Gonzalo Lira and The Dissident Right’s Martyrdom Complex

About a week ago, Chilean American independent journalist, Gonzalo Lira, died in a Ukrainian prison. Gonzalo Lira certainly had bravado, charisma, and a big ego, and was constantly reinventing himself. For instance, from a filmmaker to libertarian financial journalist, to PUA/passport bro, to geopolitical correspondent, and finally a POW/prisoner of conscious. Regardless, I found him fascinating and enjoyed his geopolitical YouTube videos. Plus his original Coach Red Pill videos were hilarious. He didn’t deserve his fate and its especially tragic, considering he had kids.

While Gonzalo Lira’s case eventually garnered the attention of Tucker Carlson, by then it was too little too late. It was primarily the alternative media that spoke out when he previously went missing. Ideally the US government should have done something to save Lira, free speech should be protected, and I shilled for him when he went missing. However, he should have tried to escape when he had the chance, rather than staying in place, and then speaking out against the Ukrainian regime. Whether Lira sacrificing himself to get his message out is admirable and courageous or foolish is up for debate. One could make the case that he had a death wish, and there is some speculation that he had some terminal illness, and wanted to go out with a banger, and not be forgotten.

Martial Law during wartime is often exploited to get rid of dissidents. For instance, Israel using the war in Gaza to take out Palestinian journalists and intellectuals. However, a regime does not need to execute or assassinate a dissident. Rather it can just imprison them, deny them healthcare, and just allow them to die, thus denying any culpability. This is especially the case if one is already in poor health, as Lira likely was. Lira also said that the Ukrainian prison guards incited other prisoners to attack him. These are common tactics in authoritarian regimes, though are also not uncommon in the US.

Though Gonzalo Lira is technically GenX, he had a boomer mentality in that he operated under the “End of History” paradigm. Basically where one could just travel anywhere and do as one pleases, as one would at home, while taking for granted the protections of a US citizen. Now dissidents are even getting arrested for thought crimes in Western European nations. One has to be extremely cautious about getting politically involved and criticizing foreign governments while abroad. Not to mention when it’s in a hostile regime, like Zelensky’s regime was to Lira.  

The same applies to outspoken anti-Putin Americans, living in or visiting Russia, though the State Department is more likely to help them. While it is harder to rescue someone from an adversarial regime, the irony is that Ukraine is a staunch US ally. Thus the Biden admin and Deep State likely intended Lira’s fate, or at the very least were indifferent. There is a paradigm shift where the State Department can no longer guarantee protection to all US passport holders. Perhaps Trump would have been more likely to save Lira, but Trump has disappointed plenty of times.

While Richard Spencer’s shilling for Biden was cringe, from a Nietzschean perspective, he was right in much of his harsh critique of the populist right. If you look at Jan 6^th, those involved LARPed as revolutionaries, like the Founding Fathers, but then once caught they were just trespassing while peacefully protesting. Many of the Jan6th protesters wanted to be martyrs rather than having a plan. Certainly many were just protesting and got caught up in the moment. Even though the Left and establishment overblow Jan 6^th, the Right wants to have it both ways. They desperately want to be martyrs but are not willing to accept the fate of a martyr. LARPing and living in hyperreality can lead to real life ramifications, though Lira had much more real life experience than most on the dissident right.  

Certainly many of those in positions of political power are scum. However, the populist right lacks consistency in how they try to hold their adversaries to some idealistic moral standards, and expect them to be beholden to Classical Liberal principles. Hypocrisy is just power, so there is no point in trying to moralize one’s adversary’s motives, in the way one would with an ally or someone you can negotiate a deal with.

While Classical Liberal principles, like Human Rights, free speech, freedom of the press, and civil liberties, are precious and something to strive for, they are not guaranteed, and are specific to the right circumstances. Those being reciprocity and or a society made up of people with shared values. Civil liberties are increasingly conditional upon which side one is on, and both sides now want to imprison their political opponents. While accelerationists and neo-reactionaries might see the demise of 20^th Century Liberalism as something to celebrate, what replaces it could end up being much worse and more oppressive.

The dissident right hates liberalism but then tries to outflank the Left using liberal arguments. For instance, the dissident right will go back and forth between memes about helicopter rides for liberal journalists to protesting that freedom of the press is sacred and must be protected under all circumstances. Another example is Russian shills attacking Ukraine using Western liberal arguments. Liberalism is so ingrained, that all political sides still reply upon liberal arguments.

Much of the Right operates by how things should ideally be, based upon the liberalism that they were brought up in. While it’s one thing for normie and boomer conservatives, a lot of these arguments are made by the radically anti-liberal, dissident right. Basically those who believe that might makes right and that only ingroup vs outgroup distinctions and ethnocentrism matter. Though Gonzalo Lira, being older, did have more Classical Liberal and libertarian leanings.

The allegations that Gonzalo Lira was some kind of Russian plant or paid Russian shill are nonsense. Western media smears likely contributed to his demise. However, he did come across as having a pro-Russian slant. For instance, he said that the Russians would steamroll Ukraine, when it has been more of a stalemate, with Russia seizing about 20% of Ukraine’s territory.

The Ukrainian military has performed stronger, and has shown itself to be more competent than a lot of the anti-Ukraine dissident right assumed. Not to mention that Russia is much larger and more powerful than Ukraine. Lira would say how much respect he had for the Ukrainian people, including their soldiers’ courage. There is also a case that the US and NATO prolonging the war has gotten a lot more Ukrainians killed, in order to weaken Russia. This is a kind of old school liberal argument, of loving a people and hating their government, which increasingly has less legitimacy, especially in times of war and hyper-polarization.