WorldNetDaily's Scott Lively admits he's a Putin apologist, and he has even appeared in Russian media to help the country justify its invasion of Ukraine while blaming the "deep state" for provoking it.
And he's still in the tank for Russia. A September 2022 column went after President Biden's speech calling out extremist MAGA Republicans (as many in the ConWeb did) but with the twist of complaining that the speech was targeting Russia and singing Vladimir Putin's praise for how well the war is purportedly going for Russia:
Could OBiden's Nazi-themed speech of Sept. 1 have been subtle psychological preparation of the American people for imminent war with Russia and a not-so subtle taunt and mockery of Vladimir Putin's pledge to de-Nazify Ukraine (and the West)?
[...]
Trump's greatest sin per Obama/Clinton propaganda is his "treasonous collusion with Russia." No amount of hard-proof debunking will ever kill that accusation: It is the Hitlerian Big Lie of our time and the essential cornerstone of the defense strategy of the criminal conspirators behind the political enslavement of Ukraine and the plundering of its vast riches. Only Russia has the power to break the propagandists' stranglehold and expose their crimes, and that is the main reason for the unprecedented flood of U.S. money and weaponry into Ukraine, even to the point of drawing down our own arsenal, and the heartbreaking, needless sacrifice of countless Ukrainian lives.
Of course, much of that treasure is to buy the silence and cooperation of their Ukrainian oligarch co-conspirators, whom they rightfully fear will flip on them if they believe criminal prosecutions by a victorious Russia are inevitable. And that prospect looms larger every day because, contrary to U.S. war propaganda, Russian has been handily winning the war all along and has just crushed the best of the best of the remainder of the U.S. trained Ukrainian army in its long-awaited counter-offensive along the Donbass front. Truth be told, it was a humiliating disaster.
At this point, the only hope of a Ukrainian victory, and a continuation of the cover-up of the Ukrainian crime scene, is direct U.S. military involvement. That would mean WWIII (which may have been the plan all along, in furtherance of the already-unfolding global great collapse before the Great Reset, framing Putin as the scapegoat for all of it). How it starts is an open question, but some sort of false-flag here or there is likely. When? Perhaps on 9/11, just like their Benghazi debacle – a do-over on a grander scale.
[Sept. 10 update: Yesterday's significant Ukrainian breakthrough against Lugansk People's Republic forces on the northern Donbass front appears to be a very thinly veiled U.S./NATO-led operation, in coordination with western media suddenly bragging about calling Putin's bluff on outside interference. Obama's playbook since the 2014 Maidan coup has always been to force Russia to take action through un-ignorable provocations and then accuse Russia of unprovoked aggression. This pivotal battle, especially if it causes Russia to strike NATO in retaliation (or a false flag is staged to make it look like Russia did), could be the trigger to WWIII. Is the timing of this battle on the weekend of the 9/11 anniversary just coincidence?]
A few weeks later, Lively spent a lot of time in a homophobic tirade against Elton John before he got around to recounting a previous visit to Ukraine to spread even more homophobia:
This brings me to my wartime mission to Ukraine. I'm, of course, not talking about the current Ukraine/Russia war. Under the current wartime dictatorship of the LGBT zealot and former TV drag performer Volodymyr Zelensky, a world-renowned "homophobe" like me likely wouldn't survive long there. In fact, the only speaking invitation I have ever turned down in my life due to a Holy Spirit "check" in my spirit was a request to do some pro-family seminars in Ukraine in (I think) 2018. It reminded me of what the Apostle Paul described in Acts 16:6. I knew in my spirit if I went Ukraine on that trip I would be killed or otherwise incapacitated by the Obama/Soros/Clinton/Biden agents already running the country by then from the shadows.
When Zelensky (the Jewish Barack Obama) says he wants to fundamentally transform Ukraine into a European Israel he doesn't mean the Orthodox Jewish quarter of Old Jerusalem; he means Tel Aviv, which advertises itself as the "Gay Capital of the World." And to show just how much this is a priority for him, he has taken time to push for "gay marriage" even during the war! [Warning: highly offensive graphic at link.]
No, MY war has always been the culture war, and my mission to Ukraine was in June of 2007 – when the early groundwork for the current kinetic war was only just being prepared by Sen. Barack Obama, George W. Bush's point man for setting up the network of bioweapons labs across Ukraine.
