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July 10, 2025 - The Charlie Kirk Show
37:22
Shock And Awe 2.0 Is The Key To MAGA Unity
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Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
We examine Epstein and also a plan for President Trump to chart his path forward, Shock and Auth 2.0, as Mark Halperin joins the show.
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Here we go.
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We're going to find out real quick whether or not we are a movement or this is just a moment.
President Donald Trump won a popular vote majority.
And when you are building and when you have won a multi-ethnic, multi-generational, multi-viewpoint coalition, it's inevitable that you have moments like what's happened the last couple of weeks.
You're not going to be able to keep everyone happy, including I know a lot of you in the base right now.
It's been a very instructive week.
You know, by the time I'm 35, I'm 31, I'm going to be able to say I've been through some stuff.
I'm going to be able to teach a masterclass.
I learned a lot this week.
I learned how you don't handle PR when it comes to a story that is as complex, as sensitive, as high profile as the Epstein thing.
It started on a Sunday night.
The whole thing was so perplexing to me because you sign the one big beautiful bill on Independence Day, and then on a holiday weekend, going into a news week, you decide to leak it to Axios that it's like, case closed, don't ask any questions, there is no list.
The whole thing was like, profoundly confusing is the term I used on Newsmax.
And again, trust me, I don't want to talk about Epstein every single day.
But it's been very interesting because this week, sometimes news stories go away.
Sometimes news stories kind of you have a one-day cycle.
This is a rare occurrence where the news story is actually getting bigger.
Sometimes they have legs.
And it's not just on social media.
Social media is a little bit deceiving, especially X. X is very goofy and wacky lately.
But it's not just the online right.
And it's as if something just happened last evening or yesterday afternoon.
I was starting to get texts from people that are not necessarily politicos.
Trump voting adjacent mid-propensity voters that might listen to a podcast once or twice a week.
That's about the criteria.
They are not like you in this audience in the Charlie Kirk faithful.
And they started to text me, Charlie, what is going on with this Epstein thing?
I'm confused.
It doesn't make sense.
What is going on?
And the story started to grow and it had legs.
The last 48 hours, this has been building to a crescendo.
And I would much rather be talking about which we should be focused on, which is mass deportations, which is focusing on dismantling the administrative state, curtailing the size and scope of government.
When you build a coalition like President Trump won in a popular vote majority, you're going to have different viewpoints.
But an undercurrent of the entire Trump movement was that we demand transparency from our government because we were lied to during COVID and we were lied to about the Hunter Biden laptop and we were lied to about 51 Intel agents and we were lied to about Ukraine.
We were lied to about so many different things that we want to try to rebuild trust in our government.
What's been very interesting and instructive to me is that this is not only a young online libertarian transparency push.
Instead, this seems like it's spanning multiple generations.
And you and this audience have an email me, freedom at charliekirk.com, very ticked off and very confused.
And this is going to be a testing moment for all of us.
What we do next is going to be critically important.
Radical transparency has always been the hallmark of the Trump administration.
And I believe it will continue to be.
People panicked over tariffs.
They are panicked over Iran.
And some are panicked over Epstein.
So right now, the people who love and defend the president want more information.
And very similar to kind of how they did the JFK files, people say, well, why don't you just put a link of all the files out there?
This is breaking news over the evening.
This is Department of Justice from the post-Millennial Cut 403.
Department of Justice reports to court that it's still reviewing Epstein records for possible release judicial watch reveals.
So we're all over the place.
We're back.
We're forth.
That is a positive step, though.
It shows that this has been a bigger grassroots push than I think people realize.
It shows that people are listening.
But let's take a broader step back, though.
50 years from now, the most important two fights of whether or not this administration and this presidency will be a success are whether or not we can recalibrate the administrative state and dismantle it down to the bone and to the core, and whether or not we can have 15 to 20 million deportations.
That is what will determine the future of the country.
And at that moment, this is where coalition politics matters.
Because for coalitional politics, you know, some people are upset because we're sending more arms to Ukraine.
I'm certainly not thrilled about that.
Some people are upset because of what happened between Israel, Iran.
Honestly, I think President Trump handled that beautifully, and I think that was a masterclass in a third way of foreign policy.
