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A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.

As many outlets—both conservative and otherwise—reported on Tuesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson began to take a tougher line on Syria in the lead-up to his visit to Moscow this week. Reporting on his comments, Fox News, for example, prominently quoted his claim that “the reign of the Assad family is coming to an end.”




Meanwhile, a different story continued to simmer in other corners of the conservative media ecosystem: A typical headline on Breitbart read, “Putin: Syria Chemical Attack Was ‘False Flag,’ More ‘Provocations’ Coming.” That post said that the Russian president—in a statement to Russian government-funded network RT—suggested that the chemical attack in Syria might have been “a phony operation staged by enemies of Russia and Syria to discredit them."

"He said more such false flag operations were on the way,” the post continued. The conspiracy site InfoWars, which had previously embraced the “false flag” angle, also credulously aggregated Putin’s comments.

LifeZette took a similar narrative up from a slightly different angle, covering WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange’s skepticism about what he said should be called the “alleged” chemical attack. The site wrote: “Assange insisted that too many details don’t line up about what exactly happened in Syria and about who was ultimately responsible for the heinous attack.”

Not everyone was buying into the conspiracy theory. The Daily Caller repeated something closer to the official United States administration's line in an article titled, “White House Lays Out Evidence That Syria Was Behind Deadly Chemical Attack.” It referred to, but did not describe, “intelligence gathered from social media accounts, open source videos, reporting, imagery, and geospatial intelligence.” In that same article, the publication cited the unnamed official's contention that the “Russians are trying to cover up what happened there.”




Writing for Fox News, Newt Gingrich stood up more directly for the president, calling his actions in Syria Reaganesque and arguing, “The United States is back in the business of leading from the front.” In National Review, Rich Lowry likewise wrote that Trump had decisively broken with Obama-era policies toward Russia, policies that were, Lowry suggested, marked by “naivete and weakness.”

That said, some conservative publications that didn’t embrace the hoax angle still found reasons to criticize Trump’s actions. Writing for the Federalist, attorney Christopher Roach claimed that the Tomahawk attack had left him feeling disheartened about the president, who he had previously supported almost without question. Roach concluded, “The whole point of his campaign was America First, at home and abroad. To see Trump transform into a knee-jerk interventionist in fewer than 100 days is astonishing.”

LifeZette editor-in-chief Laura Ingraham also cautioned against Trump’s newfound interventionism in an appearance on Fox & Friends, suggesting that the president should focus on improving conditions in the homeland instead of turning to global war:

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