“Just say it. Cry out. Mercy,” said the magistrate to William Wallace in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995). Wallace had already been drawn and quartered, so the king’s torturer was not offering to save his life. He promised only an end to the torture with a quicker, more merciful death.

The Wallace of the film refuses to speak the words the king’s magistrate commands and cries “Freedom!” instead. Realizing further torture will not produce the desired result, the magistrate reluctantly gives the order to cut off Wallace’s head.

Gibson’s film is short on historical accuracy but serves as a perfect metaphor for life in America today. The citizens of the former “land of the free” are being metaphorically tortured to say the words their rulers wish them to say, whether they be “safe and effective” or “they/them” or “plucky little democracy.” For some, like Gonzalo Lira, it is not metaphorical.

Lira was an American citizen, born in Burbank, California, and living in Ukraine – the supposed “plucky little democracy” – where he had two young children. Lira was arrested in May of 2023 and charged with violating laws prohibiting certain types of speech. Specifically, Lira criticized the Zelensky government, contradicted the narrative that the Russian invasion was unprovoked, and generally painted a much more pessimistic picture of Ukrainian success in the war than was claimed by the Ukrainian government and western media.

Importantly, virtually all of the “disinformation” Lira was accused of spreading turned out to be true. As Tucker Carlson has said on more than one occasion, one is not punished for lying about the regime. One is only punished for telling the truth.

That it was not the U.S. government that tortured and killed Lira directly should fool no one. Since the U.S. overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine (for the second time) in 2014, nothing has happened in that country that wasn’t either directed or given tacit approval by the U.S. government.” We have direct evidence of that from the leaked recording of Victoria Nuland discussing her plans for who would run Ukraine with Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt.

This includes Zelensky’s nonstop shelling of civilian neighborhoods just before the Russian invasion in February 2022 and the imprisonment and death of Gonzalo Lira over the past several months.

As Daniel McAdams wrote in his piece about Lira, “One call from the White House or State Department could have saved California-born journalist Gonzalo Lira’s life.” But that phone call never came, because the U.S. government wasn’t interested in saving the life of a U.S. citizen critical of its pet project on Russia’s border. If it were, it certainly would have been easier to get Lira out of Ukraine than it was to get Brittney Griner out of Russia.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?