I think somewhere in here {maybe near the bottom} it mentioned Saban as creator of TMNT again...
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Date: 14-FEB-2003 13:18:55
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: ack Another error....
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InfoTrac Web: Gen'l Reference Ctr Gold.
Source: The American Prospect, May 6, 2002 v13 i8 p18(6).
Title: Who is Roger Hertog? He's starting up a long-shot New York daily
and funding The New Republic. But Hertog doesn't see himself as
the vanguard of a new conservative movement--yet.(Cover Story)
Author: Michael Tomasky
Subjects: Press and politics - Analysis
Publishers (Persons) - Conduct of life
Publishing industry - Officials and employees
Editors - Conduct of life
People: Hertog, Roger - Investments
Peretz, Martin - Investments
Steinhardt, Michael H. - Investments
Lipsky, Seth - Conduct of life
Locations: United States
SIC code: 2711; 2721
Nmd Works: New York Sun (Newspaper) - Publishing
The New Republic (Periodical) - Publishing
Forward (Newspaper) - Editing
Electronic Collection: A85522760
RN: A85522760
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2002 The American Prospect, Inc.
SOMETIME THIS MONTH--ASSUMING ALL THE GEARS are turning according to schedule,
on April 16--New Yorkers will have walked to their local newsstands and been
greeted by a sight the city hasn't seen in more than 50 years: a new daily
newspaper. If you think that sounds like some bizarre time warp--what's next,
the Dodgers are coming back?--well, take a number, because you'll be joining a
long line of skeptics. To most observers, the idea of launching a daily in
this unforgiving economic climate seems quixotic, or possibly insane. Who
would attempt such a thing?
Now throw this into the mix: As if starting a daily newspaper in the only
American city that still has three of them weren't enough, two of The New York
Sun's 11 key financial angels have also bought two-thirds of The New Republic,
at a cost that one of them suggests could approach several million dollars a
year in subsidies. For starters, you'd have to conclude that Roger Hertog and
Michael Steinhardt are very rich men. And they are. They're two of New York's
most successful high-end money managers, and though neither is listed on the
Forbes 400, which bottoms out at $600 million, they're probably not far off
that pace. There's no fear they'll go broke doing this.
But the question of what they want out of these investments has ramifications
that go well beyond two men's bank balances and into the realm of political
discourse, in both the nation's ,capital and its most important city. Why
would Steinhardt, a Democrat who essentially seeded and watered the
Progressive Policy Institute, the think-tank appendage of the Democratic
Leadership Council (DLC), want to finance a newspaper that will have the Sun's
conservative politics? Why would Hertog, a man of the right and chairman of
the Manhattan Institute, the prominent conservative think tank, want a piece
of the liberal (more than not, anyway) New Republic? Why, aside from the
obvious relief of financial stress, would TNR owner Martin Peretz reduce
himself to a minority interest in the magazine he's supported for 28 years?
The answer may be best expressed not by Hertog, Steinhardt, or Peretz, but by
Seth Lipsky, editor of the Sun and a man whose decade-long dream of starting a
new New York daily is finally coming to fruition. "The right wing of the
Democratic Party," Lipsky told me recently, "is a depressed stock."
Interesting that it took a journalist to produce the apposite business
metaphor. And though the reference to party label shouldn't be taken too
literally, Lipsky is describing both the certain ideological niche of the Sun
and a likely trajectory of the Hertog-Steinhardt New Republic with some
precision. It's exactly on the right-most edge of the Democratic cliff--where
the DLC begins to morph into, say, the American Enterprise Institute; where
neoliberalism and neoconservatism, each of which is a vestigial presence now
in the twenty-first century, collapse into some new entity that doesn't yet
have a fully formed identity, or a name--that these four men meet, despite
having arrived there by vastly different paths.
It may be just an accident of history that Hertog and Steinhardt have chosen
this moment to join forces in these two ventures. Hertog merged his longtime
high-end investment firm, Sanford Bernstein and Company, with Alliance Capital
Management two years ago; he's a vice chairman at Alliance, but he's well
beyond the point of being lean and hungry. Steinhardt, who had a reputation as
one of Wall Street's most brusque and aggressive managers, has retired from
the hedge-fund business and now places his bets only for himself. They've
known each other for 30 years. Both have made their pile and are looking for
something to do. It might be that simple.