But all of this is happening at such a time where the fault lines, and every movement has fault lines, are being exposed in a rapid period of time.
It's as if this is compressed into a short 10-day window, and no movement can sustain that.
No movement can sustain within a 10-day window, we are going to flush out all the fault lines.
And the tragedy, honestly, is that a week ago, President Trump signed his Hallmark piece of legislation that deserves a lot of attention.
And a week later, no one's talking about the Big Beautiful Bill.
It should have been a week of celebration.
It should have been a PR week all about this.
And instead, that is not the case.
What happens next will determine whether or not this is just a moment or whether this is a long-lasting multi-generational movement.
And there are two major things that need to happen.
And here is my advice to the administration, both privately and publicly.
Take this weekend and go to Camp David.
That's my first piece of advice.
No reporters.
Put your phones out of the room and get yourselves back into the room.
Go to Camp David.
Get out of the White House.
Get the senior staff.
Get cabinet officials and go to Camp David.
Cancel all your plans.
If you're coming to SAS, still come to SAS, but then go to Camp David.
You need to have a little bit of a pause button here.
It's been a fast six months.
You got to have the president, the vice president, get Marco Rubio, you'll get everyone in the room.
That's number one.
Number two, plan out another wave of shock and awe.
Have a couple days to kind of have some fun, have some laughs.
Can you believe how much we've been through the last six months?
And then what we need is we need the shock and awe again.
Plan out another 100 executive orders.
Draft them.
Get them ready to go.
Go quiet for a day or two.
And then boom, come out and have President Donald Trump in the Oval Office and just start signing 100 executive orders.
Remember how that was?
Remember how good that felt?
That could still happen.
Remember the first couple of days when President Trump was signing stuff and people are all over the place?
That is the type of energy that we need.
Go to Camp David.
Reassess.
Take a breath.
You guys have been through a lot.
You guys have been to Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
You guys have been to the UAE.
You've been all over the country.
Marco Rubio is in Malaysia.
We got the Russian-Ukrainian thing.
No one slept during Israel and Iran.
You got to pass the big, beautiful bill.
The border is completely secure.
You guys have been through a lot.
By the way, this is all on the heels of a very high-pressure transition after the highest stake presidential campaign ever seen after President Trump got shot.
These guys are on fumes of fumes.
Take a well-deserved long weekend at Camp David.
Take a deep breath.
Have the senior staff together.
And then plot out and plan out Shockanov 2.0 because we still have a lot of stuff that we can do.
There are hundreds of potentially drafted executive orders, and it's time to wind up and go right back into the arena.
Because I get it.
I get that this whole thing can grind you down and can wear you down.
But the executive orders must be focused on two things.
Deportations, dismantling the administrative state.
By the way, think of all the stuff that we can still do.
We got Department of Education stuff that we still have to fight.
We have Maha promises that we still have to fulfill.
We could restore the trust around the, basically across the board.
We have to break up the college cartel.
They're breaking up the publishing cartel.
No pharmaceutical advertisements on TV.
I mean, we have dozens of campaign promises.
The NGO cartel.
We got to go after the actual Mexican drug cartels, the Sonola drug cartel.
We have 88% of the Trump administration left in front of us.
And I get it.
It can wear you down.
And people say, oh, you know, it's breaking up the coalition.
The coalition only breaks if you allow it to break.
And my advice to President Trump and his team, take a breath, take a pause, go to Camp David and plot out Shock and Aub 2.0.
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And part of that shock and awe is that I think that anything that is not proprietary, anything that does not involve the trafficking of kids, at least give us some of the elements of the Epstein stuff.
That's the least you could do.
Or give us who is the cell block partners where Epstein was.
Again, I'm not overly interested in Epstein.
I'm not.
Like, we have not done endless shows on it.
We haven't done a lot of podcasts on it.
We're focused on a lot.
We're focused on very macro and sometimes specific micro stuff.
Other programs have made it kind of their shtick.
So during Shock and Awe 2.0, which President Trump has to do, declassify all documents from 9-11 and before.
Go on a Transparency blitz.
Literally sit at the table at the resolute desk once it is planned out and just go on a transparency blitz.
