WITH LINKED REFERENCES COLLECTED EXCLUSIVELY FROM PUBLICLY AVAILABLE INFORMATION, 1995-2024

Key takeaways

For nearly two years, every major Russian propagandist has been hanging the validation of their narrative on Gonzalo Lira, an “inside man” American in Ukraine confirming what they said.

We let them.

Lira is a serial fraud and pathological liar. Lira demonstrably never held these views before the war and has been living out power fantasies and trying to become a leader for years.

They could have checked Lira’s history at any time. This report is compiled strictly from publicly available information, and it’s been publicly available long before the war.

His history predates Zelensky’s presidency, Russia’s occupation of Crimea and Donbas, Euromaidan, and the Orange Revolution.

In fact, Lira’s history of violence, misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, grifting, fraud, and self-victimization is so lengthy that his suspension for sexually assaulting a student at Dartmouth in September 1991 happened before Ukraine was even an independent state, which came into being with the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26 of that year.

Since the only American in Ukraine confirming their views is a fraud, we can confirm their fictitious narrative of Ukraine must also be a fraud.

Introduction

Russia is trying to launder their latest propaganda to portray Ukraine as having “detained and killed” a journalist.

Gonzalo Lira is not a journalist and never was.

Lira posted Ukrainian troop locations and other sensitive information to his Telegram channel. 

Lira had a history of sexual assault, theft, fraud, criminality, virulent anti-Semitism, fascism, and white supremacy.

Lira had a serious heart condition, a heavy smoking habit, and refused medication.

Lira has made repeated attempts to conceal this.

We have the proof in his own words. We have provided it below.

As we share this evidence, the link types will be annotated as [web], [arc], [img], [vid], or [snd] to indicate if the evidence is in a live website, web archive, image, video, or sound recording.

Ukraine released Lira within days of his multiple arrests and granted bail to Lira, which he deliberately violated for the express purpose of being rearrested. He had the means to leave the country, which he proved on Telegram before deleting it.

Lira’s alleged health issue, double pneumonia, is readily traceable to his lifelong heavy smoking habit, hostility to medical science, refusal to accept vaccines and refusal to accept preventative and therapeutic medical treatment. When attempting to cross the border, Lira admitted he had a serious heart condition.

Death from pneumonia under perfect circumstances in the West is a real thing, where people die of this all the time. In a country which has seen nearly 2000 medical facilities damaged or destroyed and those still standing choked with casualties from Russia’s war Lira supported, the belief that Lira was special and somehow “killed” is even more bizarre.

Lira “reinvents” his persona every few years, regularly doing “micropurges” of his sites, videos, and information to conceal his habitual failures, scams, emotional explosivity and unsavory associations, such as concealing his links to white supremacists or attempting to bribe forums to remove links to him doxing his rape victim and emails detailing his extortion efforts and theft against his former business partners.

Although Lira attempts to delete incriminating posts and videos, many (but not nearly all) have been saved and archived by people who monitor neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and right-wing extremists.

Lira has long been a familiar subject due to Lira’s association with white supremacists Richard Spencer and Andy “Race” Warski starting circa 2010, as well as his longstanding endorsement of Augusto Pinochet’s US-installed military junta in Chile.

Lira regularly attempts to purge statements or events where he has gotten things drastically wrong and caused his competence to be called into question.

Lira engages in whole-personality “macropurges” when he needs to dispose of “Lira the untrained economics expert” to become “Lira the renewable energy guy” to become “Lira the alt-right figure” to become “Lira the manosphere pickup artist dating coach” to become “Lira the Tyler Durden-obsessed vandal encouraging others to destroy police stations, pharmacies and federal offices” to “Lira the Ukraine expert who says no war will come because Zelensky is a good guy” to become “Lira the Ukraine expert who says war was inevitable because Zelensky is evil”.

These wholesale transformations of Lira’s personality are abrupt and can happen within days of him reorganizing his entire worldview based on how much attention he believes he can receive from it.

The most basic anticipation we can make is that when it becomes clear to the propagandists that Lira was highly toxic, given our discussion of behaviors consistent with personality disorders and psychopathology, they will attempt to claim that Ukraine’s side exploited a mentally ill individual to discredit them.

Why then did they latch on to him? And how did they not discover that fact for themselves?

Personality disorders and psychopathy don’t mitigate responsibility, or else Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, and Aileen Wuornos would all have walked as tragically misunderstood victims.

Lira wasn’t psychotic, he did not have a complete break from reality. Lira knew what he was doing for years was wrong, and he made multiple attempts to conceal it.

As we demonstrate Lira’s own decades-long pathological behavior we will often be re-emphasizing certain points to achieve saturation.

We are aware this is repetitious, and we apologize, but we need to anticipate Russia’s argument deflection techniques. We will close with a guide on how to deal with specific propaganda techniques using examples supplied.

To avoid the inevitable accusations that this is “dehumanizing” to justify “murdering a prisoner”, we will also be summarizing what individual sections prove about claims made by or about Lira.

Summary & initial evidence

“So what if that’s true? Does that mean Ukraine was justified in torturing and murdering a journalist for his free speech just because he’s a fascist, racist, anti-Semitic sexual assaulter? Don’t prisoners have rights? Don’t American sexpats have the right to go to foreign countries and post artillery locations during a war then call it journalism?”

THANKFULLY, NO! FIRST, LIRA IS NOT A JOURNALIST. SECOND, THE REST IS NONSENSE!

Lira calls journalists covering war he said wouldn’t happen “ZOG pigs”

Lira was arrested for posting and sharing troop locations in his Telegram [img], putting journalists at risk for being “Zionist Occupied Government” “system pigs” [img], and engaging in atrocity denial he knew was false, such as claiming Ukraine was conducting false flag strikes on its own populace [img, img] when he previously admitted that it was Russian missile strikes that were hitting downtown Kharkiv [img, img]and other cities Ukraine [img, img], Bucha atrocity denial couched in his fake expert analysis [img].

Lira memory-holed his original claim that Ukraine and Zelensky didn’t want war [img] after Russia invaded.

Lira, a serial contrarian who had previously encouraged others to vandalize federal buildings, police stations, clinics and pharmacies [img] noticed he could adopt others’ talking points and get attention for being “that guy, but actually in Ukraine.”

In fact, despite later adopting the talking point that Euromaidan was a “coup”, Lira not only never mentioned this during his time in Ukraine, voluntarily moving there after Euromaidan, Lira did not know this was a Russian talking point at first, initially trying to discredit pre-Maidan Ukraine as a pro-Western puppet government [img].

Lira “feared” that “Russia would take over everything”

Lira did not do this because he felt threatened in Ukraine. Lira admitted he “feared” that the “Russians will simply roll up the rest of the country” and that “Russia would take over everything else” [img], preparing a “bug out bag” and water supply to flee the war on February 25 [img], before deleting that claim when he reinvented himself from “Coach Red Pill, pick-up artist” to “Gonzalo Lira, war analyst.”

Before the channel deletion and rebrand, Lira believed that Russia would take Ukraine in two weeks at most [img], with a prediction of 48-72 being what he considered realistic, believing that Ukraine holding back the Russians was “complete fantasy” [img]. With his residence in Kharkiv and his sympathy to Russia, he likely figured he’d be safe, boasting that his Chilean passport gave him a 90-day visa-free stay in Russia, and he could simply walk up to Russian lines and leave safely [vid].

But Russia didn’t take Ukraine in a few days, or a week, or two weeks.

Suddenly Lira was featured on Russian TV [img, img], his channel blew up, and the authorities were now very aware of him posting and sharing information from channels like ‘Intel Slava Z’ and sharing photos and video of Russian strikes and Ukrainian troops for his audience, who were eating it up.

Lira likely realized his impulsiveness and need for attention took him too far during an actual war, attempting to delete his incriminating chats [img] now that he knew the Ukrainians were aware of it and the Russians weren’t coming to bail him out of it, but not before they were archived.

Lira’s first arrest and release

By that time, it was too late, and he was arrested in April 2022.

Even Russia’s most ardent supporters acknowledged Lira was released within days of his first arrest without a mark on him [web, arc, arc].

Although Lira claimed Ukraine was out to get him, he had previously also claimed federal agents were trying to entrap him as a small-time YouTuber [img] and that his naval officer grandfather had also been put on a kill list by Salvador Allende [img].

Ukraine protects Lira’s privacy even with damning evidence it could leak

Despite his divorce case alleging a criminal attempted rape trial, infidelity and domestic violence against his wife, and a severe beating of his autistic nephew already on file with the Ukrainian courts under the open courts principle at the time of his first arrest [web, arc, arc], Ukraine never leaked this information or tipped off anybody to it to discredit him, instead protecting his privacy, as required by Ukrainian law.

His arrest also did not affect the outcome of his divorce judgment half a year later in December 2022 [web, arc, arc]. This is despite his claim that under “Zelensky’s regime” they send “thugs” [web, arc] after you.

His Dartmouth rape accusation, which independently established a pattern corroborating his wife’s claims, had already been on record since 1995 [web, arc, arc] and was also not leaked to the public to discredit him.

His Telegram channel, including highly anti-Semitic and racist content [img, img, img], was also already archived, which Ukrainian law enforcement had access to. Ukraine also never leaked that to discredit Lira, who had deleted that content to reinvent himself as opposing “Kiev regime” “neo-Nazis” and “Banderistas” [img].

Despite Lira’s claims that he “wasn’t allowed to leave Kharkiv” after his first arrest, Lira had to admit that they returned all his documents and put no restrictions on him. Lira never produced a written house arrest order, merely claiming it had been verbally stated. Lira later attributed knowing that he could have left then, or simply stayed and stopped breaking the law, to an English-speaking inmate he met explaining it to him [web, arc].