But if the concurrence of these events has any larger meaning, it's that they
give rise to a new and possibly influential strain in American political
discourse. If one were to take Hertog, Steinhardt, Peretz, and Lipsky's
politics and put them in a centrifuge, the substance that would emerge would
be as follows: It would be explicitly neither Democratic nor Republican. It
would be right of center, especially on foreign policy (and most especially on
Israel). It would be right of center, too, on a good number of domestic
questions. But because it would pay some obeisance to the New Deal and even
(sometimes) to the Great Society, which neoconservatism refuted thoroughly,
and because it would purport to care deeply about poor people of color--Hertog
is messianic on the topic of vouchers and calls urban education "the civil
rights issue of this generation"--it would stand quite apart from, say, the
obstreperous conservatism of a Tom DeLay. Indeed, it would claim its roots in
a historic pragmatic liberalism that today's wandering liberals, this gang of
four would argue, have cashiered out of slavish devotion to quota queens and
teachers' unions. So it would fancy itself a truer liberalism. Lipsky, who was
a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board and believes that the
Journal's former editorial-page editor Robert Bartley "is pretty much spot on"
regarding policy questions, is also a registered Democrat who voted twice for
Bill Clinton.
But however it might appropriate the name, its emotional animus would be
directed full-bore at traditional liberalism. Lipsky's deputy at the Sun, Ira
Stoll, runs a Web site, www.smartertimes.com, devoted to "correcting" the
left-liberal excesses of the Newspaper of Record. Peretz's New Republic has
become somewhat more liberal (on domestic questions at least) under current
editor Peter Beinart, but throughout the 1990s, under editors Andrew Sullivan
and Michael Kelly, it preferred to take issue with conservatism while
reserving its most churlish tone to mock the nostrums of liberalism.
Steinhardt chaired the DLC for six years but left in 1996 in disgust, not over
Whitewater or women, but because in his first two years in office, according
to Steinhardt, Bill Clinton "went wandering back to his historic,
ultra-left-wing home"--as if Clinton were in league with Amiri Baraka and Noam
Chomsky. So: Not the nastiness of Tom DeLay, but for God's sakes not the
woolly-headedness of Ted Kennedy or Hillary Clinton. This tendency would be
conservative but elusive; conservative but gently so; conservative but
sometimes surprising. Call it a "velvet conservatism."
The description will track for anyone familiar with Lipsky's Forward, the New
York-based Jewish weekly he edited for a decade before reaching a final
impasse with the Forward Association, a group of old socialists and liberals
that owned half the paper. Lipsky and Steinhardt, thanks to Steinhardt's
money, owned the other half. (The association tossed Lipsky out.) It will also
ring true, with a few discrepancies, to long-time readers of The New Republic,
which over the years has roughly followed Peretz's disenchantment with things
left. This disaffection has manifested itself most plainly in Peretz's hawkish
position on Israel, a stance Steinhardt and Hertog share, and one that
occasionally finds Peretz in illiberal company. Just this April 3, for
example, Peretz signed an open letter to President Bush insisting that "it can
no longer be the policy" of the United States to press Israel to negotiate
with Yasir Arafat and urging the administration to move on Iraq posthaste. The
letter ran in The Washington Times under the headline CONSERVATIVES TO BUSH,
and its signatories included William Kristol, Ken Adelman, Gary Bauer, William
Bennett, Norman Podhoretz, and Peretz.
LIPSKY AND PERETZ HAVE EDITORIAL TRACK RECORDS. Hertog and Steinhardt, by
contrast, are just wading into the pool. How they got here, then, seems a
relevant question. Roger Hertog's mid-Manhattan office is comfortable, though
not the splendid affair the first-time visitor might envision for a man of his
means. Its gray hues and standard-issue furniture seem not to reflect any sort
of personality, and indeed Hertog takes pains to tell me he leads "a boring
life." On a wall are black-and-white photographs of Joe DiMaggio and Jackie
Robinson, but even these don't mean much to him. "I actually don't love
baseball so much," he said. "It sort of defines your life at a certain
moment."
That moment, for Hertog, is the 1950s, and the place is the Bronx. His
parents, German-Jewish, fled Hitler in 1937. He was born stateside in 1941.
After public school, he attended City College, which was then no longer a
hornet's nest of argument between the Trotskyites in Alcove One and the
Stalinists in Alcove Two, but still the "Harvard of the poor" and a place of
great intellectual fertility. He says he learned a habit of inquisitiveness
there that has stayed with him, and it's evident--in the way he talks about
Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, for example--that some part of him wishes
he'd pursued the life of the mind. But to call him an intellectual manque,
insofar as that word connotes the arriviste striving to be something he really
is not, wouldn't quite be fair. He's very smart and intellectually curious; on
a credenza alongside his desk, he has a copy of The Dialectical Imagination,
Martin Jay's study of the Frankfurt School philosophers. It seems clear that
he's actually reading the thing.
Adorno and Horkheimer aside, Hertog's political views have been fairly
constant. "I was more or less conservative when I was 20," he said. "But I
mean conservative not in political terms. I was conservative in my dress, in
my respect for the system, my respect for my parents, for my professors. My
deep abiding belief in the country. That's what I mean by conservative." He
was sympathetic, he says, to the civil rights and women's rights struggles,
and convinced that society needed to change, "but that didn't mean I thought
you had to destroy everything in its wake to get there." He doesn't seem
particularly enthusiastic about sharing any of this. He winces when I pull out
a tape recorder; at several points, as I repeat back to him my understanding
of something he's told me, his face looks like he's just sucked on a lemon,
and he politely, but forcefully, protests: I wouldn't put it that way; I don't
know; no, it's not like that.
