Tucker Carlson’s now-famous Jan. 3 monologue landed like a bomb in the lap of the conservative movement.
In 15 minutes, Carlson delivered an impassioned indictment of establishment conservatism and its “worship” of the free market, which he said led to the destruction of the American family. A combination of unregulated finance and social progressivism shattered the social fabric that made the American Dream possible.
At its conclusion, Carlson said that the Republican Party will have to rethink alternatives to its free-market dogma to preserve the things that really matter, like family, or else socialism will take over.
Carlson’s monologue raised a number of fascinating and complex questions, and both his critics and his defenders gave a range of interesting responses.
Some of the fiercest debate has been over the question of who is responsible for the decline of the middle class, and whether the problems Carlson describes can be solved politically.
One group of Carlson’s critics brushed off his speech and said that he was encouraging what David French calls “victimhood populism.” Conservative writers of this stripe, including French, Ben Shapiro, Kevin Williamson, and Jonah Goldberg, largely agreed that Carlson was wrong to blame “the elites” for the woes of the middle class and argued that public policy cannot solve the problems Carlson is concerned about, like the breakdown of the family or epidemic drug use.
Many of these responses mounted a defense of the free market and the supposed generosity of the wealthy. It’s still up to individuals struggling with the country’s vastly changed economic and social circumstances to rise above them, said French in a much-cited, representative take:
But we must not create a victim class of angry citizens. We must not tell them falsehoods about the power of governments or banks or elites over their personal destinies. We must not make them feel helpless when they are not helpless. Instead, even as we work diligently to make government more helpful than hurtful (which, frankly, can often mean getting government out of the way), we must continue to tell Americans a liberating truth: This is still a land where you can determine your own success more than can any political party or group of nefarious elites. The fundamental building block of any family is still your love, your discipline, and your fidelity.
On the other hand were those who agreed with Carlson, including the National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty and J.D. Vance. Writers in this group criticized Carlson’s dissenters for describing predatory lending practices as a necessary evil of the economic order while pretending that nothing can be done on the political level to reverse the profoundly troubling trends that Carlson laments. Carlson’s defenders largely agreed that his critics were wrong to blame those victimized by the wealthy while exculpating those in power of any responsibility in the decline of the middle class.
The various takes on the monologue are worth reading for their own sake. Just as Carlson read Mitt Romney’s op-ed as a prism into the thinking of the failed ruling class, the responses of his critics say a lot about the kind of conservatism Carlson impugned and which way the movement ought to go.
I won’t repeat what has already been argued well on this point, but the problems Carlson describes are real and profoundly serious, and the tendency of his critics to ignore them is pure gas-lighting. Manufacturing has declined. The family unit is a broken ruin compared to generations past, particularly among America’s poorest. Most strikingly, marriage has remained strong and resilient among the powerful.
Even Carlson’s critics agree that he has identified serious problems, but argue, as French puts it, that he focuses on the political “at the expense of the personal.”
This emphasis on the personal is a sticking point in the critical responses to Carlson. Ben Shapiro argues that Carlson wants to “fill a gap in the soul with a policy-based solution.”
Of course, the truth that actions have consequences is one of the core conservative insights. It is true that individuals are responsible for their choices, and communities have to sustain the morals that make communities strong.
But individual and local choices do not occur in a political vacuum. Carlson’s critics lay the blame for the breakdown of families on the welfare state and progressive attacks on the family, but it never seems to occur to them that the free market can bring about disruptive social change as well.
J.D. Vance argues that Carlson’s critics wrongly downplay the negligence of free markets to public health and the social fabric. The opioid epidemic did not spontaneously result from the bad choices of thousands of poor people; pharmaceutical companies created the crisis by pursuing their self-interest.
Personal responsibility is important, he says, “but if you want to protect a community from drugs that can take hold of a person’s mind and destroy whole neighborhoods soon thereafter, you need some government intervention.”
The opioid epidemic, like family breakdown, is the result of conscious policy decisions by those in power — decisions that could conceivably be fixed with better, more virtuous leadership. Carlson’s critics oddly share his conviction that these are terrible problems, but fail to see them as political ones that require political solutions. This is defeatism. In this excerpt from a rebuttal to Carlson’s critics, Michael Brendan Dougherty put it this way:
At what point can we actually move on from the subject of personal responsibility and onto governance? Or, to put it another way, are there any political conditions in which the advice to be virtuous and responsible aren’t the best counsel you could give an individual?