He made no effort to come up with an excuse why if they wanted him to leave the first time, they told him the opposite off the record.

Lira’s divorce judgment shows the courts did not have or anticipate any restrictions on his movements and actually expected him to move around freely in the country with his children, unsupervised and without permission from their mother during his designated visiting weeks [web, arc, arc].

The restriction was just another lie from Lira, one he made up to explain away why despite “fearing for his life” he was released without a mark on him, with his documents, without charges, and without a formal house arrest order, yet never stopped despite “fearing for his life.”

Lira’s second arrest and release

When rearrested a year later, by his own admission, Lira was granted bail [web, arc] and had his passports [web, arc] and driver’s licenses returned [web, arc].

Lira immediately announced his intention to violate his bail and claim asylum in Hungary [web, arc] knowing he did not qualify for asylum, as Ukraine is not his country of origin; this is a requirement of asylum claims, including in the European Union [web].

Lira also knew he could have left Ukraine (including to a final destination in Russia or Russian-controlled territories) using his Chilean passport [vid], which he is aware has 90-day visa-free travel to Russia [vid].

Ukraine did not disappear him, and countries that disappear people do not release them on recognizance or grant bail [web, arc], give them consular access [web, arc], return their passports [web, arc] and driver’s licenses [web, arc], or let them send letters to the outside [img].

Lira does not provide proof of extortion, torture

Lira obsessively documented and photographed everything in his life, including his attempt to cross the border, down to proving the time of the video by reading a live headline “Niger on the brink of regional war” when he was crossing the border [vid, vid].

Despite having access to the internet, a camera and a phone, Lira provided no photographs, video or documentation showing the aftermath of the physical torture he alleged happened to him, nor records of his bank accounts to show the extortion that he claimed.

Lira did use the opportunity to announce that he was writing another book based his “torture,” “extortion,” and escape [web, arc].

The US Department of State’s consular officers will visit a US citizen jailed abroad [web] and, with permission, contact others on their behalf or allow others, including press, members of the public, and Congressmembers to request their case files [web].

Since we know Lira had consular access [web, arc], he would be aware of this. Lira could have requested that be done any time he was jailed or after, including when he was released. Instead, he tweeted that he intended to violate his bail knowing an arrest warrant would be issued for him.

Lira had serious heart condition, refused medication, chain smoked

The 55-year-old Lira’s medical problems are a result of a lifetime of Lira’s heavy smoking and refusal to both get vaccinated [img, snd] and even seek basic medical care since “the drugs don’t work,” [snd].

Lira admitted that he had a “serious heart condition” and was “not in the best of shape,” and did so while chain smoking [vid].

Despite his serious heart condition, Lira said that it was a “LIE! LIE! LIE!” that “there are some medicines that help you, like … heart medication” [snd].

Lira made it clear he believed medications were for the weak, stating: “pill pill pill… FAGGOT! FAGGOT! FAGGOT!” [snd].

Lira admitted years ago he had likely contracted COVID and had experienced cardiac arrythmia and respiratory problems [img]; he sought no treatment except vitamins, carbohydrates, and salt [img] (a risk factor for fluid retention, hypertension, atrial tachycardia and atrial fibrillation, and salt intake can increase arrythmia inducibility) [web, web].

Heart issues also increase the risk of pneumonia [img].

By Lira’s own admission, Ukraine was trying to treat his pneumonia [img].

Lira: Violence, rape, misogyny (1991 to present)

It’s well-established that prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and his latest self-reinvention, Gonzalo Lira was a “dating coach” in pick-up artist/redpill/incel/manosphere circles. 

Going by the name “CoachRedPill,” Lira’s videos included standard manosphere/alt-right-jargon laden videos such as “The Mainstream Hates Men” [arc], “Beta orbiters, white knights and cucks” [arc], a seven-part series on how to “Recognize and Avoid Women who are Damaged Goods” [arc], “Never Trust Women’s Words—Only Trust their Actions” [arc], and the mutually contradictory “The Three Things You Need To Get and Hold A Woman” [arc] versus “ ‘Relationships’ Are Beta, Procreation Is Alpha” [arc].

Back before Lira’s transformation into somebody who saw Ukraine as pure evil a few days after he processed that Russia had actually invaded, back when he loved Ukraine as a sexpat paradise, he published guides like “WHY THIRD WORLD WOMEN ARE MORE FEMININE” [arc] and a 2019 video stating that “more guys in the west should come out here to the Ukraine” to get women, which was heavily mocked in a reaction video by two English-speaking women psychologists from Kharkiv pointing out that Ukrainian women are wary of sex tourists like him [vid].

Lira also dispensed more sinister dating and sex advice such as “women are like dogs … you have to treat them like you would a dog: firmly,” [vid] and “every woman I’ve ever been with responds extraordinarily well to a [sic] almost violent physical encounter” [vid]. When COVID hit and Lira continued his “the mainstream hates you” schtick, vaccinated women became “sterile” “cum dumpsters” [img].

Lira, as expat229, posted things such as claiming that “demanding a woman give you anal sex—or any other sex that is distinctly and deliberately painful—is kryptonite to women: Once they take it painfully, they surrender completely” [img], consistent with his later statement that women enjoy “violent physical encounters” [vid].

The expat229 handle is known to belong to Lira [web, arc], which he also used during his stint as an untrained economist to promote his own books and views as if he were an independent third party.

Lira’s ex-wife alleges domestic violence, beating his autistic nephew

Despite claiming a family in Ukraine, Lira’s Ukrainian wife sought divorce in 2021 (notably, before the start of the war and therefore not a “smear campaign”) on the grounds that he was unfaithful, emotionally explosive, violent, unstable, and referencing an incident in Chile of Lira beating his autistic nephew & an attempted rape case against Lira. [web, arc, arc, img]

Although the lawsuit does not mention Lira or his wife by name, the identifying characteristics of a dual Chilean-American citizen living in Kharkiv and London during the times Lira is known to have been in those locations make it clear that this is Lira. It also bears the number of a Chilean marriage certificate issued to Lira and his wife.

The divorce suit, originally in Ukrainian, reads as follows through Google’s machine translation, corrected for grammar and structure:

“During the defendant's stay outside Ukraine in March 2018, [plaintiff] received a message on her phone from an unknown woman who said that she had been in a relationship with her husband for a year and also asked if it was true that they had broken up.

At present, there are no marital relations between the parties, no mutual understanding, and a cohesive family did not develop due to irreconcilable differences, disagreements and fighting.

During the defendant's time at the marital home, his aggressive behavior and imbalance lead to psychological and physical violence against the plaintiff and the children.

After marriage, the plaintiff found out that the defendant had legal problems: a criminal case for attempted rape. During his time in Chile, there was also a case where the defendant severely beat his young nephew, who has autism.” [web, arc, arc, img]

Lira concealed this information from his followers, portraying himself “living with his children in Kharkiv,” and therefore being motivated not to lie [img].

In his respondent’s statement, Lira “fully recognize[d] the claims” against him. [web, arc, arc, img]

Nevertheless, Ukrainian law recognizes the equal importance of fathers and mothers, and Lira was treated equitably by the courts when the divorce case was decided in December 2023 [web, arc, arc, img], half a year after his first arrest.

Lira concealed this information from his followers as well. Lira was portraying Ukraine as corrupt and lawless [web, arc]; a claim that wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny if the “Kiev regime” never used the divorce to separate Lira from his children, something a country that “disappears” people certainly would do—and a claim Lira undoubtedly would have made if the divorce had gone worse than visitation rights for him.

Unsurprisingly, the attempted rape case wasn’t Lira’s first run-in with sexual assault.

1991 Dartmouth sexual assault case

In 1991, in his first year at the prestigious Ivy League school, Lira was found liable for sexually assaulting a female student.

In a particularly disturbing op-ed in The Dartmouth, the college newspaper for the New Hampshire-based Ivy League university of the same name, dated February 8, 1995, and written by Lira in his typical self-victimizing tone:

“My freshman fall, I was accused of sexual assault and harassment by another freshman. I was brought before the Committee on Standards (COS), and though there was proof that I did not harass the woman in question and more than a reasonable doubt as to whether I assaulted her, I was suspended for three terms by the COS, having been found innocent of harassment but guilty of assault.

The issue of guilt or innocence is immaterial now. All of this happened over three years ago, and nothing will change the fact that I was suspended and missed out on my freshman year.” [web, arc, arc]

The man who claims women are “cum dumpsters” [img] who should be treated “like dogs” [vid] who “surrender completely” [img] after they “take it painfully” [img] because they enjoy “violent physical encounters” [vid] asserts his innocence of sexual assault without any proof but his say-so.

Lira continues, stating that people shun him, that his guilt isn’t important, and it’s unfair because it made it difficult for him to pick up girls:

“I was suspended, and whether or not I did what I am accused of having done is not important -- I served out my punishment, I did my three terms. I paid my debt to the Dartmouth society. Was I accepted back into the fold?

In a word, no.

…

I met a woman once. We met in a tube room, we talked, we had a good time. We hung out a couple of times after that, we had a lot in common. She seemed like a decent, cool person, someone I'd like as a friend. Then I stopped hearing from her. I blitzed her a couple of times, inviting her to lunch, to hang out, whatever, but I got no answer.

I assumed she'd heard about my suspension, and I was right. I happened to see her on the street one day, and this is what she did: she studiously went around me, crossing the street to avoid me and then crossing back again, looking at the sidewalk, not approaching me, furtively glancing at me to make sure I hadn't spotted her, looking relieved when she was out of range, safely past me.” [web, arc]

Lira concludes his self-pitying op-ed with a pretentious quoting of Dartmouth’s Latin motto, vox clamantis in deserto: “a voice crying in the wilderness”.

