The most interesting thing about the “Russian talking point” thing, is that it doesn’t even claim that the talking point is wrong, just implies that because even if it is true, the enemy saying it means that you shouldn’t acknowledge it.

The Clinton campaign was scrambling hard after election ended (see: Hillary not even having a concession speech ready). They couldn’t admit they fucked up colossally so they led with the conclusion that Russia did it and spent Trump’s entire term fanning those flames. Maddow was the most popular cable news host at that time from doing Russiagate nightly. Also, Russophobia has a long history in the US so the populace was already primed for the narrative. It died out a bit during Biden, but it’s roaring back now that Trump is back.

Russiagate in 2015-16 was a real upswing of russophobia because dems couldn’t comprehend that clinton lost to a freaking cheeto. Since then, any inconvenient fact about really any geopolitical event became Russia doing putoganda.

Its the same reason why “Full scale invasion” became a media cliche. The propaganda apparatus in the imperial core has made Russia into an ontological evil and Putin the devil.

I got slapped in the face with this at my local ydsa. Americans are genuinely incredibly racist towards Russian nationals and it precludes any material analysis.

i’m actually just impressed you’ve only encountered it 3 times

The October revolution happened and then Russia became evil forever.

It’s widespread. Pro Ukraine people started saying it practically as soon as the war started.

NATO talking points, that’s how.

I had someone tell me in person like two years ago that Russia would have no missles in a week or two and that “taking the side of peace right now is what Putin wants”. I felt like I was losing my mind, so I just stopped engaging if it comes up. The libs in my life no longer even care though so it solved itself.

It’s like some sort of propagandist got a list of all the inconvenient facts about Ukraine

there’s not a masterlist somewhere, Libs independently verify information by putting it through their own filter of ‘if that looks bad for Ukraine/the west’—then its a talking point from the Kremlin. an admirable system

A year ago I was told by someone close to me that what I was saying sounded like “Kremlin talking points,” so I asked them if they had ever read/heard a statement from the Kremlin on Ukraine (beyond just a single phrase, perhaps), such that they recognized what I said in what they had direct (in-translation) knowledge of the Kremlin saying, to which they replied “no.”

I don’t remember exactly what I was talking about, though. It was in the general direction of explaining why Russia would view the situation with Ukraine as an existential threat, so probably something about not wanting NATO nukes right on their western border

During the cold war, 1950 and onwards, the pejorative “useful idiot” was used to describe Americans who had sympathies for the USSR. The idea being that a person who had sympathy for communism was both foolish and benefiting to the US’s enemy. This is very similar to the concept “russian talking point”, being things that you say could be beneficial to Russia.

During the Korean War, 1950-1953, the CIA invented the term “brainwash” to described US POWs who had developed sympathies to China while being captured, some even defected to China. Basically CIA refused to believe that China was more likeable than the US, to the extent that the US believe China had thought manipulation technology.

As others have pointed out, there’s lingering resentment from the cold war, general Russophobia, and the villification of any nation that doesn’t allow itself to be entirely subsumed by western (American) capital and military hegemony.

It was also supercharged after 2016, when liberals with needed a non-material reason to explain how the US elected Trump and the UK voted for Brexit, that didn’t either A) blame liberal 'centrism’s total failure to improve or even maintain people’s material conditions or B) reveal uncomfortable truths about the power structure and institutions of so called ‘western liberal democracies’.

But even before those seismic shocks to the liberal worldview, primarily British & American intelligence services had begun spinning up a broad network of new cutouts and propaganda arms focused on reviving Russia as a threat to discredit potential left political resurgence and to further control online discourse and media. The first half of the 2010s saw a quiet proliferation of these organisations, almost all with US/UK military/intelligence funding, pulling from Russia-hawk NATO academics, and building vast networks of uncritical propagandist journalists across the west.

To the degree that any of these groups had a public face, they were presented as ‘anti-disinformation’ organisations, focused on providing training to journalists and media figures. I practice they were a mechanism to build more formal international networks of friendly journalists to push US/UK deep state narratives and smear any opposing narrative as Russian disinformation. Journalists received payments, grants, training, exclusive access to state sources, and we’re even provided a steady stream of stories in exchange for their work going after politicians, media figures, and other journalists deemed unfriendly to smear them as Russian assets.

