In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an opportunist, grifter and YouTuber Gonzalo Lira (@GonzaloLira1968). He's best-known for appearing as an expert and making money from controversial topics, such as the "Red Pill" movement, economics and of course the war in Ukraine.
1/21
Gonzalo has tried all sorts of careers to make an easy buck. In the 90's, he wrote corny spy-action books with characters such as "Duncan Idaho, the Langley roadrunner who skirts the line between brilliantly daring and foolishly reckless" in his hardly-a-bestseller, Acrobat.
2/21
He's also co-written,produced & directed a campy action film Secuestro in 2005.After his failure as both an author & as a filmmaker,Lira disappeared from the public sphere,only to re-appear in 2010 as an "economic expert", forecasting hyperinflation threatening the US dollar.3/21
His predictions were published on a prestigious "He Wall Street" website. He was also contributing to Business Insider, a website known for publishing fake news and for allowing the use of anonymous sources "at any time for any reason".
4/21
He's also written articles for the far-right, libertarian blog ZeroHedge. Steve Keen, an Australian economist, described Gonzalo as an "over-promiser" and as an "under-deliverer". He also described him as a "sleaze" who refashions himself as an expert on any chosen topic.
5/21
Then around 2017, during the peak of the so called "Red Pill Movement" on Reddit, Lira found a new opportunity in "guiding" young men in life and became known as the "CoachRedPill". At this point he was almost 50-year-old geezer spreading ideas such as "women over...
6/21
...30 are ruined", "all women only truly desire money", and "the degenerate Western culture pushes them to chase only the hottest 15 % guys for meaningless sex".
At the same time he's selling digital seminars with topics ranging from dating to relationship advice.
7/21
He was relatively popular in the "manosphere", and his Patreon still has almost 800 patrons, making him anything between 4000 and 8000 USD a month. His other Patreon makes him another 5500 USD a month.
8/21
The idea of the "decadent West" of course comes from Russian-spread propaganda, and at some point had made its way into the Red Pill community. Due to its contrarian views, the "manosphere" was also great breeding ground for conspiratorial and pro-Russian sentiment.
9/21
Lira was spreading COVID-19 conspiracy theories, while calling himself a "PureBlood" - someone who hasn't taken the COVID-19 jabs. He's also suggested that trying to start a family with anyone who's had the vaccine is pointless since they are already infertile.
10/21
Around 2021 Reddit and other social media sites started censoring all "manosphere" related content, which naturally made Lira to move on to other things. He became a doomsayer, preaching about a "great war against China", telling people to move to "poor and ...
11/21
... under-developed countries" since they "can't afford to impose any totalitarian policies". He'd allegedly been living in Kharkiv, Ukraine for some years before the war started. Lira's wife is allegedly Ukrainian/Russian.
12/21
Around mid-February 2022, he was still confident that Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine and that it's all just Western propaganda. He later insisted that he saw the invasion coming way before it happened.
13/21
When the full-scale invasion in Feb 2022 started, Gonzalo immediately became a professional analyst on the matter. During the first days, he said that "the commentary and analysis I post is without picking sides," right after he'd picked the side of a genocidal maniac.
14/21
On 27 Feb 2022, he published a video defending Russia's actions and plans for a regime change, and blaming the US for any destruction in Ukraine. His motivations for praising Russia are unknown, but it could be due to his need to feed his big ego and due to his need ...
15/21
..to be in the spotlight. Since the full-scale invasion, he's basically just parroted the Russian propaganda on the war, for example saying that the Russians are "careful in not hitting civilian targets", "Zelenskyy is a cokehead" and that the Bucha massacre was actually...
16/21
..conducted by the Ukrainian State Secret Service, SBU. He's also blamed Victoria Nuland for having "orchestrated the Euromaidan". Lira was eventually detained by the SBU after he was taking pictures around Kharkiv. He allegedly gave up five other pro-Russian collaborators..17/21
...in exchange for house arrest or deportation. He eventually chose deportation, was escorted to Poland,and allegedly moved to the Netherlands.There were also some rumors that he was decapitated by the SBU, which made his fellow propagandist, iEarlGrey, very upset.
18/21
Gonzalo is also a big fan of the worst combat analyst, Douglas Macgregor, whose out-of-this-world predictions he shares on almost daily basis. He's also been interviewed by another pro-Kremlin propagandist, George Galloway.