To a normal human being, that calls to mind the woman who had to tolerate Lira’s disgusting, self-entitled assault. To Lira, he’s the lonely voice crying out.

His piece was so self-serving and disconnected from reality that Cassie Ehrenberg of Dartmouth’s Rape Education Action Committee (REACT) was compelled to write a response [web, arc, arc]:

“We are concerned that the focus of campus discussion about sexual abuse all too often revolves around the mythological victimization of the perpetrators.

Lira claims that "whether or not [he] did what [he] is accused of having done is not important." In fact, it is precisely the issue. We need to focus on the feelings of this and other survivors and how this community responds to abusive behaviors. There are ways in which we can reframe this discussion in order to prevent sexual abuse.

…

Can we find fault with Lira's former friend who crossed the street once she learned of his suspension? Who wouldn't feel uncomfortable? Who wouldn't want to protect herself?” [web, arc, arc]

Lira doxes his rape victim

Lira never forgot this incident. In what proved to be a pattern of behavior with any incident involving Lira which proved to not only be true but extensively documented, he continued to ignore reality and make himself the victim-protagonist.

On September 17, 2011, around 20 years after the incident, Lira posted a seething screed on his personal blog about the event [img].

In it, Lira, the man who later claimed he was terrified of doxing threats in Ukraine, doxed his rape victim [img].

The victim’s name and location have been removed, and an archived URL will not be provided except to vetted, competent reporters with verifiable credentials upon request, for obvious reasons.

The article reads like self-aggrandizing fan-fiction, with Lira positioning himself as a third-person protagonist and minimizing his own behavior:

“One of the freshmen—or “first years”, as they were beginning to be known—was accused by another first year of sexual assault and harassment. In the hot-house political environment at the time—product of the Thomas/Hill hearings, which revolved around workplace sexual harassment—these were serious allegations.

The young woman making the claim against the freshman said that he had visited her in her dorm-room around lunchtime one day during Orientation Week, and had “forcibly tried to kiss” her. She had rebuffed him, told him he was being “selfish”, after which he had left, without further incident.

This was the sexual assault allegation.

The young woman also claimed that the freshman had then started to harass her via electronic mail, in the days and weeks after. She claimed he had sent her “obscene messages”, which she had purged from her e-mail account, as she hadn’t wanted any of that “filth” on her computer.

This was the sexual harassment allegation.

The young woman said she wanted to “protect” the Dartmouth campus—and the other women at Dartmouth College—from the danger that the freshman represented. This was why she was reporting this incident three weeks after it allegedly took place.

The accused freshman, being unsophisticated, went through the disciplinary channels of Dartmouth College without contacting attorneys or even his parents. He was confident that the allegations would be shown to be lies—because he knew they were lies.

More to the point, he could prove that they were lies.” [img]

After doxing his victim, Lira assures his readers he neither “knows” nor “cares” what happened to his victim [img]. Which is why he wrote a lengthy missive 20 years after the fact.

Lira’s post detailing how he is the real victim and “doesn’t care” what happened to the young woman is 4,357 words long.

That is about 28% of this standalone document, which covers over 30 years of history, including its main body, table of contents, cover page, annotated links, and over 250 unique outbound links.

Lira harasses right-wing women online

The obsessive messaging pattern of behavior Lira denies engaging in in his sex assault blog post is behavior Lira would later be caught engaging in repeatedly.

In 2019, Lira sent unsolicited Twitter DM’s to Tim Pool associate Josie Glabach, who goes by The Red-headed Libertarian online (Glabach freely associates her real name with her online handle, so we have not censored it here).

Without provocation, Lira told Glabach to “just accept it, you’re not attractive” [web, arc]; when Glabach left him on read and did not accept his DM invitation, Lira continued to message her for four days, concluding with “ ‘if I can’t convince you with my logic and evidence—then here’s some cleavage to distract you!!’ how pathetic.” [web, arc]

Lira made serious efforts to conceal his violent misogyny over the years, deleting his YouTube channel and concealing his viler beliefs. Lira has a history of deleting or burying incriminating examples of his behavior.

Lira attempts bribe to take down information

In 2019, Lira did not just attempt to delete old content, Lira attempted to bribe a forum administrator to remove this information so he could secure funding.

Lira was concerned after it came to his attention that this information had been posted to a forum in 2017, about seven years after extremist researchers first became aware of Lira after his appearance on neo-Nazi Richard Spencer’s Vanguard Radio in 2010 [arc].

At the time this information surfaced, Lira was seeking funding with “some money guys” for a project and feared the sexual assault and business fraud details would cost him. Lira attempted to bribe the forum administrator with a permanent residence permit to Ukraine to remove his name from the thread so his prospective investors wouldn’t find it [img, img].

Lira admitted to the bribery attempt, saying he needed the thread to “not be the top thing that appeared when his name was Googled” so he asked if he could “somehow deprioritize this.” [vid]

Lira, who had doxed his rape victim, asked for his own name to be removed “as a favor” from his misdeeds to secure cash from those “big money guys” he had to “suck up to” [vid].

Lira claims that the administrator had approached him to ask for the permit [vid]. However, in line with Lira’s pattern of pathological lying, the Discord messages indicate that the administrator was actually the one to turn Lira down [img, img].

That admin was correct in his assumptions that Lira did not have “the capacity to complete the offer” [img, img]. Lira did not have the power he claimed. Ukraine switched to an automated, biometric system the year before. If Lira had attempted to make good on this offer it would have resulted in any expired visa being detected automatically by immigration control.

So what does that prove?

It proves Lira is a pathological liar who has a decades-long history of fabricating verifiably false claims of victimization even as he victimizes others.

It proves Lira has a pathological need for attention.

It proves Lira is impulsive and has a pathological inability to understand the consequences of his own actions or to exercise proper executive function.

It proves Lira gets frustrated and angry that anybody thinks negatively of him, but cannot understand that attaching his own name to his closed-doors sex assault suspension in an op-ed is him attaching the stigma permanently to himself.

It proves Lira consistently feels that he has done nothing wrong, believes that rightness and wrongness is determined solely by how he feels (which changes moment by moment) and that the system is constantly unfair to him.

It proves Lira holds intense, decades long-grudges.

It proves Lira frequently has power fantasies, claiming the ability to accomplish tasks he does not have.

It proves Lira has a propensity for violence that follows him wherever he goes.

It proves even as Lira claimed he had family in Kharkiv and therefore had strong incentive to know what was going on, he had been separated from his wife and children and his marriage had fallen apart due to his infidelity and sexual, psychological and physical violence; his “incentive” was completely fabricated.

It proves even as Lira was treated equitably by the civil courts after his first arrest; he knowingly concealed that information from his followers to continue to portray Ukraine as corrupt and lawless.

It proves the life Lira had built was falling apart, fueling a need for validation.

It proves Lira has a history of concealing or attempting to conceal this behaviour.

It proves Lira has a decades-long history of using his experiences to create revisionist fantasy with him as the protagonist, always without any supporting evidence and often in direct contradiction to known facts.

Lira: Antisemitism, racism, fascism (2010 to present)

Lira first came to several members’ attention back in 2010, just two years after Richard Spencer had coined the term “alt-right” to launder his neo-Nazi beliefs [web]. In fact, it was Richard Spencer that ushered Lira to that attention.

Lira’s foray into neo-Nazi podcasts

On September 16, 2010, then still presenting as a self-taught economics expert [web, arc, web, arc], Lira appeared on Spencer’s neo-Nazi Vanguard Radio [arc] next to episodes featuring neo-Nazi American Renaissance [web], nativist group VDARE [web], and a discussion on mass murderer and Islamophobic fascist terrorist Anders Breivik [web] and Islam in Europe [arc].

In case one assumes that Lira was merely trying to promote his fringe economics expertise wherever he could on the basis that Lira was also resorting to pretending to be a third party on Reddit to promote his economics blog [web, arc], we emphasize that this was only the first time Lira came to our attention for neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic or fascist beliefs.

While Lira was once proud of his IMDB page, which boasts his contributions to the 2000 military first-person shooter “Soldier of Fortune” (his story was thrown out and the plot re-written [img]) and his own self-directed 2005 thriller film Secuestro, the “self” tab features Lira’s 2017 and 2018 contributions to Warski Live [web, arc], a podcast hosted by American white supremacist Andy “Race” Warski, who bragged about sexually assaulting a drunk girl [web, arc], and Canadian white supremacist Jean-François Gariépy [web]. Warski and Gariépy were darlings of Andrew Anglin’s neo-Nazi Daily Stormer [arc, arc, arc]. 

Lira excited for “online Kristallnacht”, posts “gas the kikes”

By the time Lira’s Coach Red Pill Telegram and YouTube channel were in full swing, Lira was regularly making anti-Semitic posts, with posts identifying Jews who exercised “undue influence” in America [img], complaining that “Churchill was the one who started burning civilians, not Hitler” [img], posts fantasizing about an “online equivalent of Kristallnacht” and how “people in America are starting to realize that they all think the same thing: They all despise Jews” [img] (on the basis of a low-rated commercial for the Sarah Silverman/Seth Rogen HBO Max piece Santa Inc. [vid]), and—in response to that skit—sharing a meme of Silverman and Rogen with Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock and a “Hope/Adolf” ambigram [img].

Based on the above, it’s impossible to dismiss as a tasteless joke the image of Lira with the words “gas the kikes” written on an arm cast [img].