We're declassifying this.
Boom, boom, boom.
MLK, RFK being shot, one after the other.
Let the American people see it.
We're declassifying the COVID stuff.
We're declassifying just Russia Gate, crossfire hurricane.
And then do a series of executive orders, go further to break the college cartel, authorize some sort of a military cooperation against the actual cartels, and then sit at the resolute desk and say, we are now marshaling back our focus to this hemisphere.
You want to get your base excited?
Panama Canal and Greenland.
Hemispheric dominance.
Very well received by your base.
To have dominance over the Panama Canal.
Kick the CCP out of core institutions in our country.
Reverse all of Obama's consent decrees.
We need President Trump back into the arena where he is at his best.
But I think it starts with a Camp David retreat.
I think it starts with just a little bit of a reassess and a reset.
And that's okay.
There's nothing wrong with it.
Some people say, oh, it's because, guys, people need rest.
No PR, no publicity, no cameras, no press pool, no X live streams, just camaraderie, reflection, reorientation.
Presidents passed, Ronald Reagan and many others would go to Camp David at very high stakes thing.
And I think this administration deserves it.
Look at all they've done.
Do you understand that when they fly in Air Force One, the entire staff doesn't fly when they go, they don't sleep when you go to Saudi Arabia.
You're literally sleeping on the floor.
I mean, this is a tough job.
And they got to come back and they got to be sharp in front of the press, in front of the world.
They deserve just a weekend to take a breath and be like, wow, we won the election.
We crushed the transition and here we are.
And you got to find out some way to address this Epstein in a new way.
You got to figure that out in some way.
But that's just one thing.
Again, I don't want to get too emphasized.
It's important, but we got to stay focused on civilizational implication issues.
How are we going to get more deportations?
By the way, plot out a potential indictment plan of all of these Sanctuary City mayors that are getting in the way.
Go indict Karen Bass, Brandon Johnson, boom, in one day.
You're getting in the way of ICE.
We are going to indict you.
Shock and awe.
What matters 50 years from now is whether or not we take back control of the administrative state and we have mass deportations.
What is the common denominator, though, between CrossFire Hurricane and Epstein and all this stuff?
Is that there is a super government below the surface that we need to exert dominion over, that we need to exert control over.
And that is the fight.
We have been focused on that since day one, that the real fight is not Republican or Democrat.
It is going to be bureaucrat versus citizen.
It is going to be deep state versus the Constitution.
It is going to be surf, which is what they want you to be, against oligarch, the technocratic state, the council of experts.
And then I want to see President Trump right back in that resolute desk, just firing off 100 shotguns.
Don't even tell anyone it's coming.
All of a sudden, say, I'm calling a press conference and you have, can we get that picture of Shotgun 1.0 where he just had folders stacked and he within an hour and a half and he was casually with his Sharpie signing.
Oh, there's an executive order on that.
People have been waiting a long time on that.
Do you remember how good that felt?
The momentum?
Here is a rule of MAGA.
And I've been around for 10 years, so I can say this now.
And I wrote the MAGA doctrine.
Trump is at his best when he is on offense.
He sets the terms.
There it is right there.
He's able to frame the debate.
We as a movement are at our weakest when we are on defense.
RussiaGate, January 6th, we are at our weakest when we are backpenned.
See those folders?
I want to see that again.
I want to see White House aides flood into the oval with the most based, crisp, imaginable executive orders on every possible topic, border, deportations, Sanctuary City mayors, college cartel, school choice, public sector teacher unions.
We need to keep President Donald Trump right back there on a transparency blitz and an executive order blitz.
Reorient, recalibrate, and reassert dominance over the executive branch.
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Joining us now is Mark Halperin, editor-in-chief of Two-Way and host of Next Up on the Megan Kelly Network.
Mark, great to see you.
Mark, I caught your interview with Megan Kelly, I think it was yesterday, where you were discussing the Epstein story.
This is an unusual one where it seems as if it is growing in its interest and with velocity over the last couple of days.
What is your analysis as a reporter of how the Trump administration has handled this?
And what would you say is the political implications of this?
Well, first of all, nice to be back.
