“Trump Red Pilled Me” - Nick Fuentes REVEALS How MAGA TRANSFORMED Conservatism
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
200.6656
Summary
Nick Fuentes is a stand-up comedian, best known for his appearances on Comedy Central's "Saturday Night Live" and "SNL" as well as many other sketch comedy shows. He is also the author of the book, "Free to Choose: How I Became Who I am Today" and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, and other media outlets. In this episode, Nick talks about how he became who he is today.
Transcript
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So, Nick, I don't know much about you except for the clips I've seen, respectfully.
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To me, the way I've made my money over the last, you know, whatever, 25 years in insurance and finance
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And I would watch somebody, I would say, this guy's got what it takes, right?
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First time I had Charlie Kirk on at 23 years old, I said, there's something very special about this guy.
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At 23, I came to my insurance company, I said, this guy's going to be the president one day.
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First time I watched Tucker, unbelievable talent.
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When you watch him, humor, sarcasm, intelligence, pushing back, subtle, he's making fun of you,
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you don't know it, the audience knows it, he knows the art, Candice, talent, Dave Smith, talent.
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We used to have a comedian working here called Marcelo Hernandez, who is now on SNL.
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And I said, this guy's going to do something special.
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Vinny, talent, I see you, the way you communicated.
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And I've expressed this before on the show before.
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But I want to know a little bit more about how you became who you are today.
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And then we'll cover a lot of different topics.
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Well, at 14 years old, I was already very political.
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I've been political since, really, I was 12 years old.
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Well, I just started to develop an interest in politics.
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There were a lot of political conversations happening due to the rise of Obama, actually, in 2008, 2012.
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And I wanted to know basically everything about it.
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You know, when you turn around that age, you start to ask questions about the world and how we all got here and, you know, about things that happened before.
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And so the first thing I ever watched, actually, was Thomas Sowell on Uncommon Knowledge with, I think, Peter Robinson.
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Yeah, they're both excellent from the Hoover Institute.
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And that was actually the first thing I ever watched.
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A buddy of mine in school was telling me about the private sector.
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And I told my mom, I said, I want Free to Choose by Milton Friedman.
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And one day I came home from school and it was there on my bed.
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So it was Friedman, Sowell, and all the others.
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And so I read all that stuff in middle school and high school.
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And at that time, I was really a libertarian because that's just what was out there at that time.
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This is early 2010s that was being put out by young libertarians.
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So that's just what was out there and what was available.
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Basic economics by Thomas Sowell and read about all the Chicago school, even then the Austrian school, the really more libertarian economic stuff.
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And in high school, I was in model UN, student council, speech team.
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I was very active in high school and, you know, one of those precocious autodidact type young guys.
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I was always getting in political debates in class and in model UN, but I didn't really get in trouble as much.
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What's really funny, this might interest you actually, and I've talked about this before, but when I was in model UN, I was one of the best guys on the team.
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And because if you don't know model United Nations, you go, you simulate the United Nations general assembly or the different committees.
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It's like a role play game, but for the United Nations.
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And anyway, so I was one of the better guys on the team, and my junior year of high school, I became the head of the team.
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But I had a major falling out with the guy that ran the team.
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He was ethnically Arab, I think, extremely pro-Palestine.
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And so I downloaded all the dogma from the conservative movement at that time.
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And so I remember we were sitting in the study hall one day, and they had all the flags of the world hanging up on the ceiling.
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And I said, why do we have the Iranian flag hanging up?
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I said, they're the number one state sponsor of terrorism in the world.
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And he told me, you've got to read The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Waltz.
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And we had this, like, vicious back and forth about it.
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And that is kind of the only major problem I had with faculty over politics, ironically.
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And this school, walk me through the demo of the school.
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It was a pretty affluent public school, mostly white, outside in the suburbs of Chicago.
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And would you say politically center, left, don't care, Republican?
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But what's interesting about it is very liberal, but not leftist, not very progressive.
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So even though we were in the middle of a very progressive revolution under Obama, I mean, these guys were all liberal, but they weren't communists.
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When you were a junior in high school, this would make it what?
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Okay, so this is – has Trump yet announced anything?
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You're getting into these debates in junior year, and then Trump announces, and then what do you do?
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So after Trump announced, this is right around the time – so actually he announced in June 2015.
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And so I was very political, obviously super engaged with the election.
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And at that time – so this was going into my senior year of high school – I had a radio show on the high school radio station and a TV show on the high school TV station.
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And one of my first shows I've ever done in my whole life was talking about the election, and that was a very crowded primary.
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And so I went through all the candidates, and initially I was very anti-Trump because I was a libertarian.
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So I was in it for Rand Paul and then Ted Cruz.
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And it wasn't until April or March 2016, about seven months in to my senior year, that I really went in hard for Trump.
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And Trump, I would say, is the one who red-pilled me, quote-unquote.
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Out of all these guys, these are the guys we're looking at, right?
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That was a – Jeb Bush started with $140 million.
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Cruz was one of the guys that people thought could do something.
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Nobody thought Trump up until I think Ann Coulter's like, who do you think today is going to win it?
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She made the comment that I think it's going to be Trump on Bill Maher.
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Because at that time, I am preoccupied with this notion of individualism, very much like you.
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I mean, a lot of the stuff you say in your show, I agree with you 100%.
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I guess he reoriented my perspective about individualism.
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Because what I started to understand is that, you remember, in 2015, it felt like the left was unstoppable.
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It felt like Obama and then Hillary Clinton were going to lead this progressive revolution,
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and it was just going to get more left every day forever.