Perhaps the most publicly famous of these groups (at least in the UK and Europe) was the Integrity Initiative. A subsidiary of the UK military funded Institute for Statecraft, it played a major role in smearing Corbyn’s labour party, infiltrating a supposedly new independent left media including Novara (primarily via crank Paul Mason), but also interfering in the democratic affairs of multiple European countries including Norway, Moldova, and Greece, whilst building a broader smear campaign against most European ‘left’ parties as Russian assets or ‘useful idiots’. It built a narrative, and a body of international ‘journalistic’ work that could reference each other as evidentiary despite all coming from the same secretive source, that anything from Asia-European diplomacy to unassailably factual documents planning the privatisation of the British NHS could be considered as a pro-Russian threat.

It was exposed in the UK through a combination of investigative journalism, email hacks released under the ‘Anonymous’ group name (which is meaningless as an identifier, but that’s another issue), and a number of lawsuits here in the UK. Primarily though, Integrity Initiative overplayed it’s hand as it went all in on destroying Corbyn and a resurgent left electoral movement. It’s network of journalists were too eager to claim credit for their role thwarting this new threat in media party circles. Guardian journalist and II asset Carole Cadwalladr (who ironically was also at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica reporting which she used to burnish her credentials whilst simultaneously muddying that issue) overstepped in smearing conservative and Brexit donor Arron Banks as a Russian stooge, who then sued her for defamation where more information about II was made public in discovery. And critical independent journalists discovered that the organisation was supposedly an above-board Scottish charity, but it’s registered address was a dilapidated water mill and many of its scarce registered details were either fraudulent or deeply suspicious.

Russiagate, shifting Brexit blame from the primarily US/UK/Saudi government and tech/social media dark money, and Ukraine war propaganda all came later and supercharged it, but the network for it had already been built. And it’s had more than a decade to seed, grow, and expand. Further fuelled by what’s now literal billions being spent by the US on countering ‘foreign narrative threats’ online, never mind the strategic placement of open intelligence assets at the top of every major social media company or publishing organisation under the guise of moderation and safeguarding. And that doesn’t even take into account the wholesale capture of outliers like TikTok, first by Oracle and now by it’s new private owners and IDF ‘advisory’ role.

I know it most likely doesn’t apply to you, but there is absolutely a ton of straight up factually inaccurate information from pro Russian sources (or people who support Russia) out there that spreads on social media. For instance “Russia would never invade Ukraine, it’s just a military exercise” that lots of people were saying over three years ago.

That’s not to say that factually inaccurate information doesn’t exist on the pro NATO/pro west side, it absolutely does, sometimes to a greater degree. (See all the people saying that Russia’s economy would crash instantly upon the imposition of sanctions). It’s just that Russia is quite bold with this kind of thing on the English speaking internet (though vehicles like RT or their network of telegram and Twitter accounts). Usually by the end of the week after first appearing, this factually inaccurate information breaks containment and is all over social media, being reposted by people who should know better, all repeating the same line of thought and sounding the exact same. Hence the “Russian talking points” critique that libs have picked up and ran with.

The latest round of factually inaccurate information from pro Russian sources (I guess you could call it the latest “Russian talking point” in lib vocabulary) is that it would be impossible for Ukraine to get the required military equipment to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles. Again, this is being reposted by people who should know better, and they’re all repeating the same “talking point” with the same incorrect arguments, like a bunch of robots who couldn’t be bothered to google “post INF treaty cruise missile tests”, and just repeat whatever they read from their favourite telegram or Twitter account.

there’s also this soft implication there that you would be some sort of traitor to your country by presenting inconvenient facts like the death count in the ukrainian war on donbas before

the funniest is when lib and conservative politicians in Poland go back and forth about who’s the bigger secret Putin agent, all their arguments are so fake because they go back to the obama reset era when everyone was just carrying out US orders to be more friendly to Russia

on the flip side you have a bunch of pro russian telegram channels but I don’t think the average libs are aware of those, there’s also a bit of an alt media russia explainer cottage industry