And if you want to know why I'm not, as is our usual practice, wearing a ripped and wrinkled t-shirt, it's because I had your cousin, I mean, your friend Michael Knowles on my podcast today.
And as you know, he's an Ivy League dweeb.
I knew he'd wear a sports jacket.
So that's right.
He always dresses up.
That's why I'm overdressed.
Okay, so there's at least four reasons why you would think the president and the administration would be doing full-on disclosure.
First, it's the right thing to do for the victims.
Second, they promised that they would be transparent about this.
Three, the MAGA movement, as best we can tell, certainly men of its leaders like you are for it.
But certainly, I surveyed the, asked everyone on Tuway this morning on the morning meeting, go in the chat if you're a three-time Trump voter, say what you think they should do and a very pro-disclosure.
And four, you know, they've handled it badly in so many ways.
And just the politics of it suggests that the way to recover from such a poor handling of it would be to comply with the other three things.
So what's on the other side?
Why wouldn't they be disclosing?
And the answers are not great.
Either they're trying to protect people or there's an intelligence connection that they're trying to protect, as best I can tell.
I struggle, despite what I said about the two-way community, I struggle with knowing whether there's political damage here for the president in the midterms.
People say, you know, there won't be turnout in the midterms or his approval rating will go down.
MAGA is very resilient.
MAGA fights with the president sometimes and then moves on.
And I don't know that this is a qualitatively different case.
There's a lot of emotion around this.
There's a lot of resonance around it.
There are a lot of leaders, including some MAGA leaders who often disagree, who seem to agree on this.
There's not much support for the president's position, except for people who he hired.
So I don't really know where it's going or how much damage it will do.
But I do think that the two ledgers, the two sides of the ledger seem pretty clear.
And it's incumbent upon them to not put out a statement or say some things on the fly, but to have a long and detailed explanation of why they're choosing the course they're choosing, because the way they've done it so far is only arousing suspicion.
Based on your reporting, did the Trump administration think it would go away after a day or two with this kind of Sunday night leak strategy?
They did.
And of course, as you know, they're leveraging the credibility of the director of the FBI and his deputy, two people who previously were in the camp of saying there needs to be disclosure and concerned about a conspiracy.
So I think they were trying to leverage them.
Did they think it would go away?
Yes.
Part of the issue here is while MAGA media is quite interested, the dominant media, inexplicably to me, is not interested.
Even though you've got now House Democrats writing a letter to the president saying he should put all this stuff out, I don't know why the press isn't interested in the story.
It's a compelling story, just as a story.
The whole thing is, but including this latest episode.
But also the fact that Donald Trump is split from MAGA.
So there are a lot of stories about the MAGA split, but there are not a lot of stories on TV, especially where Donald Trump pays attention, even though he doesn't like the dominant media.
He pays close attention.
There are not a lot of stories there about the underlying question, which is where is justice for the victims?
And so part of why they didn't think they'd pay a political price and part of why I don't think they're as concerned as they might be is this is a big topic of discussion on Megan's show, on your show, on X, but it's not a dominant conversation in the country at large in a way that would put more pressure on them.
Yeah, I think that's partially right.
I think that it's growing, at least yesterday I started to get non-political-ish people start to reach out as it's starting to penetrate more circles.
So again, I don't want to spend our entire conversation on this, but I do find it to be interesting.
I would say the last point on this, and we'll go to another topic, is this is one of the few instances, and maybe you can correct me, where it seems as if the president is 180 from his base.
The only one I could think of is maybe the vaccine and the years after that, when he would go to rallies and sometimes get murmurs and even booze at times.
Can you think of other examples potentially and how do those usually rectify?
They just kind of go away as they're an addressing.
Right.
Well, I know you want to move on, and I've got so much to say about the thing he's just passing, but well, okay.
So first of all, he's certainly adverse with the base on amnesty, path to citizenship, path to legal status for people who came to the country illegally.
So that's another one right now where he's at least flirting with doing it differently than the base.
So my monologue on my show today is about how Donald Trump makes decisions.
And I think he's an extraordinarily underrated decision maker.
And he's extraordinarily different than the other presidents I've covered in many of the ways he makes decisions.
