When the Ukraine war kicked off over a year ago, Latinx sex tourist/manosphere grifter Gonzalo Lira rebranded as an on-the-ground “expert” on the Ukraine war, as he was living in Kharkiv where he had established himself years ago hunting for White women.
Shortly after the war started, Lira — who has been a frequent guest on Russia Today pimping various types of “analysis” from culture, economics to geopolitics — disappeared from his social channels and then turned up a week later claiming to have been kidnapped by the Ukrainian secret police. There’s not much evidence this even happened other than his word. I wouldn’t put it past him to have faked the whole incident for publicity.
But it appears the elder sex tourist’s fantasies have come true: the Ukrainian police just picked him up for real.
According to investigation, the man is a citizen of a Latin American country but has lived in Kharkiv for several years. Law enforcement authorities accuse him of supporting Russian occupation and valorizing Moscow’s apparent war crimes during the war.
Additionally, he is said to have engaged in attempts to discredit Ukraine’s highest military and political leadership.
In spring 2022, he filmed provocative videos, showing the faces of Ukrainian soldiers and insulting the country’s defenders. He posted the videos on YouTube and Twitter, where he has nearly 300,000 subscribers.
The SBU has also accused him of denying the facts of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian cities and the mass killings of civilians by the invading forces.
During a search of his possessions, law enforcement officials found mobile phones and a computer that contained evidence of his illegal activity.
He has been remanded in custody by the court, and the investigation is ongoing.
Lira is well-known for being a sleazeball grifter who jumps on whatever he thinks is currently popular, fashioning new “expertise” in the trending area to market himself as a guru to get your dollars.
According to publicly available materials and his own statements, Lira has a long track record of jumping between careers. In the late ’90s, he wrote pulpy action novels about manly men. In the aughts, he switched over to filmmaking for a spell. Then, around 2010, he refashioned himself as a supposed expert in economics, writing commentary for Business Insider and ZeroHedge and appearing as a pundit on “alternative media” programs.
Steve Keen, a relatively well-known Australian economist, told The Daily Beast that Lira contacted him out of nowhere about a decade ago to compliment Keen’s analyses, and suggest that they work together on a project. Ultimately, Keen said, Lira proposed a paid subscription content creation model, which he claimed he could effectively market for the two of them. Keen added that he looked Lira up and saw that figures he knew in the alt media world had interviewed him, so he figured he must be somewhat credible, and decided to give this a shot.
“It is an experience I regret,” he told The Daily Beast. He said Lira overstated and over-promised what he could do, then under-delivered. He claimed Lira was arrogant, and so rude to Keen’s other employees and collaborators that it at least hastened many of their departures.
Keen said he regrets not doing better due diligence on Lira, which he believes would have led him to realize that he was not capable or trustworthy. He now describes Lira as a “sleaze” who, anytime he fails in a project, uses his supreme self-confidence to refashion himself into an “expert” on some new topic. “If he is the source for any claim, my reaction would be to strongly doubt the veracity of that claim,” he said of Lira’s current commentary.
…
But he seemed to largely shift over to COVID conspiracy commentary, and the occasional note on a supposed coming geopolitical storm. However, as late as mid-February, he insisted that Russia would never invade Ukraine, and that fears about a coming invasion were all drummed up by Western propaganda, pointed out Alex MacKenzie, an expert on Ukraine and its history of conflict with Russia at the United Kingdom’s University of Liverpool who reviewed a fair amount of Lira’s recent videos and posts. Lira now insists in interviews that he saw the invasion coming well ahead of time—because he’s smart like that.
When the war broke out, no matter what Lira was doing, it made sense for him to say something because he lived and had family there, Michael noted. But several observers The Daily Beast spoke to suggested that he might have adopted his new persona as an ostensibly neutral but in fact evidently pro-Russian commentator on the conflict because he saw a market for the Putin-praising viewpoint in the spaces he inhabited, and may have wanted a new hustle.
Lira counts a number of internet media pundits as his friends and supporters, like these two clowns who are crying about his arrest while they simultaneously cheer on Putin’s war and the arrest of thousands of Russians who protest the war:
Gariepy said in a previous stream that he supports the White genocide in Ukraine because he dislikes Western governments and views it as collective revenge against governments he doesn’t like. So White Ukrainians must die to satisfy his lust for revenge against the Canadian government or something.
So these dorks are mad that a Latino immigrant — who made Ukraine his home and repays them by acting as a fifth columnist propagandist in support of Russia’s war against their country — is being punished for his treachery, yet at the same time they vigorously support all of Putin’s measures to silence his own people’s discontent.
The highly selective criticism that we’ve been witnessing here, where Ukraine defending itself is portrayed as “aggression” and Ukraine locking up fifth columnist subversives aiding Russia’s war aims is decried as “oppression,” is proof these people are either on the Russian payroll or trying to get on it. This is exactly why I view the “alternative” media, which is nothing more than a collection of amateur and clownish internet-based pundits, as a cat’s paw for the Kremlin. It is not serious media or journalism, it is all revenge-based contrarian hot takes done for clicks, dollars and self-aggrandizement.
Ukrainian authorities found Lira’s apartment littered with pro-Putin books and paraphernalia. It appears the dork was fully immersed in the world of Putinism. Some of the thoughts probably running through Lira’s mind is that Putin is an anti-Western strongman who has the power to nuke Western White people off the planet, a scenario Lira looks forward to as revenge for his repeated sexual failures with White women.
Strangely though, the uninformed circus jester Lira says in this clip that Putin is an “ethnic nationalist but not an imperialist,” the exact reverse of the truth:
As I demonstrated in my latest video Putin’s Black Power Pivot, Putin is opposed to ethnic nationalism precisely because he is a Eurasian multicultural imperialist who wants to expand Russia’s borders and subsume multitudes of non-Russians into the empire by forcing Russian customs and language upon them. The exact opposite of ethnic nationalism.
If you enjoyed this content, consider becoming a member and subscribe by email below for future posts.