19/21
To conclude: Lira is a grifter and an opportunist who's always looking for a new ways to earn more money. He has an enormous and fragile ego, he's extremely thin-skinned and gets upset when his shitty takes on Ukraine (or on anything) are challenged.
20/21
Like Jackson "Z" Hinkle, Lira's a "Merchant of Rage", making money from outrage and from contrarian views, which is why people should just ignore him.
In this 9th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss “legitimate military targets”. Russia illegally invaded Ukraine, with no declaration of war, hiding behind a “special military operation”. Yet vatniks & useful idiots pretend Russia has any legitimate or lawful targets in Ukraine.
1/8
Russia started the war in 2014 by seizing Crimea with unmarked soldiers, “little green men”. Russians have been waging an undeclared, illegal war with endless war crimes ever since, whether it’s kidnapping of Ukrainian children with genocidal intent…
… the concentration camps for Ukrainians under occupation, conscripting Ukrainians from occupied territories, or the terrorist, deliberate bombing of civilians, including their infamous “double tap” strikes.
So no, Russia does not have any “legitimate targets” in Ukraine.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Hasan Piker, a Turkish-American streamer and millionaire. He’s best known for his champagne socialism, rabid criticism of the US and Israel, support for the Soviet Union and for Chinese and Russian invasions, and for mistreating his dog.
1/20
Born in 1991, Piker grew up in a privileged and well-connected environment. His father held senior roles at big corporations and his uncle, Cenk Uygur, is the founder of The Young Turks media network. He graduated cum laude from Rutgers, a top-tier university in New Jersey.
2/20
His main activity and primary source of income consists of hours-long livestreams on Twitch where he comments on news and yells at videos. He also keeps his dog in place the whole time with a shock collar.
What you see happening here is coordinated strategic communication by the Trump cult. Elon’s baby mama and former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair explained this ecosystem in a long video. They have built platforms where people can find narratives to spread and get paid for doing so.
Even though the system technically breaks the platform's ToS, this is perfectly fine for @nikitabier and the rest of the X crew, because Elon pays their salaries and this is part of his election interference machinery.
If you wanna know how the system works, read this:
Here’s Ashley’s video, where she explains how the system works. She was immediately attacked by various MAGA actors, which suggests that what she said hit a nerve.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist and politician. He’s best known for rising to power at the height of the Greek debt crisis, not solving anything but endearing himself to the left, and using his fame to promote Russian imperialism.
1/20
Born in 1961 in Athens, Varoufakis studied economics in the UK and built an academic career in Australia, the US, and Europe. His early work focused on game theory, political economy, and critiques of capitalism.
2/20
Presenting himself as the fearless, unorthodox economist willing to confront the EU’s “neoliberal” elites, he rose to prominence during Greece’s debt crisis. At its height in 2015, he was appointed finance minister under the left-wing Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras.
In this 8th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss complaints about US financing of NATO, in particular how the US allegedly pays for European defense, leading to calls for a US withdrawal from the Alliance — which would only make it easier for Putin to invade more countries.
1/7
NATO by itself costs peanuts. In fact, the core of NATO is a principle, an agreement, that ideally costs nothing. The main cost is defense spending, which the US is eagerly doing anyway: Trump has just announced a 50% increase in military spending for his “Department of War”. 2/7
To sow division and thereby weaken the Alliance, vatniks deliberately mix up different figures, such as contributions to the NATO common budget, with defense spending. And US military spending has been huge by the sheer fact that the US is the world’s largest economy.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll talk about why we’re doing this: why we think Ukraine is so important and why we believe that souping vatniks and debunking their propaganda narratives is so crucial to counter Russia’s & their allies’ wars of aggression and achieve real peace.
1/20
War is expensive, and Russia is not a rich country that could afford this: Hospitals? Roads? Plumbing? No: everything into terror and destruction.
But not only that. There is a 2nd item in the Russian state budget that remains strong no matter what:
Manufacturing support for that terror and destruction. Propaganda. Vatniks. “Innocent” travel bloggers. “Independent” journalists. “Patriotic” politicians. Russia spends hundreds of billions of rubles a year ($5 billion) on this, and that kind of money buys you A LOT of BS.