And one of those things is no decision's ever final.
He'll make a decision, and then he'll make a different decision.
And sometimes it's 180 degrees different in response to it.
I know that the people who feel passionately about this feel passionately about it.
And I understand why.
But I also know two other things.
Number one, it doesn't affect their lives directly.
You could say that it affects their trust in the president or their trust in his commitment to transparency or justice.
But in the end, it doesn't affect their pocketbook directly.
It doesn't affect their daily lives directly.
And so I think the chances of it, so the Risks of being at odds with some of MAGA are lower.
Number two, whatever reason caused them to choose the course they've chosen so far must still be there.
I was quite struck, I've said this several times already.
The way he tried to shut the reporter down, asking about the other day, I thought was a massive tell.
It wasn't his usual, you're the fake news, you're asking questions that don't matter.
Because as you point out, this does matter to a lot of people who care about him and who he cares about.
But if he simply sticks to whatever rationale he has for the course he's chosen and other news occurs, which has already happened, and it never catches on with the mainstream dominant media, and if he can please MAGA some other way, I think he could stick to this.
And again, I'd say, I'd like him and I'd like the attorney general and the FBI director, I'd like them to explain not just the facts of what they did better, but the reason for what they did better.
To say there's nothing to see here, we all know anyone who's followed this at all knows that's not true.
So I think that MAGA is very understanding when the president explains things, but he hasn't explained it.
And so, yeah, again, in the attempt to move on, we're going to stay on the topic.
Yeah, and I think that's right.
And at least talking about from the base perspective, the younger base in particular, there is this growing distrust of government.
And it's actually really bad that people don't trust their government.
I missed the country in the 1950s and 60s.
I wasn't alive, but this idea that you trust your institutions and they tell you the truth.
But this certainly doesn't help, does it, Mark?
I mean, for trying to rebuild trust and trying to rebuild integrity in our institutions.
I'm going to propose something to you that just occurred to me.
I'd like our shows together to do a joint focus group of young people who care about this issue.
You and I will moderate it together.
Let's recruit 12 young people.
Let's get them on a Zoom and let's let the White House hear their voices because the fact that young people care about this more than older people, which you and I are hearing anecdotally all over the place, I'd love to give voice to that because that is the big issue.
And again, I'm not minimizing the responsibility our society has to the victims at all.
But the longer term issue that runs parallel to that is trust in government.
And it's a thing that needs to be put in sharper relief.
Younger people really care about this more than older people in general.
And the reasons for that relate, at least in part, to their incredulity that a government, particularly a government if they're MAGA, who they voted for and trust, could so fundamentally betray what they thought was going to happen and should happen.
So it's a good idea.
Let me just elaborate more is that this is a generation that they view they have been wronged by every power institution as long as they have been alive.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And they saw Trump to be different in that way.
Please, Mark.
Well, the reason I want to do this so much is because it's crazy.
We live in a society with all this media and you've not heard that a single place, right?
Like one or two voices maybe on your show, my show, somebody you and I have talked to, but the country needs to see 12 young Trump voters saying, Mr. President, this is wrong.
And here's why.
Here's why we feel so passionately about this.
That voice needs to be put in sharp relief.
It needs to be heard.
And I'd like the president to hear it because I suspect he hasn't.
This is important.
And I'll tell you, it's a more structural issue because what I am concerned about, and I trust everyone, I trust Cash and I trust Bongino and I know them quite well.
Yeah, of course.
But I care about keeping the coalition together as a MAGA guy and as one of President Trump's greatest defenders on a daily basis, multi-platform, that I am concerned that the coalition that we have built, especially under 30, is going to be put in jeopardy.
And we'll learn a lot this weekend.
This weekend, we have our big event.
We have 7,000, 6,500 young people coming from across the country this weekend in Tampa, Florida.
And we're going to learn a lot when we're there.
And so if you want to come do the focus group down there, Mark, come on by.
Maybe I will.
Every time I read the list of who's coming, it appears that everyone you and I both know will be there except for me.
Well, then you'd have to come in.
We'll give you a room.
Come do the press.
It would be awesome to do that on stage.