While his new-found Russian war supporters were quick to dismiss this as a Photoshop, that’s not the case. In the “gas the kikes” image, Lira is wearing a shirt that can be seen to read in part “Mür—Mü—,” the rest of the letters obstructed.

In the April 17, 2021 archives taken from his now-nuked YouTube channel, Lira can be seen wearing that same shirt in a video titled “IMPORTANT: The Breaking Point” [arc, img].

The video thumbnail shows the full writing on the shirt to be “Mürdoch Mürdoch”, a white supremacist animated “sitcom” with titles like “Nice Guy National Socialism” on playlists featuring George Lincoln Rockwell [img]. Other episode titles include “Pure 100% Bavarian Phenotype” about a European ethnostate and “Galaxy MM88,” a reference to the title “Mürdoch Mürdoch” and 88, for Heil Hitler [web].

Lira targets Black Americans

Lira’s ire wasn’t reserved only for Jews, as Lira also focused on Black Americans, resharing memes of big-lipped, broad-nosed caricatures of Black men reading the blurry headline “Black man shot dead after innocently doing something illegal”, putting on glasses, and seeing “Sale: Nike shoes one-hundred percent off at all locations” [img].

Lira’s Telegram subscribers approved of this, with this fueling Lira’s own need for approval in turn. Lira once wrote “I am very much liking the comments section on my Telegram channel. It’s like my own private 4chan: Rabid, racist, insane and autistic” [img]. 

His use of racial slurs and racial stereotypes was so prolific and so frequent that it was able to be remixed into a song of Lira saying the words “nigger,” “chink,” “faggot,” and “kike,” repeating racial tropes, and saying he wasn’t upset by the slurs, unlike Black people who were “too weak to handle it” and “children” and defending himself on the basis of being a Hispanic Chilean who doesn’t take offense at the word “spic” [vid].

The video contains unedited excerpts such as “and so I have to ask Black people, are you too weak to handle it? It’s an honest question,” and “Black people are too weak to handle it. They’re so weak, weak minded, weak emotionally, that if anybody says the word ‘nigger,’ they’re going to have a complete meltdown” [vid].

Lira’s first flirtation with racism, however, goes back to his time at Dartmouth, just as the Ivy League university was his first dabbling in sexual assault. Lira was friends with a man named Anthony Lightfoot, who displayed what one newspaper generously referred to as eccentricities: peppering his speech with military jargon, carrying a large knife with him, and exploding into bouts of rage.

In 1995, Lightfoot plead guilty to mailing threatening letters to the then-head of the Black Alumni of Dartmouth Association, threatening to lynch him and rape and kill his wife [web], furious that he had received a letter from the association. Like Lira, Lightfoot was suspended from Dartmouth over his crimes. In 1996, Lightfoot killed himself, and Lira—the only person who continued to talk to Lightfoot after he left—described him as a “pretty cool guy” [web].

What is shocking about the incident is not the younger Lira’s poor judge of character in remaining friendly with Lightfoot or his refusal to temper his views on Lightfoot after the fact, which could be attributable to a forgiving attitude and a willingness to see the best in people.

The issue is that Lira learned nothing in the intervening years about racism and violence against minorities from the Lightfoot incident.

Lira glorifies fascism, authoritarianism

 Lira enjoyed glorifying fascism. The more anodyne posts in his channel doing so featured statements as “Which way Western Man indeed” next to photographs of an obese man labeled “capitalism,” an emaciated man labeled “communism,” and bodybuilder and actor Steve Reeves (insultingly, a US Army volunteer in World War 2) labeled “fascism” [img].

The Chilean Lira idolized the US-backed military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet [web]. Pinochet overthrew (and drove to suicide) the democratically elected Salvador Allende [web] in a September 11, 1970, coup d’état [web]. The CIA admitted its role in the 1970 kidnapping of army General René Schneider, who refused to use his soldiers to block Allende’s inauguration [web]. America knew of Pinochet’s plans in the days leading up to the military coup [web]. Pinochet was a key founder of the US-backed Operation Condor in South America, a state-backed terror program that killed tens of thousands of leftists and sympathizers, real or imagined [web].

Pinochet’s regime was also infamous for its “death flights,” extrajudicial killings that involve throwing victims from helicopters [web]. While the Pinochet junta was not the only practitioner of death flights, the notion is inextricably tied to the Chilean junta. The far-right “helicopter rides” meme references this [web].

As a far-right extremist and a Chilean, Lira was no stranger to the reference. In the same archive where he can be seen sporting his “Mürdoch Mürdoch” shirt, another video features a thumbnail of a helicopter and the title “The ‘HELICOPTER RIDES FOR EVERYONE’ CoachStream” [arc, img].

Lira posted lines such as, “As a Chilean, I can say unequivocally that Gen. Augusto Pinochet is the best president our country ever had …. He was a great man, and it’s only obvious in retrospect—now that Chile is once again sliding into communism and chaos. ¡Viva Chile Pinochet!” [arc, img]

Lira’s first known fabrication of “kill lists”

Immediately after, Lira posted that he banned a user—a “soy boy”—for pointing out Pinochet’s excesses. “Salvador Allende was a murderous thug who had my own grandparents on a kill list.” [arc, img, img]

Lira’s grandfather was Captain Angel Custodio Lira Gálvez [img], undersecretary of the Chilean Navy during Carlos Ibáñez del Campo’s second presidency [web].

Military opposition to Allende simmered down only after the assassination of General Schneider during the CIA-backed plot to kidnap him and have him block Allende’s inauguration. The notion that Allende, with a coalition government and heavy legislative opposition, would risk the barely contained ire of the military to have Lira’s naval officer grandfather put on a mysterious, never reported “kill list” is a joke.

These fabricated “kill lists” Lira invents are key parts of his heroics. His grandparents were on imagined Allende kill lists, just as he was on a Ukrainian “kill list”.

In the face of invented victimization, anybody can be brave.

Lira opined on the good days of Pinochet, questioned apartheid

Lira also attempted to normalize the Pinochet dictatorship on video. The statements in them, especially given his later statements about Ukraine, are egregious.

Given Lira’s about-face, going from supporting actual US-backed coup governments in Chile to opposing imaginary ones in Ukraine, his thoughts on Chile’s press freedoms during a junta are drastically different from his later beliefs about Ukraine’s press freedoms during an invasion he claimed was never going to happen. 

“They found these bodies, and everybody assumed the military dictatorship did it. But nobody said that in Chile. Because you couldn't. Because the press was... not tightly controlled, but there was a clear line with the Pinochet dictatorship. If you reported something that was factually accurate, they wouldn't touch you. But if you propagandized or skewed the news or reported things that were false, the military regime would shut you down. And so, reporters and especially editors were very careful never cross that bright line. They always stuck to what was true; what was accurate. But that rule, very healthy though it was, brought at the cost of a military dictatorship, but it was a healthy rule.” [vid]

Although Lira repeatedly tells us we should distrust the government—the American government was lying about the pending Russian invasion, about vaccines, about everything—he’s more than happy to take the Pinochet government’s word: “They found these dead bodies and they were the product of the Pinochet dictatorship. Even though the Pinochet dictatorship was swearing up and down they had nothing to do with these bodies.” [vid]

Lira mocks the notion that the Pinochet government, which killed, tortured, and imprisoned tens of thousands in Chile and through Operation Condor, was in any way a bloodthirsty one: “And the other thing, of course, because of the picture, is you assume that there were thousands of bodies that had been found. That these bloodthirsty military blah-blah-blah sons-of-bitches had killed thousands of people. That's the inference you would inevitably draw from that picture. I was looking at the picture and looking at the headline and thinking, this isn't true." [vid]

Echoing his later Telegram statements on why he endorsed the military dictatorship—the stability, the economy—Lira continues: “The economy, far from being on its death throes as the article sort of implied was going great guns. It was going fantastic as a matter of fact. You know, politically Chile was very, very stable at that time.”

Lira continues, normalizing the dictatorship because some Chileans admired it: “In point of fact, people liked the dictatorship. And the proof of this is just a couple of years later there was a plebiscite that was held. And the question was 'Do you want eight more years of Pinochet as dictator or do you want democracy, just as a concept. 44% of the people voted for Pinochet to continue eight more years as dictator. And 55% said they wanted democracy with free elections. Now that election was on the up-and-up for the obvious reason that no, you know, dictatorship is going to skew election results just to win by fewer votes.” [vid]

Lira does not consider that after a decade and a half of military rule and tens of thousands of dead, tortured or incarcerated, that while the 1988 Chilean presidential referendum may have been “on the up-and-up” as the then-73-year-old Pinochet was legitimately ready to retire, some people voting in the election may not have understood or believed that.

Given Lira’s later racism, it’s little shock that his early sentiments can be traced directly to how unfair he felt the portrayal of the military dictatorship was, causing him to question apartheid in South Africa: “The article was saying something, was painting a picture that was totally inaccurate and I started thinking to myself what about other places that I don't know about? Because I know about Chile real well and I know that this article is just full of it but what about South Africa? You know, in the mid 80's and the late 80's there was a whole apartheid thing and Nelson Mandela blah, blah. What about South Africa? Are the news that they're telling me, is it true? Is it accurate? Or is it as inaccurate as this article is?” [vid]

Lira’s fetishism for Pinochet may arise from the fact that he claims to have attended high school at St. George’s College in Santiago, Chile [img, img]. St. George’s College was an epicenter of left-wing liberation theology before Pinochet’s dictatorship; in response, the junta took direct control of the school, only returning it to the religious congregation in 1986 [web], the year after Lira says he graduated from the school.