It will come as no surprise that the claim of a "network of bioweapons labs across Ukraine" is Russian disinformation. The whining continued:
Shortly afterward, I was in Ukraine at the same time Elton John was there to normalize the LGBT agenda and lifestyles to the formerly morally conservative Ukrainian people by giving a free concert in Kyiv. It was just another of those David and Goliath battles I've been in all my life: The nobody Scott Lively trying to help local believers organize a resistance while the globalists blitzkreig'd the culture with a super-star reprobate.
But God will have the last word in this war, and I'm happy to be on His side no matter how badly it looks like it's going through worldly eyes.
Lively kept shilling for Putin in an October 2022 column:
Preface: I've been monitoring the Russia/Ukraine war very closely since the beginning and comparing the non-stop shamefully dishonest propaganda of the OBiden-controlled media with news from independent, mostly pro-Russian sources. What matters to me is truth, and that is coming almost exclusively from the pro-Russian side: It's almost exactly the reverse of the U.S./USSR contest of the Cold War, with America now taking the old Soviet role and the Russian Federation taking the ethical higher ground formerly held by the U.S.
Everything done by Putin in this conflict is reasoned, rational and either clearly legal under international law or clearly defensible by comparison to U.S. interventions in foreign nations, which our government insist are legal.
If you don't share that view, it's likely the fault of your "news" sources. Tag-teaming propaganda by the leftist and neocon (RINO) media (which includes huge swaths of Christian media controlled by neocons like Pence, Romney and Ryan) is the only reason so many Americans are backing OBiden on this war. If the average American knew what I know from my independent research, there would never even have been a Russian incursion into Ukraine because we would all recognize that our government has nefariously orchestrated every single step of this conflict since at least 2014.
That orchestration includes especially the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, which the lying media has the audacity to call "unprovoked" after deliberately covering up the very serious provocations. The psyops campaign against our own people regarding Ukraine has been done at a John 8:44, Father-of-Lies level of deception, particularly regarding the media-created "war crimes" to stir public outrage and keep the cash flowing into the war machine. (Never forget what these exact same propagandists did and are still doing to Donald Trump! They. can. not. be. trusted. about. anything.)
This was capped off by Lively calling Secretary of State Antony Blinken "the Obergruppenfuhrer of the CIA." (Um, doesn't WND hate it when people are likened to Nazis?) Still, Lively insisted on blaming everyone but Russia for Russia's aggression:
Frankly, every death in Ukraine since as least April (when OBiden sent Boris Johnson to kill the peace deal that Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France had brought within inches of adoption) has been the fault of our government. And realistically, the death toll going back all the way to the 2014 Obama/Soros Maidan coup, including the 14,000 people killed in the Donbass by Ukrainian shelling through February 2022, is "our" fault, too.
Looking at it all from the highest level of geopolitical pragmatism, there would be a reasonably strong argument to be made for preserving U.S. global hegemony and discouraging Russia from building a multi-polar alternative IF American values and vision reflected the altruistic Christian heritage of our past. But American "values" today are the most corrupt and perverse of any nation on earth, and the future our leaders envision is a dystopian transhumanist freak show of woke tyrants and sexual deviants.
Lively didn't write about Russia much after that -- probably because the war wasn't going so well for them and because Russia is indubitably targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. But he returned more vociferous than ever in his Feb. 13 column, in which he even admitted he's a Putin apologist (as if that helps him):
An apologist is a person who argues in defense of someone who is under attack and can't defend himself. Every defense lawyer in civil and criminal law is one, preserving the fundamental right to a fair trial that is otherwise impossible when only the prosecution is allowed to speak, such as in the case of Vladimir Putin. But I don't defend Putin only because he, like every other human being, deserves the fair hearing he has so far been denied. I do it because I am trained in Christian Apologetics to defend the far more important biblical mandate of truth-telling.
Based on my own due diligence, I believe Vladimir Putin is legally and ethically in the right in the matter of Russia's "Special Military Operation" (a position I explained last March in my essay on Putin talking points and the Monroe Doctrine) and that both the U.S./U.K. deep state that orchestrated the war, and the controlled liberal and neo-con media spoon feeding its propaganda to the American people, are as thoroughly dishonest as the devil himself. Thus, as a truth-loving Christian attorney, I would not hesitate to take the role of Putin's defense counsel in the matter of the Ukraine war and, if the trial court were a genuinely just venue where all the facts and evidence (the heart of which is well summarized and documented here) could be fairly presented to a truly impartial jury, I would be highly confident in victory for my client.
