American Citizen Journalist Reported Dead In Ukrainian Custody

On the ground in Ukraine, Gonzalo Lira criticized the Zelensky government.

We live in what I call the New Age of Orthodoxy, in which doctrinaire and apparently unquestionable representations about complex matters are forged, propagated, and passionately embraced by millions with astonishing speed.

When we started the Courageous Discourse Substack in October 2022, one of our objectives was to interview individuals who question New Orthodoxies about a range of public policy issues.

Prior to 2020, Dr. McCullough and I never saw ourselves as dissidents. Our questioning of the bizarre and unconstitutional federal pandemic response made us dissidents. Inevitably we found ourselves asking the question:

If our government is lying to us about COVID-19, what else is it lying about?

As a result of Dr. McCullough’s prominence in questioning the pandemic response, he is frequently contacted by people all over the world who recognize that he has an open mind and is willing to hear dissident points of view about a range of topic.

One such dissident was Gonzalo Lira, an American citizen journalist who lived in Ukraine and reported (mostly on Twitter) what was going on there. Peter had a long conversation with him, took notes, and wished him well. He then proposed that I consider interviewing Mr. Lira for our Substack.

I hesitated because I’d never met Mr. Lira and knew nothing about his background, character, or mental soundness. One of my favorite books about the Cold War is Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow, by S.J. Taylor. For those who have never heard of Duranty, he was an Englishmen whom the Times employed as its Moscow Bureau Chief in the late twenties and early thirty.

Pretty much every thing Duranty wrote, especially his vehement denials of the Ukrainian Holodomor, was pro Stalin propaganda. In those days, the prevailing bien pensant opinion of Stalin in the United States was that he was a swell guy who was making the socialist dream of dopey western intellectuals a reality (in Russia, of all places).

To be sure, I sensed that Mr. Lira’s instincts and perceptions of the war were sound, but it bothered me that that I had no means of corroborating or substantiating his reporting. This unto itself is yet another bizarre feature of Our New Age of Orthodoxy—namely, that apart from the Epoch Times, we don’t have a single newspaper that does any serious reporting about anything. The younger generation of journalists now working for America’s legacy newspapers strikes me as parcel of brainwashed automatons.

Yesterday, while waiting for our delayed departure at Washington Reagan, Peter broke the news to me that Gonzala Lira had apparently died in Ukrainian custody, where he’d been for several months after he was arrested for his sharp criticism of the Zelensky government and its Biden administration lackeys.

At that moment I regretted that I’d never interviewed him. Had I done so, I would have asked him: Are you prepared to die for your mission of telling what you believe to be the the truth about the war in Ukraine?

Since Julian Assange’s arrest and indefinite detention, it has become clear that the United States government does not care about journalists who challenge the Military-Industrial Complex. Indeed, I have no doubt that our lords would prefer that all such troublemakers be sent to a gulag.

Peter seemed to read my mind, as he then asked me: “Do you suppose that others who challenge other orthodoxies will also eventually be killed?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I suppose it all depends it on the dissident, the size of his following, and the tolerance level of the tyrant he is questioning.”

The only thing I can say for sure is that nothing would surprise me now. The republics of the West have been destabilized and their governments are increasingly shadowy and unrestrained by constitutional law or budgetary constraints. The legacy press is now almost perfectly subservient to those in power. Note that in the case of Gonzalo Lira, many journalists in the West seem to think that five to seven years in a prison labor camp is a fitting punishment for criticizing the Zelensky regime. NOT a severe warning, a bit of jail time to frighten him, and finally deportation—but up to seven years imprisonment, apparently without proper medical care, as it seems that Lira died of severe pneumonia while in custody.

The upshot is that there are fewer and fewer impediments to the imposition of tyranny, and for most of history, limited government of the people, by the people, for the people has been a great exception, and NOT the norm.

Tucker Carlson recently posted (starting at 3:36) the following is video that Lira claimed to have shot the near Hungarian border last summer. As he states in the video, he was about to attempt to cross the border and seek asylum in Hungary. As fate would have it, he was arrested at the border and detained, where he would die about six months later.