However, Lira is a pathological liar with a fetish for self-aggrandizing, so it’s equally possible he picked what he perceived as the most prestigious high school in Chile to claim he matriculated at.

So what does that prove?

It proves Lira is a pathological liar who has a decades-long history of fabricating verifiably false claims of victimization even as he victimizes others. 

It proves Lira’s claims of “Banderistas” was projection to displace his own decades-long association with neo-Nazis—the neo-Nazis in Ukraine were him.

It proves that even as Lira claimed he hated regime change and the “coup government,” he was thrilled with murderous coup governments backed by the US when they were as authoritarian as Putin.

It proves that Lira can set aside his entire past identity as if it never existed in a matter of moments without missing a beat.

It proves that Lira has a pathological need for attention, getting validation from neo-Nazis and anti-Semites one minute, then those who claim they oppose them the next.

It proves that Lira is impulsive and has a pathological inability to understand the consequences of his own actions or to exercise proper executive function.

It proves that Lira has a history of concealing or attempting to conceal this behaviour.

It proves that Lira has a decades-long history of using his experiences to create revisionist fantasy with him as the protagonist, always without any supporting evidence and often in direct contradiction to known facts.

Lira: Amateur economist, reinvented expertise (2010 to present)

In 2010, Lira was obsessed with positioning himself as an expert on economics. As noted, Lira would post as reddit user expat229 on economics, promoting his own blog and written as if expat229 were a third party who found Lira’s views “interesting” [web, arc].

Lira attracts the attention of real economists

Lira’s amateur expertise grift didn’t start as an overnight Ukraine analyst.

In 2010, Lira—an outspoken supporter of Russia's war in Ukraine—accused economist and NYT economics columnist Paul Krugman of being a “warmonger” in an op-ed at Business Insider.

The original piece was mirrored at Lira’s personal blog [arc], because it was so off the mark (and ironically accused Krugman of distorting facts) that Business Insider pulled the piece, noting that “the post that previously appeared at this URL by the writer Gonzalo Lira makes some claims about Paul Krugman's stance on war being necessary for the economy that we feel distort Krugman's actual stance” [web, arc]. Worth noting is that the archive demonstrates that the article, dated September 28, 2010, was pulled by October 1, 2010.

Salon’s Andrew Leonard picked up on it, noting that even a decade and a half ago, Lira was “seeking a second life as a bomb-throwing econoblogger” and “wasn’t asking the question -- he was asserting the premise as fact” [web, arc].

Brad DeLong simply described it as “batshit insane” [web, arc].

Leonard wrote that Lira’s Wikipedia article at the time read, “starting in 2010, Lira began contributing blog articles to Zero Hedge, naked capitalism, Seeking Alpha and Business Insider, despite have no economic background, no financial education, and no business experience in the financial markets” [web, arc].

“It’s kind of hard to escape your past,” Leonard said [web, arc].

Lira’s fixation on economics didn’t stop there.

Prof. Steve Keen and DebunkingEconomics.com

Lira reached out through Skype [img] to Prof. Steve Keen, an economist and then-associate professor of economics at the University of Western Sydney [web]. Keen says Lira pitched him on a subscription-style site using the DebunkingEconomics.com domain, named for Keen’s 2001 book.

Lira proposed, and Keen accepted, a contract to develop a paid subscription site, a 50/50 split in revenue share and copyright, with Keen delivering several podcasts a week, Lira financing the start-up and paying for operational expenses, Lira being responsible for payment processing and disbursement of payment to Keen, and Lira owning the site infrastructure and Keen owning the domain; the contract had a one-year duration and a 30-day notice period for canceling [img, img]. In an addendum to the memo Lira proposed that he buy up Keen’s domain name DebunkingEconomics.com for “security stuff” reasons and that Keen could purchase it from him for a peppercorn payment of $1; Keen agreed [img, img].

Perhaps again prophetically, Lira called his company “Echo Chamber Media.”

The site ended up being a commercial failure in Keen’s assessment, and he wanted to shut it down and return to using it to promote his book [web, arc].

Lira did not comply with this.

Starting on March 30, 2013, Keen emailed Lira asking that the site be returned to him, telling Lira to withhold $1 from Lira’s next payment to Keen and to return the domain, as well as shut down the paid yearly subscriptions that were auto renewing for customers [img].

Keen became gradually angrier, outright telling customers to cancel their subscriptions while Lira continued to make excuses as to why he wasn’t complying with Keen’s demands, all the while pocketing the subscription money and forcing Keen to cajole him into making payments to him [img, img, img, img, img, img, img, img, img, img, img, img, img, img, img, img, img]

By February 18, 2014, nearly a full year later, Lira had still not complied, attempting to extort money from Keen, demanding $7,500 for an unsolicited website revamp he did for Keen, and acting victimized that he had to lose the money he spent on DebunkingEconomics.com [img], which he had of course agreed to in their contract.

Lira also demanded the removal of posts Keen had made on the site informing readers to manually cancel memberships, as Lira refused to do and Lira continued to pocket the subscription money [img].

In an interview with Mark Hay at The Daily Beast when Lira first became a Ukraine war expert, Keen said:

“It is an experience I regret,” [Keen] 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.

“He’ll send me a threat to sue me for what I’ve said, I’m sure,” he added. “But I’m entitled to my opinion. And my opinion is fairly low.” [web, arc]

Lira was indeed failing a project in Ukraine in 2022: his marriage. He didn’t live with his kids in Kharkiv, as he claimed, and he needed a new expertise to give his life in Ukraine purpose.

It was these allegations and the sexual assault that Lira was afraid the “money guys” would see when he attempted to bribe the forum administrator [img, img], saying he needed the thread to “not be the top thing that appeared when his name was Googled” and asked if he could “somehow deprioritize this.” [vid]

Keen was also right about Lira’s reinvention of himself: some time in 2015, Lira recreated his personality as a solar energy guy [img].

So what does that prove?

It proves that Lira is a serial fabulist who constantly reinvents himself as an expert in a new topic whenever he fails.

It proves that Lira is a pathologically manipulative individual whose behavior follows him wherever he goes, unable to take responsibility for his actions and threatening, extorting, or blackmailing others to conceal his misdeeds.

It proves that Lira has a pattern of a total disregard for his own agreements and the wants and desires of others.

It proves that Lira is motivated by the immediate and tangible, such as money or quantifiable audience metrics, and not abstract emotions like love, attachment, or mutual respect.

It proves that Lira had non-delusional paranoia, seeing hostile intent (such as in Krugman’s stances) where there was none, and asserting as fact the belief that was real.

It proves that Lira frequently projected his own negative behavior and traits onto others.

It proves that Lira knows his behavior is wrong and makes attempts to conceal it.

Lira: Increasingly erratic behavior (2019 to present)

Lira began to become increasingly erratic in 2019, coincidental with the COVID pandemic. Contrary to Lira’s later statement in Ukraine that he had respect for civil society, his latching on to the anti-vax movement caused his unstable fabulism to spiral.

Lira thinking became increasingly conspiratorial, with him obsessing over Tifanny Dover, a nurse who collapsed after receiving a vaccine on camera. Lira claimed that “nobody has seen Tiffany Dover” since then [snd]. “Whenever anybody tells you how wonderful the vaccine is, just ask them this question: ‘Where is Tiffany Dover?’ Ask that question whenever they talk about the effectiveness of the vaccine.”

He continued: “Get this question trending! … if she were alive, it would be easy to get her on camera… but no such video has emerged, no such video will emerge.” [snd]

In fact, Tiffany Dover was fine. She spoke to the news, explaining she has a medical condition that causes her to occasionally faint, including the next day [web]. She appeared multiple more times over the years [web, web, web, web, vid].

Lira’s amateur analysis continued, also becoming more unhinged, believing society was divided into “Trustfuls” and “Skepticals”, believing that the Skepticals were preparing for armed resistance; this too of course was related to vaccines [img]. Lire believed his side, the “Skepticals,” could produce a “messianic leader” [img].

But even before the pandemic, the attention-addicted Lira was already looking for a larger audience.

Lira lashes out at fellow right-wingers, seeks “bigger audience”

In September 2019, Tim Pool associate Josie Glabach published unsolicited DM’s Lira sent her, also outlined in the section on Lira’s misogyny. Glabach goes by The Red-headed Libertarian online (Glabach freely associates her real name with her online handle, so we have not censored it here).

Without prompting or provocation, Lira made repeated comments on Glabach’s appearance, telling her to “accept” that she was “not attractive.” [web, arc]; Glabach left him on read, and Lira continued to message her for days, ending by calling her “pathetic” [web, arc].

Ethan Ralph picked up on her statement and said “Lemme guess…you didn't answer his dms/emails fast enough and he sperged out like a 12.5 year old female? Cause this has happened to about 10 associates of mine after interacting with Coach Dead Pill” [arc, img]. Ralph has now deleted the tweet [web].

Mike Cernovich added that he recognized the name, sharing a tweet of Lira asking him to discuss an issue on a livestream before Lira added the next day “I’d appreciate your help, getting in front of a larger audience.” [web, arc]

When Cernovich didn’t respond, Lira said “Do you know why you are despised, Cernovich? And why you will never achieve true political power? Because you look down on social-media small-fry, and blow them off, instead of making them your allies and lieutenants. With that attitude, sure, you might make some money short-term—but you’ll achieve nothing, and be forgotten.” [web, arc, img, img]

Of note here is that, like his pendulum-swing opinion on Ukraine, Lira went from being excited to work with Cernovich to telling him how “despised” he was. Lira was also notably concerned with the notions of “power” and not “being forgotten.”

Lira, “Project Mayhem” and destruction of property

On December 5, 2021, Lira opened the “Project Mayhem” Telegram channel [web].