Yeah, it would be again, I don't know how to run a focus group, so you'll have to teach me.
I'm not being sarcastic.
We'll do it together.
It seems as if it's an art to be able to run it as much as it is a science, right?
Because you don't want.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
It is.
And I've done hundreds of them.
So I wouldn't say I was great in the beginning, but I get how to do it now.
Check out 2-Way TV and also Mark's excellent show, which is host of Next Up on the Megan Kelly Network.
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So Mark, I'm looking at the New York Times, flipping through it as I do as for penance every morning.
But you said something briefly on the Megan Kelly program.
The media would, you would seem, would have kind of a straight shot here at a story with Trump, right?
Here's this Epstein Thing that has some velocity.
Here is Trump.
Why has the media ignored this for so long?
What is that all about?
I mean, I don't want to try to get into like the dark, you know, wacky stuff, but it's just true.
The media, the mainstream media, not internet media, seems like meticulously uninterested in this.
It's been a mystery to me for the entire time.
There are dark possible explanations that I don't want to give voice to necessarily.
Perhaps I will as I ramble here.
I don't know.
It's an incredible story.
And currently, there are stories about the quote unquote divisions with the MAGA base because of course they love that.
But why the press is not covering a story about the documented abuse of children and the politics of it, of how it's gone this long.
And, you know, you've got all sorts of Trump angles that are appropriate to discuss.
So I don't know.
I'd say the same thing about the Hunter, the Joe Biden acuity thing and the doctor taking the fifth.
If I were running a news organization like the New York Times or NBC News, with the exception of continuing to cover the tragedy in Texas, I would have led with those two stories.
Those are massive stories, and yet they're barely covered today.
And I normally can explain the press's behavior.
I can't explain those two.
I cannot.
So more broadly here, just from, I want to talk about on the Democrat side.
Is there any strategy on the Democrats to try to be interested in this?
Or are they too also?
So they're seeing your favorite.
Jamie Raskin, your favorite House Democrat, I believe.
I know you like Nadler too, but Jamie wrote, Jamie wrote a letter with five or six other House Democrats sounding like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon saying, you know, everything should be released.
So they've entered the fray.
And again, I would think the press would write about that.
And there was a little bit of coverage of it.
But here you have a rare moment of bipartisan moral clarity saying this needs to be done for the sake of trust in government and the sake of transparency and sake of the victims and a shared populist line that elites should not be protecting elites.
And yet, you know.
That's such a good point.
Let me interject.
That's what I think this Epstein thing is a unique example where there's like five or six elements that kind of combine because it does have this.
Not only was he a creep and a pedophile, which has there has been a yearning in the right-wing base that there has been some pedophilic activity that has not been held accountable.
As you know, that has been a legitimate concern for over a decade.
And then number two, that he probably was an intelligence asset, either for the American government or for MI6 or for the Saudis or for Mossad or whatever, right?
We don't know.
Number three, of course, the way he died, which was not exactly transparent.
And then, of course, like what you, he's a billionaire or allegedly.
So there's this populist thing, which is like, oh, if you have money, you can buy your way out of no matter what evil actions that you are in.
And that the elites will protect each other.
Yeah, no, that's right.
To allow them to get away with things.
And, you know, no one has documented the full impact of the failure for a single Wall Street executive to be indicted after 2008.
No one has documented how that affected the psyche of the American people.
But this is of a piece with that.
And, you know, one of the things that I work as hard on as anything as a journalist is I've lived in Boston, Washington, and New York my whole life, okay?
But my obligation is to not reflect the point of view of those three elite places.
And yet, when I say the obligation to the victims and when I say the responsibility to not have elites protect elites, I feel it in my core.
Like, that is a human resonant thing for me, in part because I feel both things myself, but in part because I know tens of millions of people around the country feel it passionately.
And to have this administration, which promised otherwise to not do it, just is going to incite the worst speculation about what the motive is.
And elites protecting elites is not great.
Transparency is the answer here, and it's not too late to fix it.
Mark, thank you so much.
Really appreciate your time.
Thank you.
See you in Florida.
See you in Florida.
Can't wait.
Thanks so much for listening.
Everybody, email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.
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