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Jim Mattis became something of a hero among supporters of Donald Trump when he accepted the newly inaugurated president's appointment as secretary of defense in January 2017. (That was before he suddenly became the focus of Trump's ire in December 2018, when he resigned from his post shortly after the president announced his intention to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.) One quotation attributed to Mattis burnished the retired Marine Corps general's reputation in right-leaning, social media circles as a grizzled, no-nonsense conservative icon. In reality, it's not clear that Mattis ever made those remarks, but he probably never did. The meme has appeared intermittently online since shortly after Mattis took office. The earliest instance we could find was from May 2017, when it was posted by the conservative Facebook page Mad World News, where it reappeared in June and September 2017. We could find no corroborating evidence of Mattis ever having said or written those words, despite checking online news archives dating back several decades. Mad World News is a Facebook page and website with a history of posting provocative and occasionally inflammatory memes. It has a track record of publishing misleading and inaccurate stories, particularly about Muslims, some of which we have examined previously. Although we can't definitively say one way or another, the absence of any independent corroboration for the purported quotation, or even a cited source or date in the meme, along with the previous record of Mad World News, strongly suggest that the quotation is fabricated.
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