira was an SBU asset, in which he says he cannot see how Lira’s actions benefited Ukraine or the SBU. Johnson said that he has known Ritter for quite some time.
Vanessa Beeley tweeted that she was disappointed that Berletic had blocked her on Twitter for holding '“opposing views based on my own research & conclusions” regarding Lira. Comments were made that Berletic and Lira might have been in ‘similar situations in life’, referring to Lira’s dating coach material and presumably inferring that Berletic might live in Thailand for similar ‘sleazy’ reasons.
In short, his reappearance fractured the online community that had been united around exposing what was happening in Ukraine, and it did so along absolutely predictable lines. Ritter distrusted him completely, as you might expect from someone whom Lira had himself denounced. Beeley and Bartlett, both female war reporters reporting on the ground from warzones, doubted him for entirely legitimate reasons, but it’s impossible not to wonder whether their opinions were coloured by the misogynistic things he’s said in the past.
For my own part, when I posted about him on Facebook after his first disappearance, I defended him against (male) detractors who had read the Bulwark and Daily Beast pieces about him, and saw him purely as a misogynist pig. I was prepared to hold my nose regarding the misogyny because I felt it had nothing to do with the valuable perspective he was offering on the war in Ukraine. The detractors believed - and still believe - the mainstream narrative on Ukraine, so for them he was a misogynist pig and a Russian propagandist, and therefore beyond redemption.
My thoughts
I don’t pretend to have any more privileged information than anyone else regarding Lira, but I have at least watched all of his solo videos since he began his first Gonzalo Lira channel. I wouldn’t have watched them if I thought he was an SBU asset, and at no time did his stance on the Ukrainian security services soften, even after having been detained and released by them. He has always insisted that Ukrainians are lovely people, but that the worst among them have been pushed into positions of power by corrupt politicians in Ukraine and the US.
I can believe that everything he’s said has been sincere, but that doesn’t mean he was always correct about everything. It’s important not to fall into the trap of completely dismissing someone because of something they said that turned out to be wrong, or that you found in some way offensive - this is a tactic the mainstream media uses all the time to silence dissenting voices, and it is always used selectively. Media coverage of Trump and Biden, anyone?
I agree with Brian Berletic about the lack of benefit to the SBU of using him as an asset after his first release. None of the people who went on his roundtable have hidden their views on Ukraine, so to suspect that it was a ‘honeypot’ to entice these people into outing themselves seems nonsensical. The possibility that Lira’s laptop might have been monitored to get their contact details is slightly more plausible, but then again that would probably only give the SBU access to their private exchanges with Lira, which couldn’t have been terribly revealing.
One possible explanation that I haven’t seen proposed elsewhere, is that the SBU let him go purely because of how it undermined what Lira had been saying about them disappearing dissidents. If those men had got to him on March 2nd 2022, he might have become just another forgotten footnote to the war, a blogger who went missing after saying some inconvenient things. He may have saved his own life by publishing the video immediately afterwards in which he went into great detail about Zelensky’s rise to power, since once that took off, he had enough of an online presence for people outside of Ukraine to notice and kick up a stink.
I have no idea why the SBU chose to arrest him the second time when they did, other than that it was in the week preceding their hyped counter-offensive. I think that all the video they released as evidence of his status as an enemy propagandist dated back to before his first arrest.
I think the possibility should not be discounted, that he is simply not a well-known enough figure to warrant the protection he clearly received after his first release. Those of us who know who he is might be invested in his wellbeing, but he is far from a household name. As I learned when I posted about him on Facebook, most people are more than happy to Google his name and base their opinion of him on what a supposedly trustworthy news outlet has said about him1, rather than listen to what he has to say. It doesn’t help that there are dozens of hours of his videos, he has a tendency to ramble, and that some of the more recent content really was wandering into the realms of paranoid crack-pottery. The only media sources supporting him are themselves regularly defamed, and when some of those sources themselves start to express scepticism, his credibility is further damaged.
I really hope that Gonzalo is OK. I don’t see how it makes any sense for him to have been an SBU asset, other than as a figure to attract ridicule and fracture the movement that he was a part of. I pray that he doesn’t have to turn up dead for those who doubted him to accept that he was genuine; in fact, that might serve to confirm their suspicions that he was used by the SBU, and disposed of when he had outlived his usefulness. Such is the danger of confirmation bias in making sense of the unknowable.
Ultimately his is but one story in a cacophony of tragedy, and it feels somewhat distasteful to focus on it when others have it so much worse, like the four-year-old girl killed by shelling in Donetsk on August 9th, also unnoticed by western media. Unfortunately that’s the nature of fame in the social media age, and parasocial relationships in general.
This also applies to Patrick Lancaster, who has none of the ‘manosphere’ baggage that Lira does, but about whom numerous hit pieces have been written.
It's not a bad thing if every pickup artist in the world is shot by the SBU. Double tap to the head. SBU is like the Gestapo, but a broken clock is right twice a day.