In what might be Lira’s most overtly and transparently unhinged behavior, he posted lengthy screeds about how individuals should put together “cells-of-three” to avoid infiltration and talked about how members were “bugs.”

Lira posted mini-manifestos and speeches obsessing over Tyler Durden as an “alter ego” and lashing out at the notion of the Fight Club being “homoerotic” (Chuck Palahniuk is gay) and how he wants to become “Mayhem” as an alter ego [snd].

Lira handed out “homework,” including vandalizing “fed office buildings,” “corrupt courthouses,” “local pig stations,” “local clot shot dispensaries,” “local stores and businesses,” and “the local bookstore” where “antifa” has their headquarters [web, img].

Lira recorded himself doing exactly that to a pharmacy in Paris, France, attempting to prevent patients from getting their medication by jamming the lock with toothpicks [vid].

Lira believed that “feds” were after him and his 357-subscriber Telegram channel, posting an audio message titled “A Quick Message to All Feds.” In it, Lira engages in his power fantasies again, putting out the belief that he is so special and such a powerful resistance leader the FBI sent federal agents to Kyiv to spy on him and have compromised his phone:

“This is a question to all feds... just wanted to tell you feds the following: It's ok if you compromise my phone, it's ok if you compromise my computer. I don't have any plans on either my phone or my computers, plural. There are no plans. And that's the point of this. There are no plans, no organization, no names, no contact info, the only information you'll find is babysitters and the people who drop off water and the maid and stuff like that.

Understand feds, and it was cool that you sent Ryan Perkins, man, I felt flattered. I wish he'd stuck around. I'd be really interested to know if he was army as I think he was, but a lot of other people are saying that he was probably navy, because they're saying he had that navy look. I'd like to know, I'd like to know if Ryan Perkins was navy, and who he was working for. I'm betting it was FBI. And that he got wind of this shit, of that little Kiev meet-up, and he wanted to meet me and size me up. And get a sense of the names of all the other participants.

I get what you're doing, and I know Mr. Fed Man, that you have to do this because your job depends on it, and your paycheck depends on it, and I know that you're not so fucking stupid as to not realize how fucked up our democracies have become, how unresponsive they have become. I mean you swore an oath to the constitution, and you're supposed to have a working knowledge of what the constitution is about, what the democracies are about, I mean it could be that you're a fed from a European country, say. Right?

So you know that the whole point of a democracy is a government of the people, by the people, for the people. It's supposed to be responsive to the will of the people, it's supposed to carry out what the people want. And the people never wanted mass immigration. You ask them today and they have never wanted this. And the people didn't want to have all these lockdowns, they never did, that they thought it was the right thing to do. Little did they know they were being fucked over. You're a Fed Man, you know how the people get fucked over on the regular, hmm? And so there's some of us regular people, inconsequential people, bugs. Bugs like us, who are just fucking tired of this. And so, and so we're going to swarm. And there's no organization, there's no plan, there's nothing, huh?. Whatever plans I have in mind, me, Mayhem, I just come up with them on the daily and just shoot them out there and see what happens. There's no plan. There's no secret hidden information. And if you want to waste your time looking for it, go ahead. I'm an open book. This is Mayhem. You boys take care now, huh? And don't eat that greasy food in your stake-outs, man, it's bad for you. I mean, take some carrots or some celery or something like that, when you go on these stakeouts you know, observing, huh? And waiting there in your car, huh? I mean, you're sitting there, you're inactive. It's not healthy. So, you boys take care now, bye-bye.” [snd]

Notably, despite his later similar power fantasies with Ukraine, Lira does not at that time claim the SBU is after him or that Ukraine is compromised like America or Europe.

So what does that prove?

It proves Lira was a serial fabulist who existed to believe he was in opposition to others.

It proves Lira desperately wanted to be a leader of something.

It proves Lira had antisocial traits and needed to position himself in defiance of norms.

It proves Lira suffered from non-delusional paranoia, perceiving hostile intent everywhere.

It proves that despite Lira later claiming Ukraine was a thuggish autocracy, he never at the time advanced the belief that Ukrainian authorities were cracking down on his resistance fantasies.

It proves Lira needed to believe powerful people knew about him and opposed him and would do anything to reinforce that belief.

It proves that quite the opposite of his later claim of being law-abiding and admiring civil society, he endorsed destruction of property if the property was representative of his “enemies” to him.

Lira: Invasion of Ukraine (2022 to present)

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, the country was a paradise to Lira. In fact, he made a video—now deleted—that more Western men should come to the country he would later call an authoritarian regime. Unfortunately for Lira’s attempt to memory-hole that video, it provoked a reaction from two Kharkiv-based women, a dating coach and a psychologist, so Lira’s creepy praise of the country remains preserved [vid].

Lira moved to Ukraine in November 2016 [web, arc, arc], settling in Kharkiv with his Ukrainian wife [img]. Lira at the time oddly had no issue with the “coup regime,” coming two years after Euromaidan and the Revolution of Dignity. Nor did Lira, with his Chilean passport and its visa-free travel to Russia [vid], think to settle in Crimea or Russia with his wife, who was entitled to take a Russian passport [web], having been born in Ordzhonikidze [img], a municipality in Crimea [web].

For years, in fact, Lira never mentioned any issues with Ukraine, or Kharkiv, or the “coup regime.” In fact, as seen in his admiration of Pinochet [img], Lira was quite comfortable with US-supported coups d’état.

Lira adamant invasion won’t happen

In the lead-up to the 2022 invasion, Lira was adamant it would never happen: “I told you the ‘Russia is about to invade Ukraine!’ narrative was all bullshit.” Lira sagely assured his audience in a now-deleted Telegram message [img].

Lira was so confident that Russia wouldn’t invade, he told his followers that he “had a strong incentive to know what was going on” because he was “40km from the Russian border, living [there] with [his] two small children” [img]. In fact, as we know from his divorce, his children lived with his ex-wife, and he would end up securing visitation for several weeks a year [web, arc, arc].

In another now-deleted Telegram message, he told his audience that “Russians do NOT want to invade Ukraine – it would be a fucking hassle for them,” [img]. Ukraine had undergone a cyberattack that day, with Lira claiming the Ukrainians blamed Belarus, not Russia [img]. In reality  not only did Ukraine blame Russia for the cyberattacks [web, arc], but the invasion had already been long planned, and the January 14 cyberattacks were groundwork for it, even though future Ukraine-expert Lira insisted it was made up.

He shared a screenshot of RT stating that Ned Price of the US State Department had accused Russia of planning to stage a false flag in Donetsk, and this was actually to mask a “real terrorist attack,” calling the US State Department—not Russia—“war-mongering fuckers” [img]. The “real terrorist attack” that wasn’t a false flag according to Lira was the car bombing that “killed” a very unfortunate autopsy victim [web, arc, arc, img]

On February 24, Lira was awoken by a call from his assistant telling him there is “confusing news” about a Russian invasion of Ukraine [img]. This news was only confusing to Lira, who had insisted the night before Russia invaded that it was made up, based on February 23, 2022 “reporting” from Aaron Maté.

Unsurprisingly, since Lira had insisted Russia wouldn’t invade and that Zelensky didn’t want war [img], Lira’s personality and emotions began to severely destabilize when he was proven wrong.

Lira vacillated between incredulity [img], fear, including fear of Russians taking over, [img, img] and explosive rage [img], wishing a violent death on Associated Press journalists who had come to report the “fake news” of the invasion Lira insisted wouldn’t happen, calling them “zogbot [Zionist occupied government] system pigs” [img], and that he had a “visceral hatred” of reporters [img].

Lira regressed into another power fantasy, going on about how he should have “developed” the reporters and “used” them [img].

Lira called the reporters “liars” who “act as if they own the truth” and act as if the truth is “flexible” [img]. It goes without saying but nevertheless worth repeating that Lira was the one who lied, and AP had gotten it right.

Projection, the act of pushing one’s own faults onto others to displace internal anxiety, is common in personality-disordered individuals. Lira admitted that the reporters “caught him by surprise”—that is, their mere presence in the hotel shocked him, as it disproved his own claims, and that this alone was enough to provoke a violent emotional response from him, saying his “emotional reaction” got the better of him [img].

At the time Lira fantasized about a violent death for reporters doing the bidding of their Jewish masters, his Telegram channel description/biography assured his audience that even if Lira being unvaxed made them “angry” and made them “hope that [he] dies soon,” that he had “no such wish for you” [img].

Lira position swings between views, false flags, Russian strikes

As noted, in the initial stages of the invasion, Lira vacillated in his position, desperately trying to re-root himself from his poor predictions. He was at times full of bravado, other times fearful, other times confused, other times angry.

When roleplaying as the expert analyst, Lira would frequently predict or describe “false flag” strikes by Ukraine [img, img]. However, in the immediate moment, Lira’s persona would slip and he would state that it was Russians who were hitting city centers [img, img, img]

That wasn’t the only position shift.

When Lira was still in his full right-winger persona, he regularly posted pro-second amendment content.

“With the advent of this medical tyranny we are witnessing, I have no doubt in my mind that the Second Amendment will be suspended in the name of public health,” read one [img].

“Cars vs Guns,” read another, with pictures of assault rifles up on the wall. “Gun murders account for around 10k deaths a year, around 7k are gang or drug related, only around 100 in mass shootings.” The same photo ended with “a child is 1,000 times more likely to die in a car accident on the way to school than in a school shooting” [img].

We can safely assume that when Kyiv came under siege and civilians were volunteering to defend it and taking up arms, Lira supported this, then?