This is not to deny that Ukraine has become hell on earth for the Ukrainian people – whom I dearly love in Christ, grieve for and have personally ministered to on a mission trip there and in other contexts. The issue is who is actually responsible for first unleashing that hell and then preventing Germany, France and Israel from ending it in the early stages, using Boris Johnson as their hatchet-man. The chief culprits are the OBiden (Obama-Biden) regime and its RINO co-conspirators, whose vast criminal operations there might otherwise be exposed and punished.
Saying these things is risky business these days, and I have lost some supporters over this issue, but I fear the spiritual consequences of condoning and repeating lies and slander more than the worldly consequences of defying deep-state bullies demanding and coercing allegiance to false narratives. I'd rather be John and Baptist than Pontius Pilate. And I am ashamed for the church that so many "virtue signaling" Christians – even when rightly opposing U.S. involvement in Ukraine – willingly throw Putin and the Russians under the bus while letting the actual culprits (the true enemies of everything we hold dear) off the hook.
Those "facts and evidence" Lively claimed to have was merely a repetition of Russian propaganda that Ukraine provoked Russia's invasion by bombing the Donbas region of the country where many ethnic Russians live -- a claim that lacks evidence. Lively then went further into conspiracy theory territory:
American foreign policy has been run by demons for decades, even under Trump who never had anything more than nominal control of the Departments of State and Defense or their intelligence arms. And now we're on the verge of WWIII, intentionally, to ensure their Great Collapse will set the stage for the Great Reset in furtherance of the globalists' Agenda 2030.
Just as the State Department telegraphed its plan to blow up Nord Stream 2, OBiden announced that sending tanks to his puppet Zelensky would trigger WWIII … and now they're in shipment with great fanfare. But for those of us who have been monitoring the war while ignoring the "Ukraine can win this!" controlled-media spin, the equipment escalation seems too obviously too little too late to be an actual battlefield strategy for the Donbass line where the victory of the now heavily mobilized Russian forces is a virtually foregone conclusion. And the new war narrative accompanying all of this has the feel of a child's mystery novel or treasure map with the clues highlighted and underlined so there's no chance that the plebes will wander off the path of discovery.
Lively went on to claim without evidence that crazy QAnon guy Mike Flynn's "famous phone call that triggered Obama's fury and intensive lawfare against him" to Putin actually worked to deter war, baselessly claiming that as a result "Russia turned from a table-pounding threat to expel American diplomats, to Putin himself magnanimously inviting the children of those diplomats to join his holiday celebrations, killing the Obama plan."
Lively served up more conspiracy-mongering regarding Russia and Ukraine in his Feb. 27 column:
"'Cui bono?' (Classical Latin), in English 'to whom is it a benefit?' is a Latin phrase about identifying crime suspects. It expresses the view that crimes are often committed to benefit their perpetrators, especially financially" (Wikipedia).
"Cui bono?" asked Vladimir Putin rhetorically after the Nord Stream 2 was sabotaged. We all know "OBiden" did it – but knowing and proving are not the same. Both Victoria Nuland and putative President Biden as much as threatened to do it. Legendary journalist Seymour Hersh pretty convincingly confirmed it.
In fact, Hersh's claim is based on a single anonymous source -- hardly convincing. Lively then argued there was some kind of plot "to drive the newly re-Christianized, Marxism-rejecting Russia into the arms of staunchly Communist China." And, of course, he bashes "globalists" who purportedly hate "the Judeo-Christian cultural ideals that both pre-Obama (now MAGA) America and post-Soviet Russia share."
I haven't seen anyone else offer this opinion, but I believe the flood of illegal immigrants who have been coming over our southern border for the past decade – mostly military-age young men – may actually be intended to serve as cannon-fodder for the now-admitted American-run Ukraine war of attrition against Russia. Their status as non-citizens of the U.S. would allow them to become foreign mercenaries to Ukraine identified only by their country of origin, theoretically preserving the ability of our corrupt elites to plausibly deny that their actions constitute direct U.S. war with Russia (triggering all the serious complications of constitutional and international law that would entail).