Indeed, when? The answer from Shapiro and like-minded conservatives is, presumably, “never.”
Carlson is concerned with the health, prosperity, and virtue of the community, and he is willing to let the government step in to safeguard those things when necessary. For saying this, some of his critics accused him, either directly or through insinuation, of being a socialist.
This is not so much an argument as a condemnation for political heresy. Some of his critics mounted dogmatic defenses of the free market that proved his point about “worship” of capitalism. Shapiro speaks of the market like a deity promising freedom from all earthly want, writing:
Supply and demand economics has powered most of the world’s human beings out of extreme poverty, and led to the richest society in human history. It has allowed us to live longer, in bigger houses, in more comfort. It has meant fewer dead children and more living parents. If we’ve blown that advantage, that’s our own fault.
But the free market, Carlson said, is not a deity but a “tool” that should be subordinated to greater social and political ends. The market should serve the people, not the other way around, according to Carlson:
Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.
Carlson’s argument against markets is two-fold: the free market has both destroyed the material conditions for family life by killing jobs and wages and hollowed out family values with materialism and worship of the GDP.
On the one hand, Shapiro simply denies that the material foundation for family life has eroded, mounting a knee-jerk defense of the supposedly benevolent stewardship of the market that is divorced from the economic devastation it has wrought on the middle class. Other critics, including French, make similar arguments that economic conditions necessary for family life have not changed significantly enough to make an impact.
But he also draws a sharp and arbitrary divide between economics and culture, which allows him to somehow fault Carlson with looking to jobs to “provide meaning,” as if jobs are not an indispensable material condition for family life and necessary for the dignity and purpose that Carlson believes has vanished from much of American society. Meaning is supposed to come from the social fabric, Shapiro writes, missing Carlson’s point that economics is tied intimately into the social fabric.
Shapiro misreads Carlson as “neglecting cultural decay,” when Carlson plainly sees the market as driving that decay. Carlson wrongly blames elites for “somehow, in unspecified fashion, convincing poorer Americans to conceive children out of wedlock,” when he is arguing that market forces created conditions inhospitable to family formation.
Indeed, Carlson argues that economics and culture are not separate spheres, but “intertwined.” But Shapiro dings Carlson for “conflating” markets with culture and looking to government intervention to provide meaning and purpose, which must come instead from personal choices.
This is a rather obtuse reading of Carlson’s point.
Carlson is not looking to government to provide meaning, but to act as a corrective to those things which destroy it. Carlson recognizes that average people, in the grand scheme of things, don’t stand a chance against larger forces seeking to subvert their values unless they take political action.
In his monologue, he laments the push to decriminalize marijuana and the negative effect the drug has had on the minds and souls of young men. The push to legalize the drug, he said, did not come from the left alone; it was the result of converging interests between progressives and self-interested free market libertarians looking to make a profit.
Conservatives, one would think, would oppose normalizing drug use, or any habit that cripples the health and virtue of the public. But Shapiro, French, and myriad others of this type are indifferent. Shapiro criticizes Carlson for demonizing “voluntary exchanges,” inadvertently defining the squishy libertarian morality that helped erode conservative values.
Shapiro blasts the war on drugs but doesn’t seem to show any concern for the effects of drug use on the minds and characters of people. This doesn’t seem like a terribly conservative sentiment. One would think that conservatives would want morals to curtail appetites, not be defined by them.
It was this apathy that hollowed out conservatism and allowed the market, in conjunction with the left, to spoil the virtue of the public. Guided by a desire for profit and libertarian ethics that begin and end with “voluntary exchanges,” conservatives were too busy defending an economic system that worked against their values to protect those values from being destroyed.
Marijuana is just one example. Parents have also railed against porn and violent video games for years, but they eventually came to invade home life and define the morals, minds, and lifestyles of entire generations of Americans anyway. That didn’t just happen. Markets made it happen.
It’s difficult to trace the tortuous path by which keeping unhealthy drugs illegal is “providing meaning.” Shapiro seems to be intolerant of any government action that would make society healthy.