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And at that time, what felt so suffocating was this kind of political chokehold the country was in.
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And what woke me up about Trump is one day I was watching the primaries, early primary elections,
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One, he didn't win the Iowa caucus, but he won in New Hampshire, won in Nevada, won in—
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And I remember the media was beside themselves, calling it every day for him.
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And I said, the one thing that Trump has right is he understands in order to take power—
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well, in order to do what you want to do, you've got to take power first.
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In order to take power, you have to engage the media, because the media is really the enemy.
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It's a very early kind of understanding of how politics actually works.
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But he would fight the moderators in the debates, even Fox News, because Roger Ailes had it out for him early on.
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And I said, he's going to fight the mainstream media.
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That's essential, because if you can't fight the media, you can't win.
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And then I thought about immigration and how it's affecting the voting patterns,
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because I looked at one meme in 2016, and it said, this is what the 2012 election would look like
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if only white men voted, if only men voted, if only—I'm sure everybody's seen it.
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And what became clear is that if only non-white people are voting, they vote 90 percent left.
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Blacks voted 97 percent for Obama in 2008, in 2012.
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If immigration is making the country less white, and if non-white people only vote Democrat—
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Asians is like 75 percent, Hispanics at that time 70 percent, blacks 90 percent—
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I said, it's clear where the country's going to go, what direction this is headed in.
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I said, so—and the reason this is happening is because these people aren't assimilating.
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So before we can even think about individualism, the Constitution, et cetera, we've got to take out the media.
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And by take out, you know, what I mean by that is you've got to fight back.
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And two, you have to secure the border, because if the Democrats bring in all these illegals and legal immigrants,
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they're going to flip taxes, and that's the way it's going to go.
00:10:24.720
That's what made me say, I'm all in it for Trump, even though ideologically I wasn't really with him just yet.
00:10:37.140
I don't know—I don't think it was Joe Jorgensen, right, who was a candidate at the time for the libertarian.
00:10:41.760
Right, so you're not going to go Gary Johnson, right?
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I think he got—is he the one that didn't know the capital of a country?
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And it's like, oh, my God, this guy can't be in, and they moved on.
00:11:02.460
I get my MAGA hat, and I'm all excited about it, and I volunteer for the campaign and everything.
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And so he wins the primary in the spring of 2016.
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I enter college at Boston University in September 2016.
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And this is the first time I've lived outside Chicago.
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And it's important to impress upon you and maybe everybody, like, where I grew up.
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It's like this pocket of America that never changed.
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So growing up, I'm going to CCD, which is like catechism class for Catholics.
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There's an annual parade where you go and eat hot dogs and play baseball.
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So this is a place that is untouched by, like I said, even though they're liberal, they're not even really progressive.
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It's untouched by the progressive politics, by a lot of the diversity, even the crime.
00:12:12.440
It's a lot of young people because it's all schools, all universities, and they're all from Asia, all foreign students.
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And everyone on the campuses, they're militant left wing.
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And I kind of realized in that moment, most of the country looks like this now, actually, New York, L.A., Miami, the big cities.
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They all look like this because of immigration, because of left wing progressive politics.
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And I kind of said in that moment, my slice of America that I grew up with is a dying breed.
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I want to – if I have a family, I want to raise my kids in a place like that.
00:13:01.100
But in 50 years, will there be places like that?
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The country is going to become majority-minority in the 2030s.
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So when I'm old and gray and I have grandkids, what is the country they're going to look like?
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You're asking yourself, I'm concerned that I'm going to lose the identity of what it means to be an American.
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What do you mean it's going to lose its identity?
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It's all of that, that it's not going to be white people.
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No hot – like all these different layers of identity are kind of being blown up.
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Who are you sharing this concern with at the time?
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Are you talking to friends, mentor, peers, relatives, parents?
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So we all met at the – there was a watch party for the first debate between Trump and Clinton, all three of us, four of us.
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We were the only Trump supporters on the whole campus.
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So it was at the first one we all met, and we developed this kind of tight-knit friendship.
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And so we all get together, and what was interesting at that time, and this was kind of like a cultural moment,
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is that remember that Trump, when he came around, there was just this explosion on the right wing.
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That had a very different connotation in 2016 than it did in 17, because in 16 and even 2015, what it meant up to that point,
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the GOP and conservatism meant kind of like one thing.
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It meant like Rick Santorum, like cultural conservatism, traditional –
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And Trump comes along and says, well, I'm kind of agnostic on health care.
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He was more of a Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis-like nationalist.
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And so there was this explosion on 4chan and on Twitter of a lot of young right wing guys that were asking,
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And so there's guys like Stefan Molyneux and Jared Taylor and Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro.
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All these guys come into the fold, and it's much more aggressive.
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It's a lot of new ideas or maybe old ideas presented in a new way.
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And so we were kind of holding like this salon, like this intellectual salon at the Tasty Burger by Fenway,
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talking about all these new people that are coming around, Richard Spencer for that matter,
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Peterson, race – and ideas like race realism, like Western chauvinism, people like Gavin McInnes.
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And we were all kind of developing our ideas and what we thought was right.
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And ironically, none of these guys were even white.
00:16:11.020
And a lot of people say about me, I mean, I'm an American ethnic.
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Parents, when we're talking to the crew, they're telling me that mom had some influence political.
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Is that mom and dad had more influence politically or dad?
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Really more by my grandmother, by my mom's mother.
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She would say, Nick, you got to follow this guy.
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If you want to text me or call me or ask me a question, you can find me on Minect.
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