These young men would be recruited/conscripted in the U.S., perhaps in conjunction with the threat of deportation/prosecution (in carrot-and-stick fashion), then trained and equipped in the U.S. or Europe alongside native Ukrainian soldiers, but paid by U.S. tax-money laundered through the Ukrainian government in the form of wages. Conversely, we might openly declare war and institute a draft to do pretty much the same thing. (Interestingly, even illegals are legally required to register with Selective Service.)
Is this a plausible theory? The corrupt elites whose minions rule us from their deep-state bunkers in the Defense and State departments of our government love fighting wars with proxy armies. They learned a hard lesson during the Vietnam War that Americans would no longer tolerate forever wars in which large numbers of their own children died for ideological pretexts masking mega-corporate, geopolitical strategies. So proxy wars became necessary to keep the military-industrial complex humming and Anglo-American global hegemony intact.
Lively doesn't seem to consider the possibility that nobody else has offered this particular opinion because it's stupid and has no basis in reality. He then went into pro-Putin mode again:
The Russian Federation, with its hopeful championship of pro-family normalcy and rightness of cause in defending its legitimate national interests in the face of relentless NATO aggression, will not be the salvation of the world but only play its role as global scapegoat in the looming great collapse and great reset. The current, unsustainable partnership of Orthodox Russia with Islamic nations and Communist China would inevitably devolve into conflict, even if it survived World War III intact, which it won't and neither will we. The Antichrist kingdom will be the temporary victor pending Christ's second coming, and all the world will suffer that evil rule together.
Lively seems to have missed the part about NATO being a defensive alliance, not one interested in "aggression."
Lively served up more Ukraine-related conspiracies in his May 22 column:
For years I have been in correspondence with an American ex-pat who shares my respect for Russia. I have appreciated this man for introducing me to information sources outside of the U.S./U.K. media bubble. By having learned about and regularly monitored these sources, I believe I am one of the better informed Americans on the Russian perspectives of the issues.
Unfortunately, this man has become increasingly hostile to Israel over this same period, and particularly scornful toward "Christian Zionists." I've given up trying to reason with him on the matter because he's become ideologically entrenched. Essentially, while I remain simply a truth-seeker anchored by a mature biblical worldview, he has become a "team player" for the Russian Federation, which has responded to NATO aggression/sanctions by building alliances with the Islamic nations and Communist China. Its new worldview is thus laced with coalition-affirming arguments from Islamic and Communist perspectives in the same way U.S. propaganda has traditionally included pro-Saudi themes for the same reason (even after 9/11).
Russia's "marriage-of-convenience" geopolitical partnerships are ultimately incompatible with the Russian Orthodox theology at the core of post-Soviet Russia and will eventually produce schisms, but in the meantime the nascent anti-Semitic inclinations of Orthodox believers (rooted in the doctrine of supersessionism – or "replacement theology" – which it shares with Roman Catholicism and some Protestant denominations), has been rekindled by close relations with the Muslims. That has manifested in a strong and growing anti-Zionist sentiment among both Russian nationalists and Orthodox Christians (even here at home). It is made much worse by blatant anti-Torah perspectives and policies of the Israeli government, symbolically represented recently by its outrageous equation of hostility toward the morally reprobate George Soros with anti-Semitism.
The rest of his column was a lot of convoluted explaining of how all this supposedly affects Israel, complete with a claim that ultra-orthodox Israelis "are the true 'Zionists'" and ranting about how "the (Soros-like) Synagogue of Satan that brings in the Antichrist Kingdom right before our eyes."
Lively does Russian media
Lively is such a Putin stooge that he's willing to appear in Russian media to do so. He began his April 7 column this way:
In is no secret to those who get their news outside the U.S./U.K. media propaganda bubble that the government of Ukraine has become a highly repressive military dictatorship under cultural Marxist President Zelensky, in which both opposition political parties and independent media are banned. But the very worst repression is being seen today in the grotesque holy week persecution of Orthodox monks and believers as showcased in this aptly titled article: "U.S./NATO-funded proxy war in Ukraine fueling hatred, persecution of ancient Christian community: Priests arrested, praying Christians mocked in public by ultra-nationalists and Satanists as standoff continues at holy site." Pay special attention to the accompanying photo.