At the same time, Shapiro oddly shares Carlson’s concern for virtue, but he is unwilling to see virtue as a political problem. He blames the erosion of values on the people for making the wrong choices, writing: “If market capitalism exacerbated [moral decline] through materialism and consumerism, that’s because we chose to make it so.”
Yes, it is up to people to sustain the virtues and values that make society good. But it’s also really hard to do that when corporations actively subvert the values that make society strong, and doubly so when conservatism is hobbled by the libertarian laissez-faire morality that Shapiro advocates.
It never seems to occur to Shapiro that corporations are powerful, political entities that push their values onto ordinary people, not the other way around. Shapiro seems to have missed something Carlson picks up on: the convergence of socially progressive values with corporate interests, or what some populist critics have snarkily labeled “woke capitalism.” Corporate “virtue signaling” for diversity, feminism, and the LGBT agenda have by now become common.
Carlson hits on a kinship between free markets and progressivism in his monologue, particularly when discussing Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in” and the impact of markets on gender roles. Carlson points to the vacuous “empowerment” of putting shareholders before family as an example of family values being consumed and replaced by materialism and careerism.
Shapiro agrees with Carlson in lamenting the rise of a corporate culture that places a premium on loyalty to corporations over family, but settles on blaming individuals for failing to preserve family values. It doesn’t occur to him that the market destroyed and replaced those values with its own.
Shapiro even echoes Carlson’s point about using the GDP as a measure of prosperity, writing that “perhaps the chief threat to virtue came from desire for material gain, disconnected from virtuous social fabric.” But he somehow sees Carlson as neglecting the importance of virtue and advocating “the same material solutions that undercut virtue in the first place” when he is doing just the opposite.
Shapiro and Carlson seem to agree that virtue needs to come first, but Carlson thinks that worship of the market hollowed out virtue with consumerism and that the country’s rulers, not the ruled, are to blame for this change. Shapiro is unable or unwilling to acknowledge the connection between markets and morals.
Markets have great power to shape the character and souls of the people they entangle. Some latent criticism of the free market’s effect on the soul can even be found in Shapiro’s commentary on hip hop music.
Conservatives including Shapiro have long forwarded familiar complaints against rap: that it glorifies promiscuity, crime, and vanity.
Shapiro may argue that it’s the fault of consumers for encouraging the production of trash, thereby degrading the public, but consumers don’t dictate the production of trash; companies with lots of trash to sell do. It never seems to occur to Shapiro that consumer capitalism can define the morals and even personalities of the public.
Of course, people can choose to reject the culturally progressive messages being pushed by corporations, but realistically, powerful institutions sustain the norms, folkways, and habits of the majority. Under consumer capitalism, progressive entertainers wield greater moral authority than preachers.
Shapiro faults Carlson for baselessly linking free markets to children being born out of wedlock, as if pornography and increasingly vulgar entertainment and advertising have not been encouraging laissez-faire sexual attitudes for half a century. Many conservatives including Shapiro complain all the time about corporate censorship of conservatives by Big Tech companies, but choose to do nothing about it. To the contrary, they breathlessly defend the rights of Silicon Valley giants to stamp out their conservative ideas from the public square.
The correct response to corporations pushing poison on the public is to take political action. But Carlson’s critics would rather do nothing and allow major corporations to dictate society’s morals.
This fatalism is a core difference between Carlson and his critics. Carlson’s monologue struck a nerve because he suggested that people can take political action to improve their lives.
His monologue was not an idle reverie, but an attack on the flimsy foundations of market conservatism. Carlson’s monologue gestures toward a more capacious conservatism that puts families first and that is willing to use state power to make that happen.
Carlson argues that politics is about happiness, and that the free market should be seen as a tool subordinate to that goal. Something that his critics seem to broadly agree on is that the goal of politics is not happiness, but to keep the government as limited as possible, at all costs.
But there is nothing conservative about putting the free market before the preservation of families. Writing in the American Mind, Matthew J. Peterson calls the politics of Carlson’s critics the “anti-politics of principled loserdom.”
If the breakdown of the family cannot be fixed with politics, then, Peterson writes, “why should anyone bother about politics at all?”
