Tag Archives: Gonzalo Lira

Exactly What Are We Supporting In Ukraine?

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How is the Ukrainian government acting any differently than the Russian government they are fighting? What citizens’ rights does the Ukrainian government under President Volodymyr Zelensky support?

On Friday, Breitbart reported:

American journalist Gonzalo Lira has died in a Ukrainian prison, according to show host Tucker Carlson.

Carlson posted on X on Friday evening:

Gonzalo Lira, Sr. says his son has died at 55 in a Ukrainian prison, where he was being held for the crime of criticizing the Zelensky and Biden governments. Gonzalo Lira was an American citizen, but the Biden administration clearly supported his imprisonment and torture. Several weeks ago we spoke to his father, who predicted his son would be killed.

In early December, Carlson interviewed Lira’s father, who blamed President Joe Biden and the State Department for allowing his son to languish in a Ukrainian prison for criticizing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, the West’s response to the Russian invasion, and President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Lira is a dual citizen of Chile and the U.S., and was living in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv at the time of the invasion last year, as reported by Breitbart News’s Kurt Zindulka. He began giving his on-the-ground perspective of the war, attributing it to Western antagonism to Moscow.

Lira was arrested multiple times, and was last imprisoned for attempting to cross the border of Ukraine and seek asylum in Hungary. He faced multiple years in prison under Ukraine’s wartime propaganda laws, being accused of having “criminal intent aimed at the manufacture, distribution materials containing justification, recognition as legitimate, denial of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine…as well as justification, recognition as legitimate of the temporary occupation of part of Ukraine territory.”

He was also reportedly accused of publishing videos with the faces of Ukrainian soldiers, despite many such videos being freely available online and published by news outlets.

“The charges against me are just because of my opinion about this conflict, I did no harm to anyone,” Lira claimed before his latest imprisonment.

In September, the State Department confirmed to Breitbart News that it was aware of Lira being imprisoned in Ukraine, saying in a statement:

We are aware of the detention of Mr. Lira in Ukraine. We take our role in assisting U.S. citizens abroad seriously and are providing all appropriate assistance. We are monitoring the situation but have no further comment at this time. We reiterate our message that U.S. citizens should not travel to Ukraine due to the active armed conflict.

Considering the fact that Mr. Lira is an investigative journalist in Ukraine, does anyone really believe that the American State Department wanted him released?

 

 

Where Are We Going As A Country?

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On Sunday, Glenn Reynolds posted an article in USA Today entitled, “When leaders cheat, followers…follow.” That is not good news considering the current state of affairs in America.

The article reminds us:

I wonder more when I read things like this report from the Washington Examiner: “The CIA’s inspector general is claiming it inadvertently destroyed its only copy of a classified, three-volume Senate report on torture, prompting a leading senator to ask for reassurance that it was in fact ‘an accident.’”

Here’s a hint: It very likely wasn’t.

…Then there’s Hillary’s email scandal, in which emails kept on a private unsecure server — presumably to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures — were deleted. Now emails from Hillary’s IT guy, who is believed to have set up the server, have gone poof.

“Destroy the evidence, and you’ve got it made,” said an old frozen dinner commercial. But now that appears to be the motto of the United States government.

So this leads to the question:

So why do the rest of us bother to obey the law? And, yes, that’s an increasingly serious question.

The article describes America as currently a high-trust society. Glenn Reynolds defines that as a place where people extend trust to strangers and follow rules for the most part even when nobody is watching. He defines a low-trust society as a place where trust seldom extends beyond close family, and everybody cheats if they can get away with it.

The article concludes:

High-trust societies are much nicer places to live than low-trust ones. But a fish rots from the head and the head of our society is looking pretty rotten. As Lira (Gonzalo Lira, an American novelist and filmmaker) says, “I’m like Wayne Gretsky: I don’t concern myself with where the puck has been — I look for where the puck is going to be.” Where will our society be in a decade if these trends continue? And what can we do to ensure that they don’t?

If the coming Presidential election is won by a Republican, will the IRS scandal, Fast and Furious, the email scandal, the Clinton Foundation, etc. be investigated? I don’t know, but an honest investigation might restore some of the trust in our government.