In just that one paragraph, Lively managed to be even more dishonest about what was going on than fellow WND columnist Hanne Nabintu Herland. The issue here -- involving the expelling of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from a monastery -- is that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church continues to have ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, which is headed by a staunch Putin ally, Patriarch Kirill, who has expressed enthusiastic support for Russia's war in Ukraine. (One Russian Orthodox priest appeared on Russian TV calling to "burn Ukrainians like pagans.") A breakaway sect, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, has formed independent of Moscow, which Lively presumably doesn't like. That "aptly titled article" Lively is referring to was written by Leo Hohmann, a former WND reporter who has a history of writing articles so filled with false claims and fearmongering that WND had to stealth-correct them months after the fact to presumably avoid getting sued.
Lively then wrote:
This week I gave an online interview on this topic to a Moscow-based Russian media outlet that featured me a few years ago as the primary English-speaking authority in the internationally popular documentary film "Sodom." I offer their questions and my preliminary answers here by way of educating my fellow American conservatives on this topic.
Yes, Lively is doing interviews with Russian media -- and you can bet he's not criticizing Russia's role in instigating the war while doing them. Indeed, his first answer is wildly divergent from reality in telling Russians what they want to hear:
Question. What provoked the religious conflict in Ukraine?
Answer. There is a worldwide assault on Christianity because it is the strongest force standing against the globalist plot for one-world government. The global elites intend to create this one-world government on a Utopian Cultural Marxist theme – which sets its highest priority on what they call "sexual freedom" but which is really sexual anarchy. The most powerful drivers of this agenda are the LGBTs, who now control the governments of the West, including the NATO alliance. Zelensky is their willing friend and ally in that goal. He is pretending that the current suppression of the church is about nationalistic patriotism, but it is really an effort to purge the church from the culture to make way for Marxism and the "great reset."
Lively continued to deceive as he willingly help his Russian media person (and, thus, Putin) advance bogus anti-Ukraine narratives:
Q. Criminal cases are initiated against clergy in Ukraine, some priests are deprived of Ukrainian citizenship, parishes are seized by schismatics – what will this lead to?
A. On my third trip to Russia in 2013, I toured Moscow and the Kremlin with a delegation from the World Congress of Families, which intended to hold an international conference defending biblical marriage and the natural family there in 2014 (which was canceled due to the outbreak of civil war in Ukraine). Part of that tour featured an overview of what the Soviet Communists did to the church during their control of Russia, which included tearing down beautiful churches and cathedrals, and turning others into storage warehouses for trucks and heavy equipment. That is always what Marxists do when they come to power, and I expect to see more of the same defilement of church properties in Ukraine and insults to the dignity of the believers, the stronger the Marxist powers grow.
For all the talk about religious schisms in the interview, there was no mention of the fact that this particular schism is driven by the fact that Orthodox Ukrainians would like to attend a church not affiliated with the government that's bombing their country and murdering thousands of its citizens. Instead, Lively continued to suck up to his Russian interviewer and the pro-Putin church:
Q. What can be the solution of the religious conflict in Ukraine?
A. I think the only solution to the religious conflict in Ukraine is for strong Christian believers with political skills to infiltrate the government and reform it from within, while Christian-influenced world governments and NGOs apply pressure from without to restore God's standards of ethics, morality and public service to the regime. I also think the Orthodox Church should directly appeal to the conservative Benjamin Netanyahu government in Israel for intervention, because it is experiencing the same Marxist vs. Religious power struggle in its country as is happening in Ukraine, and it also has a powerful role regarding U.S. policy.
Q. What role does the Russian Orthodox Church play in the world?
A. At the present time, the Russian Orthodox Church is the world's strongest defender of biblical marriage and the natural family, without which civilization itself will disintegrate. It's essential leadership in this matter is an encouragement to true Christian believers of every confession around the world, and even to those of other faiths who share the universal truths about normal sexuality and family. Preserving and unifying the people of the world around these foundational truths is, in my opinion, the only way to defeat godless globalism, and I urge the Russian Orthodox Church to be more assertive in its promotion of family-based unity around the world, using its resources to actively campaign for such unity internationally.
Note that Lively did not urge the Russian Orthodox Church to denounce the war or disassociate itself from Putin.