When Ukrainian civilians began arming themselves against Russian columns approaching Kyiv, Lira had a meltdown. “No document check, no registry, just handing them out willy-nilly,” he said [img].

Lira was never clear on why exactly he believed that war was the worst time for a populace to arm itself, when he also believed Americans in peace time should be armed to teeth because there’s “only” around 100 mass shootings a year.

Subscribers, narcissistic supply & development of anti-Ukraine views

It’s important to understand Lira’s need for attention and historic lack of competence in any venture to understand why the sudden attention he received after the invasion as an “American in Ukraine” confirming Russia’s narrative caused him to solidify his anti-Ukraine views.

Lira’s channel was still relatively small and a hold-over from his neo-Nazi podcasting and pick-up artist/dating coach days, when he was still advertising Ukraine as a sexpat paradise he’d willingly moved to two years after Euromaidan [vid] rather than a “coup regime.”

Lira had historically always been desperate for attention, engaging in duplicitous self-promotion. 

Lira had, of course, positioned himself as an economics expert (despite no economics training) in 2010, making posts as expat229 on economics subreddits and promoting his own blog as if expat229 was a third party who found Lira’s views “interesting” [web, arc].

Those posts got little engagement, typically zero replies. When there were replies, they were dismissive: “Thousands of economists, with the same set of data that he has, are not worried about this "problem," because those economists actually understand economics,” reads one [web].

Pre-war Ukraine was little different for Lira’s engagement. In June 2021, Lira had 813 subscribers in his Telegram channel [img]. His immediate pre-invasion posts on how Russia didn’t want to invade Ukraine garnered only between about 3.3k – 4.5k views [img, img, img, img, img].

That slowly changed after the invasion when he finally began getting the attention he’d wanted. On February 28, 2022, Lira had 12.5k subscribers [img], bolstered by just four days of posting his updates from Ukraine.

This would rapidly change after the invasion, when he was featured on Russian state TV at the start of March (his birthday, February 29/March 1).

Lira became aware while traveling by train from Kyiv to Kharkiv that Russian state television.

Lira was clearly panicked: “STATEMENT ON THE USE OF MY ANALYSIS FOR RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA,” he wrote, “Last night, as I traveled from Kiev to Kharkov, where my family and I live, I was made aware that some of my video content was used for a Russian propaganda news broadcast” and pinned it to his channel [img].

Immediately after, Lira noticed his subscriber count had hit over 20k [img].

The posts were likely only meant to be seen by his handful of followers, but once Russian state television advertised him, Lira had to realize Ukraine would find him and see where he was cross-posting channels like ‘Intel Slava Z’ [img]—decoded, “Intel Glory to the Russian Invasion Force”—and sharing artillery positions from them [img]. The next day, March 2, Lira’s subscriber count had risen to 22k [img].

The same day, Lira went into damage-control mode, writing “I just woke up, and all I can think about is this fucking video where the Russian propagandists twisted what I said. It seems like the video has gone viral in Russia and in Ukraine” [img].

Also on March 2, 2022, he deleted the chat to purge its history, blaming it on “extremists” [img] and changed the name from Coach Red Pill to Gonzalo Lira [img].

Lira was never clear on how he believed deleting his history would actually stop the extremists, though it did conveniently allow him to remove incriminating evidence of him both sharing Ukrainian positions and contradicting his future expert analyst persona or having anybody point it out, all without admitting that was what he was doing. It was, as we’ve demonstrated, not even close to the first time Lira had attempted to erase his embarrassing past and reinvent himself.

Lira was not in a good position for somebody with his pathology at this point: While he’d chased audiences for years, his subscribers had been small at the start of the war, mostly interested in his rage against vaccines and his vandalism of European health clinics.

Then the audience Lira had chased for decades followed Russian state television and showed up while he was stuck on a train, and Lira realized exactly what the Ukrainian state would see and archive when they went to his channel.

He was unable to drop his “fuck the system” grift and admit he was wrong about the invasion, because if he admitted he was wrong and the system and the “ZOG” press he’d always railed against had been right, his handful of followers would drop him. Reinventing himself as a convert to Western support of Ukraine would be pathologically extremely difficult and he would be a drop in the bucket of commentators, dwarfed by their expertise, and unable to get attention.

So Lira leaned into it. A Russian military column began approaching Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant just before midnight on March 3, starting a firefight on March 4 [web]. “The Zelensky regime is using nuclear power plants as shield – the Zelensky regime WANTS to cause a nuclear accident, so they can blame in on the Russians,” Lira wrote on March 4 [img].

Lira did not bother to explain how Ukraine was at fault for Russia attacking the plant, or how Russia could have avoided the issue by just not attacking the nuclear plant or, alternatively, just not invading at all.

On the other hand, Lira was finally getting the attention and fame he wanted. On March 20, the same time his subscribers reached 45k [web], he appeared on George Galloway’s Mother of All Talk Shows on RT [img].

To a personality-disordered individual, that’s like the cocaine he imagined Zelensky was on. Lira clearly knew he’d backed himself into a corner and deleted everything, as he had many, many times before. But he also had a poor inability to understand the consequences of his actions, poor executive functioning, and an addiction to attention.

Lira had to go from Russia not wanting to invade and Ukraine not wanting war, to supporting Russia and blaming Ukraine. In the early days, Lira circled around it, trying to ignore his bad predictions and explain away his failures.

While Lira dropped his old persona within days, if not hours, of Russia invading, that first month of the invasion saw him gradually garnering more and more narcissistic supply and attention. Lira realized he could simply repeat back what others were saying—something he’d done for years in right-wing circles—using his status as being in Ukraine to make it “true.”

Lira was also sloppy. In a clear indication Lira had no idea what he was talking about and was picking up talking points as he went along before parroting them back, he once blamed Russia-friendly pre-Maidan Ukraine for being in the West’s pocket. Lira shared a meme that said “from 1999-2014, Ukraine donated more money to the Clinton Foundation than any other foreign country,” linking that to the Trump impeachment, and asking if people were “connecting the dots yet” [img].

Liver clearly never considered the Ukrainian government a problem before and had no idea that he was supposed to be blaming post-2014 Ukraine.

Lira’s Ukraine primer video, an example of failed analysis

When Lira decided to jump bail, he mentioned a video that really “chapped their ass”, which was “Ukraine: A primer” [web, arc], where Lira explains how the “invasion wasn’t out of the blue, that indeed, it was provoked by the Kiev regime.” Curiously, Lira skips the part where Zelensky didn’t want war according to him [img], or how it was pre-2014 Ukraine that was in America’s pocket [img], and how the war (provoked as it was) took an expert like him by surprise [img].

It's worth a brief digression to note the hallmarks of Lira’s fake analysis resurfacing from the past.

The video, taken at a time before Lira learned to fully mirror talking points and still attempted to provide his own analysis, veers into the bizarre.

There are naturally the parts where Lira rails against coups (omitting his admiration of Pinochet) and repeats the claim that the US staged one during the “civil unrest” of Euromaidan. Lira stumbles over where that unrest came from, fumbling his speech as he struggles to omit how Russia staged a soft coup in 2013 [web, arc] to stop the Euro-association agreement that the majority of the country supported [arc], including 412 out of 444 sitting parliamentary deputies of the democratically elected government [web], as well as 52% of Eastern Ukraine, where only 31% opposed it [web, arc]. Nor does Lira mention the neo-Nazis Russia flooded Donbas and Odessa with to seize and destabilize the country [web, img], which triggered the spiral of Ukraine over the next decade—at a time when only 28% of Ukraine saw relations with Russia as tense or antagonistic [web, arc]. Nor does Lira mention that the American ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, was hoping for “some kind of outreach to Yanukovych” [web, arc], which is not what a country does when deposing a leader. All those selective omissions are de rigueur for Russian propagandists and expected at this point.

While Lira stumbles a bit trying to figure out how to get around explaining where the civil tension came from (he just decides not to), things take a turn when Lira tries to provide his own explanations. Lira loses the concept of linear time, claiming that Russia seized Crimea (February 27, 2014) after Petro Poroshenko was “installed” (voted in on May 25, 2014), as this “worried” Russia. He claims that 95% of Crimeans self-identified as Russian at the time; in the last resident survey of Crimea taken before Russia invaded, 40% self-identified as Russian [img].

Russian propagandists know to deflect attention away from the fact that Crimea was not Russia, playing up the current numbers rather than the numbers when Russia seized it. They do this for the exact reason Lira touches on in the video, where he describes Putin as an “ethnic nationalist,” not an “imperialist,” who wants to protect “ethnic Russians”—Lira has inadvertently drawn attention to the fact that Putin seized Crimea for Russia despite 60% of the populace not self-identifying as Russian. 

Attempt to jump bail

On July 31, 2023, with Lira’s hearing coming up, he attempted to violate his bail and jump the border. In a rambling, 15-minute video—just one of several—Lira announced his intention to the entire world [vid, vid], accompanied by a series of tweets.

Even though Lira clearly understood he was in trouble, the video is full of the same fake laughs as the one he made about the power of his Chilean passport, indicating Lira’s lack of executive functioning told him this was some sort of game, and that because Ukraine had let him off the hook after his first arrest, they’d do it again.

Lira wanted to apply for asylum in Hungary, despite being a dual American-Chilean citizen. Ukraine is not his home country, a requirement for asylum [web].

Lira talks about his serious heart condition while chain smoking [vid] and how he wouldn’t survive in prison.

Consistent with Lira’s history of fabulism and believing he is special, Lira talks about how Victoria Nuland is aware of him, the protagonist of reality, and “hates his guts” [vid, vid].