The rigid separation between the personal and the political that Carlson’s critics advocate for underscores a politics empty of any meaningful aim. To Carlson’s critics, families and corporations do not lie within the political sphere. Politics is quite simple: the only political things are governments, which always need to be limited. Individuals exist in a political vacuum where larger forces can never harm their humble families and communities if they are just determined enough to stop them, and work really hard to cultivate virtue.
But this separation between the personal and political is disingenuous, because Carlson’s critics clearly do think that public policy can harm families when the government intervenes, but are somehow unable to conceive there ever being a good policy that involves curtailing the market.
In other words, public policy is always bad. By this logic, then politics is aimless. The only political action on the table is retreat.
The result of this mentality is “principled” self-flagellation. This is the real victimhood mentality: letting the country fray at the seams because it would go against free market principles to do something about it.
As far back as Aristotle, politics has been understood to be a craft with a specific aim: generally, to build happy societies. No politics that is worth keeping disengages from the pursuit of justice.
If the answer to problems like the opioid epidemic and family breakdown is inaction, then what is it that free market conservatism is trying to achieve?
Carlson’s conservatism is not socialism. It’s just politics. If Carlson says things that sound socialist to his critics, that is only because their politics is so empty that any political action to secure the common good sounds like socialism.
Shapiro condemns right-wingers who want to “hijack” the government to pursue their preferred policy. By “hijack,” he presumably means any government action at all that aims to promote the general welfare. He faults Carlson for suggesting that politics is the “universal solution to our problems,” overstating Carlson’s case for using politics to simply solve problems.
From this political no-man’s-land, Shapiro finds that populists on the right and left are similar because they both favor government intervention for different goals. Carlson, Shapiro writes, sounds more like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders than Milton Friedman.
It says more about Shapiro’s politics than Carlson’s that he is unable to distinguish between Carlson and feminists like Warren and Sanders. The goal of conserving families is as conservative as it gets. But because Carlson is suggesting that people take political action to achieve that goal, he’s been labeled a socialist.
Shapiro’s operating principle is not protecting families, but dogmatic political inaction at all costs. There is nothing conservative about this. He calls Carlson’s politics “an attempt to rally government behind preferred conservative causes.”
Why would conservatives not want the government to rally behind their preferred causes, particularly when non-intervention is not successfully safeguarding those causes? Surely Shapiro has noticed that the left tends to use the state for their causes, to devastating effect.
Caution toward the state is a natural reaction for conservatives to have. But limited-government conservatism was formulated in a time when traditional values dominated culture and it was reasonable to expect that society would sustain itself with limited government interference. This is no longer the case after decades of tectonic cultural and social change that eviscerated the authority of conservative norms and institutions. Some political action is needed to make society whole and healthy again.
The purpose of a rigid separation between the personal and the political seems to be to exclude free markets from the political sphere entirely, thereby rendering them untouchable. Carlson is suggesting that families, corporations, and banks are part of the political sphere, and that the choices of the wealthy can harm the middle class. But to market conservatives, the free market is mysteriously exempt from being considered a political entity, and even if it is political, its motivations and effects are always benevolent.
Carlson “seems to suggest that our system itself is to blame for individual shortcomings,” writes Shapiro. But Shapiro would not hesitate to blame a system like socialism for individual shortcomings. The problem is not that Carlson is a systematic political thinker, but that he is questioning the free market’s place in the present system.
Shapiro does not seem to view the free market as a system at all but as the foundation of all political reality. He doesn’t address Carlson’s arguments so much as insinuate that his ideas sound suspiciously similar to things that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have also said, which is bad.
Why? Because free markets.
Free markets allow for the true purpose of politics, which is not happiness, but the pursuit of happiness, Shapiro writes. With these weighty words, Shapiro attempts to tie his ideology to the founders. But didn’t the founders write something somewhere about “securing the general welfare?”
The pursuit of happiness was never meant to be a purely theoretical pursuit. It is one thing for people to take matters into their own hands and pursue happy lives and another for people to pursue happy lives within social conditions that are inhospitable to happiness.
