State Department Says Claim The West Is In Decline Is A 'Russian Disinformation Trope'

Theme #3: “The Collapse of Western Civilization is Imminent”

Russia pushes the false claim that Western civilization is collapsing and has strayed from “traditional values” because it works to ensure the safety and equality of LGBTQI+ people and promotes concepts such as female equality and multiculturalism. The demise of Western civilization is one of Russia’s oldest disinformation tropes, with claims of “the decaying west” documented since the 19th century.

This “values”-based disinformation narrative evokes ill-defined concepts including “tradition,” “family values,” and “spirituality.” Russia argues it is the bastion of so-called “traditional values” and gender roles and serves as a moral counterweight to the “decadence” of the United States and Western countries. For example, President Putin has claimed the West has practically cancelled the concepts of “mother” and “father,” and instead has replaced them with “parent 1 and 2,” while Foreign Minister Lavrov wrote that Western students “learn at school that Jesus Christ was bisexual.”

The U.S. and China leveled sharp rebukes of each others’ policies in the first high-level, in-person talks of the Biden administration, with deeply strained relations of the two global rivals on rare public display in Alaska https://t.co/cl3SoVXQmE pic.twitter.com/JAJxufB674

— Reuters (@Reuters) March 19, 2021