Lira explains that he’s obviously not a criminal, as the “extent of [his] criminal career up to this point” was that he had a dog and that he “would walk the dog without a leash, and one time [he] got a ticket, $50, which [he] didn’t pay. That’s the extent of [his] law-breaking career,” and that he is a “person who very much believes in civil society.” [vid]

Unmentioned in Lira’s ode to civil society and the law is his sexual assault of a student at Dartmouth in 1991 [web, arc, arc], the statements outlined in his ex-wife’s divorce case, [web, arc, arc] or his efforts with “Project Mayhem” to vandalize and disrupt “fed office buildings,” “corrupt courthouses,” “local pig stations,” “local clot shot dispensaries,” “local stores and businesses,” and “the local bookstore,” to name a few [img].

Nor did he mention the video of him doing just that to a pharmacy in Paris, France [vid, url, img, img].

Lira mentions that he has been “told he will be found guilty” by people who would know [vid, vid, web, arc]. Given his history of being held responsible for his actions before, Lira very clearly knew he was guilty, and very clearly knew that Ukraine had given him one chance before to simply stop, and he blew it.

Lira spends a considerable amount of time trying to come up with a plausible explanation on why he didn’t leave before, even when he was given his documents back, assigning that explanation to a “prisoner” who told him Ukraine wanted him to leave and didn’t simply outright tell him [vid, vid].

What Lira does not do is bother to address the inherent inconsistency that they let him go but that he will be found guilty.

In fact, from Lira’s divorce judgment, which was active and accepting filings from parties between his first arrest and second, we know that there were no then-current or anticipated restrictions on his movements [web, arc, arc].

Despite assuring us that “Zelensky’s … thuggish regime” only cares about the “perception of democracy and the rule of law” [web, arc], Lira knew that his divorce judgment wasn’t public knowledge.

If it was, Lira would have to come up with an explanation as to why the “thieving, corrupt, murderous gangster regime PRETENDING to be a polite ‘western’ democracy’ [web, arc] hadn’t meddled with his custody, hadn’t deprived him of access to his children, or discredited him with the domestic abuse of his wife and the battery of his autistic nephew outlined in it [web, arc, arc].

If you didn’t know Russia had extensive war censorship laws [web], you could easily deduce they did if you simply knew Lira’s personality and saw him railing against Ukraine’s lack of democracy.

In a reminder of Lira’s asserting as fact that Paul Krugman was a warmonger, he says that all he did was “discuss publicly known facts about the war,” while photographing an indictment that mentions his fixation on false flags, again saying they’re true because he says they’re true.

It's here that he mentions the Ukraine primer video that “chapped their asses.”

Lira claims torture by surprisingly fluent prisoners, offers no proof, announces book

Lira goes on to claim he was “tortured,” [web, arc] detailing how he had cracked ribs [web, arc], was beaten for 30 hours [web, arc], had both his arms dislocated [web, arc], “generally beaten pretty bad” [web, arc], had two thugs cut into his sclera with a toothpick [web, arc], and “beaten in the chest so hard and so repetitively that the beating left a yellow-and-green splotch dead-center on [his] sternum” [web, arc]. 

Lira says that everything but having his sclera scratched was “pretty manageable” [web, arc], which is a point he apparently forgot when making his YouTube video noting he was not in good shape and had a serious heart condition [vid].

Lira says he was extorted for $70,000, his emergency cash of $9,000 confiscated (standard for a passport-holding flight risk), and another $11,000 in bail money (which isn’t extortion, it’s bail) [web, arc].

Lira obsessively documented and photographed everything in his life, including announcing his attempt to cross the border to the country that had just released him on bail, down to proving the time of the video by reading a live headline “Niger on the brink of regional war” when he was crossing the border [vid, vid].

Lira had once even documented his sweat-stained clothes when he had cardiac arrythmia [img].

Lira provided no photographs, video or documentation showing the aftermath of the extreme physical torture he alleged happened to him and displayed no physical discomfort on video, nor did Lira produce records of his bank accounts to show the extortion that he claimed.

It’s absurd to believe that a 55-year-old man who is “not in the best shape” and has a “serious heart condition” managed to survive multiple beatings, one of them 30 hours long, cracked ribs, bruised sternum, a scratched sclera and having his arms twisted backwards over the course of weeks without a visible mark to take a picture or video of nine weeks after first entering jail.

Lira provided no account records, IBAN records, SWIFT records, and no withdrawal records.

It’s outright impossible to believe the money was extorted without a paper trail. We know the $70,000 Lira claims Ukraine extorted from him wasn’t cash. Lira makes this clear when he says the cash he had on hand was $9,000.

But Lira, a serial fabulist who has a history of self-publishing and self-promoting books [web, arc], did use the opportunity to announce that he was writing another book based on the plot of his “torture,” “extortion,” and escape [web, arc]

The US Department of State’s consular officers will visit a US citizen jailed abroad [web] and, with permission, contact others on their behalf or allow others, including press, members of the public, and Congressmembers to request their case files and status [web].

Since we know Lira had consular access [web, arc] with an admitted three contacts with the American consular officers and one with the Chilean consular officers, he would be aware of this. Lira could have requested that be done any time he was jailed or after, including when he was released. Instead, he tweeted that he intended to violate his bail knowing an arrest warrant would be issued for him.

Either Lira, despite being tortured and extorted and wanting the world to know, and having superhuman healing abilities that would erase the severe physical damage he suffered by the time of his release, forgot to inform the consulates while jailed or on release that he wanted people to be able to verify his consular case records…

Or the records are ‘missing’ because they would contradict the statements Lira was making, and the reason Lira was obsessively trying to prove other things (like the time at which the video was being recorded) was to lend verisimilitude to his invented claims, hoping nobody would notice that the things he didn’t prove were the ones that mattered most.

In fact, we know why no record of this supposed torture or extortion exists. Court records from his third arrest prove Lira asserted that "persons previously unknown to him committed violent acts against him, demanded from him the transfer of a sum of money in the amount of 70,000.00 US dollars to the provided bank accounts... However, these funds were not transferred due to technical reasons, i.e. the transaction for transferring funds was not completed by the financial institution" [web, arc, arc] and that Lira "did not inform the law enforcement agencies, the court, his lawyer, and the administration of the pretrial detention center about the illegal violent acts committed against him" [web, arc, arc]

In other words, no record exists because before his video, Lira didn't tell anybody. Not the consulates or even his own lawyer.

Contrary to the claims Lira made in his video stating he was extorted, Lira now claimed no money was actually transferred at all because of a technical issue. Lira never provided any evidence of this failed transfer attempt in the video, claiming it could only be proven in another of his self-published books. In that same video, he insisted the money was absolutely taken.

Also of note is that Ukraine’s population has 19.2% who can speak English at least “a little,” enough to suss out some comprehension, with only 1% fluent [web, arc]. Lira—who doesn’t speak Ukrainian, couldn’t read his Ukrainian indictment, and required a court translator—discovered that this population was mostly from the criminal class, as all the prisoners in his cells who tortured, threatened, or apologized to him could communicate with him. So could the prisoner who told him that Ukraine gave him his documents back because they wanted him to leave.

In reality, Lira knew he had a history of poor impulse control and being unable to weasel his way out of responsibility. Coupled with the fact that he had shared Ukrainian troop positions, meant that the chance Ukraine gave him the first time to leave wasn’t going to come again.

There are echoes of his interactions with Steve Keen here, ignoring the consequences of pocketing subscription money until Keen publicized his behavior, then threatening Keen.

When the day of Lira’s first hearing approached, the consequences finally dawned on him, and he very clearly regressed fully into his personality disorder.

The story has all the tells of Lira’s fabulism.

Individuals with personality disorders often can’t think through the realism of their lies, so Lira, an out-of-shape middle-aged chain smoker with a serious heart condition manages to endure weeks of inhumane beatings and extortion and makes no documentation of any of it.

However, by the grace of God, Lira has an English-speaking Ukrainian prisoner explain to him that he really was allowed to leave the first time. Not only that, but the SBU wanted him to, they just verbally told him he couldn’t [web, arc]; all to explain away why he didn’t repatriate himself in 2022.

When the video was published, even many of Lira’s most ardent believers didn’t think it made any sense why he’d announce it. Lira knew he couldn’t escape, wouldn’t get through Ukrainian border points, and didn’t qualify for asylum. But that’s not why Lira made the video.

Lira believed that if he created this video, he could use it as some sort of “blackmail” against Ukraine to escape the consequences of his actions caused by his poor impulse control and need for attention. Essentially, if they arrested or tried Lira, he thought that he could make it so “everybody would believe” that Ukraine had disappeared or killed him and they would just let him go like the first time.

Despite Lira’s roleplay that the FBI was sending federal agents to compromise his phone and infiltrate his meetups in peacetime Kyiv, Ukraine was in no mood to play these games during war, they’d given him one chance, he blew it, and he was rearrested.

So what does that prove?

It proves Lira is a pathological liar.

It proves Lira is a serial fabulist who needed to construct elaborate reasons to explain away his behavior.

It proves Lira was not qualified to perform any analysis, clearly getting basic information wildly incorrect and struggling with the concept of linear time.

It proves that Lira can set aside his entire past identity as if it never existed in a matter of moments without missing a beat.

It proves that Lira has a pathological need for attention, going from real fear of Russia taking over and being afraid of his Telegram channel going viral to leaning into it as his subscriber counts grew.

It proves that Lira is impulsive and has a pathological inability to understand the consequences of his own actions or to exercise proper executive function.

It proves that Lira has a history of concealing or attempting to conceal this behaviour.

It proves that Lira has a decades-long history of using his experiences to create revisionist fantasy with him as the protagonist, always without any supporting evidence and often in direct contradiction to known facts.