The notion that the government should never do anything to secure the happiness of the people, ever, is blindly self-defeating, lacking in precedent and not at all conservative. Carlson points to the example of Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting. Abraham Lincoln was a protectionist who railed against predatory lending practices. Can some of America’s greatest presidents have been wrong about free markets? The answer is that dogmatic non-interventionism is a fairly recent invention.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that free market conservatives see markets as the first principle of politics, as the political operating system within which everything else must fit. This recalls Carlson’s whole point about markets serving people and not the other way around. Shapiro is explicit that markets should not serve the people.
So what are markets for? The market is not a creation or a tool, Shapiro argues, but the miraculous “reality” of humans interacting voluntarily. It’s as natural as the air we breathe, and likewise acts as the mysterious ether in which humans “act in liberty.” Pretending that markets are “just a tool” will lead to power being “centralized,” which is something corporations supposedly never do.
The free market doesn’t have a specific political purpose, he says, since it is not “one choice among many.” It just is. It’s unquestionable.
Jonah Goldberg gives a slightly more reasonable characterization of the market than Shapiro, not quite deifying it, but dismissing the idea that it is a tool. Goldberg similarly argues that the market is the means by which people exercise their “economic liberty” to buy and sell what they want as well as exercise their constitutional rights.
Carlson would certainly object to the latter point about rights given his attacks on Big Tech corporations. As for economic liberty, what does that actually mean?
The free market has given Americans more choice to decide between this or that luxury consumer good, but less freedom and less peace of mind in attaining a secure, comfortable existence. Cheaper goods are a good thing, and they are no small convenience to the poor, but are they worth the “two-income trap?”
Telling people who are falling behind the times and losing their vocations to “just move” to a major city is an imperative, not a free choice. There is nothing “free” about families having to choose between dying out or uprooting themselves and adapting to ever-changing economic and social circumstances beyond their control.
Carlson’s critics think the free market makes people free. But every political system values freedom, understood in its own way. Carlson clearly understands a virtuous, stable social order as necessary for happiness and freedom. The freedom that Shapiro and Goldberg value is soulless and superficial — the freedom to buy and sell at one’s will, but not the freedom to pursue the vocation of one’s father or grandfather, or to hold on to one’s heritage and values.
Carlson’s critics value “economic liberty” that allows the pursuit of private ambition, but that comes at the exclusion of the public good. Shapiro prefers the “adventure” of the personal quest to the public happiness.
This insistence upon individual venture is the building block of a vacuous non-politics.
Shapiro also attacks Carlson for not intuitively understanding that freedom comes from free markets. “ For Carlson, however, the very freedom of our society leads to the unhappiness so many of us feel,” he writes. But elsewhere, Shapiro agrees with Carlson that virtue is necessary for freedom and that virtue has eroded.
He shouldn’t have a difficult time understanding why Carlson finds the freedom of the free market wanting. But he seems to miss Carlson’s point, which is that all of that “adventure” has come at the cost of the social fabric.
Carlson, perhaps without being too explicit about it, commits his gravest sin when he describes the market as a disruptive agent of change rather than a system for maintaining social and economic homeostasis.
Somebody else thought that about capitalism: Karl Marx. Does that mean Carlson is a socialist?
By no means. Carlson’s whole point is that socialism will result if something is not done to help average people marry and prosper. There is a fundamental split here in political values: while Carlson values community, stability, and order, his critics value the mobility, fluidity, and fungibility that free markets provide, but that disrupt a stable social order.
The free market is, in other words, progressive. Carlson’s critics defend the market by speaking of the conveniences it brings: technological advancement, consumer choice, cheaper goods. Yes, but what is it conserving?
Both free markets and leftism promise progress and liberation from constraints, and break up the bonds of community and society in favor of opportunity for the individual. Whereas progressives encourage limitless self-expression, market orthodoxy promises more opportunities for the individual to pursue their own ambitions and consume goods.
What free market conservatives value about the market is not conservative at all, but more in line with the restless liberation and change that progressives desire. Carlson touches on this in his discussion of the market’s impact on gender roles.
Carlson was condemned for seeming to lament the introduction of women into the workforce. The free market liberated women from cultural constraints that tied them to male providers. Carlson doesn’t explicitly say that, but he does regret that this change led to the obsolescence of the male provider role and a concomitant decline in marriage.
Like Shapiro, French shares Carlson’s concern with the decline of the traditional family. But while he agrees with Carlson’s point about male wages, he curiously says nothing about what drove them down. He laments the disruption of the single breadwinner norm — “only utopians believe that you could disrupt the single-male-earner cultural norm and reap only rewards,” he writes, but doesn’t consider the market’s role in disintegrating that norm.
The disruptions to order that Carlson bemoans did not only come from the welfare state or progressive movements alone, as his critics say, but from the markets. Just as the markets provide opportunities for self-maximization, they dissolve social bonds that leave the weakest vulnerable and struggling to keep up with the engine of progress.
If politics is just an “adventure” of individuals struggling against each other, then the result is not something resembling society, but a social Darwinist nightmare. The bargain that Shapiro and like-minded conservatives champion is a progressive one that is actually quite brutalizing and callous.
Indeed, the logic of markets is taken as the infallible work of divine intelligence. Jobs leave the country not because of decisions made by powerful people, but because the logic of the free market determined the most efficient way to distribute them. Perhaps people will be forced to give up old folkways and professions, and maybe lots of people will fail to adapt and collapse into despair, but it’s for the best.
Moreover, the communities that are left empty by the forces of change are just collateral damage of the Brave New World. It’s the individual’s responsibility to accept that their community is dying, their way of life is dying, and their father’s and grandfather’s trade is dying, and it’s their responsibility to seek opportunity in the wealthy cosmopolitan areas where economic growth is concentrated.
Is this desirable? Carlson says no. His critics think it is at least tolerable.
The attitude that free market conservatives have toward the collateral damage of economic “progress” is similar to the kind of dejection and resignation that allowed the left to win the culture war. As Carlson observes, libertarians and liberals are not so different.
Contrary to this individualism, Carlson is more concerned about the community than the romantic, Promethean quest to build one’s house on quicksand. Of course, the idea that happiness should be given rubs against the American instinct for individualism. Carlson seems to be returning to classical, even pre-liberal thinking about what the aim of politics actually is. Kevin Williamson called it a “medieval” worldview.
Williamson went on to write that Carlson is yearning for a fixed regime, like feudalism, where there is little freedom of movement, but everyone is safe and secure in their place:
Tucker Carlson’s argument that the state’s job is to see to our happiness, rather than to see to public order, represents a return to a political primitivism associated with the medieval period, when everyone, peasant and lord alike, knew his place and could be sure of his role in this kingdom and in the Heavenly Kingdom, a clockwork universe in which the great majority of people may have been miserable in absolute material terms but in which they had confidence in the fixity of the social order, and hence in the security of their own status. The emergence of primitive capitalism disrupted that order, and the emergence of global capitalism has, in a similar way, disrupted the postwar American social order.
Williamson comes closer to the truth than Shapiro, who labels Carlson a socialist just for challenging free market orthodoxy. The feudalism comparison hits on something right: yes, Carlson is advocating paternalism. But conservatism should be paternalistic. That’s the whole point — conserving things worth saving requires prudence and care.
Carlson is not making a case for handouts. He is criticizing the bad stewardship of the financialized, globalized political and economic system that has failed to keep the disruption of the market system within fair and reasonable guard-rails.
Williamson acknowledges that markets are disruptive, but disagrees with Carlson that government action is necessary or desirable: Carlson has launched a disingenuous “non-debate” that is more about status signaling against “the elites” than anything.
But this is more political fatalism. Is there no middle ground between unregulated markets and the actual Middle Ages? Surely the material lot of the majority has improved since feudalism, but is that everything?
To pretend that the forces squeezing the middle class are simply inexorable and that individuals must rise above them anyway to attain a level of prosperity enjoyed by former generations is pure gas-lighting. The whole point of the American dream is that it is not just a dream, but an attainable goal.
Carlson was clear that socialism is bad. He is asking for politicians to address the country’s social and economic collapse before socialism becomes an attractive solution to those falling behind.
Carlson was attacked for accusing conservatives of failing to conserve the things that are worthwhile. Worship of the free market does not conserve values or traditions, but can in fact destroy them. And a population that has been victimized, demoralized, and degraded by bad governance will take bread and circuses over virtue and self-government.
It should bother conservatives that families are falling apart. Otherwise, what are you conserving?
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