What it is like, Hertog said flatly, is this: "I'm not a particularly partisan
person. I've almost never really been involved in campaigns. I've never been
to the White House. It's never interested me. What interested me was ideas."
The New Republic and the Sun, he says, will be idea factories. He insists that
he doesn't especially care, within certain broad parameters, what the ideas
are, merely that they be generated in a high-minded and debate-influencing
manner. He's prepared for the inevitable questions about whether he might lend
The New Republic a more conservative slant, and he's ready with his answer.
"Marty is the editor in chief," he said. "Peter is the editor. Leon
[Wieseltier] is in charge of the cultural side. They define the magazine's
vision. Do I have an interest in what they write? Yes. Will I read it? Yes.
Will I talk about it? Yes. But that's different than making an effort to
change who or what the magazine should support. The answer is no, absolutely
not." For what it's worth, Myron Magnet, the editor of the Manhattan
Institute's City Journal, adores Hertog and says the journal has had "complete
editorial independence." Of course, Hertog would be far more likely to agree
with the conservative City Journal on most issues than with The New Republic.
Hertog seems to mean what he says about the magazine; on some level, maybe
many levels, his stated belief in the purity of ideas is genuine. But
inevitably there will be flash points where the magazine's position will clash
with his. And one could argue that based on the record, he is a particularly
partisan person. In addition to the Manhattan Institute--respected, but never
known for recidivist bipartisanship--he contributes to the American Enterprise
Institute. He gives some money to the Club for Growth, an organization that
aggressively backs only the most conservative, free-market candidates. Already
this year it has financed commercials for Republican John Thune in the
contentious Senate race in South Dakota. The point of these ads, in addition
to helping Thune, is to hit Tim Johnson, Thune's Democratic opponent, and to
weaken Tom Daschle in his home state (ultimately, of course, to make him
minority leader). The club is also backing many congressional candidates it
seems likely that The New Republic would oppose.
A March 18 TNR piece on Democratic strategy in the by-elections mentioned the
South Dakota ads. The piece didn't note that the club financed them, and it
was probably under no special obligation to do so. But how will the magazine
cover these elections, in which it would presumably prefer to see Democratic
victories by and large, while its new one-third owner helps finance GOP
control of Congress? The question is a fair one.
So is the question of how the magazine will handle Hertog's business
interests. Alliance Capital has been subpoenaed by the state of Florida
because, while advising the state's pension fund, Alliance executives--though
not Hertog--advised that the fund buy Enron stock even after the energy firm
was under investigation. The shares were purchased at prices ranging from $9
to $23, but ultimately dumped for 28 cents. The fund lost $334 million--a
large number, but, to be fair, a very small percentage of the fund's total
value of around $100 billion. The state attorney general's office and the
state board of administration, which oversees the fund, are both
investigating.
Hertog had no role in the Enron debacle. Even so, for The New Republic, a
magazine whose editorial pursuits may take it in any number of directions, the
presence of an owner whose business interests will also range far and wide is
new and potentially fraught. It was always unlikely, for example, that TNR
editors would face a crisis of conscience over how to cover the Singer sewing
machine company, the source of Peretz's wealth.
HERTOG'S ROLE, HE BEING THE CONSERVATIVE, IS MORE interesting, but Michael
Steinhardt was the man who made the deal happen. Peretz and Hertog did not
know each other, but Steinhardt has known them both for around 30 years. He
says he'd known for some time that Peretz was in the market for co-investors,
and once he introduced Peretz and Hertog, the deal "happened very, very
quickly. And I felt that if I was introducing Roger to a losing investment, I
had a certain obligation to lose some money myself." The deal, giving each man
one-third of the magazine, was sealed over Thanksgiving weekend at Peretz's
house in Truro, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod.
A beefy 61-year-old with darting blue eyes, Steinhardt is one of his era's
true celebrity investors, notwithstanding a scrape with the government over an
alleged T-note scandal, for which he paid a $40 million fine (without any
admission of wrongdoing). His office is decorated with the kind of art that
suggests an adventurous eye. He collects Judaica and pre-Columbian Peruvian
feather textiles. On a 51-acre farm in northern Westchester County, he keeps,
literally, a private zoo: kangaroos, wallabies, camels, zebras, an antelope,
and other fauna corralled into four paddocks of a few acres each. The animals,
he said, "somehow have to make it together.... Sometimes I make mistakes, but,
you know...."
As a self-styled contrarian who grew up in a "very liberal" Brooklyn
household, Steinhardt voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964, couldn't bear John
Lindsay, and only started inching leftward when Richard Nixon came along. When
A1 From launched the DLC in the 1980s, a relationship seemed natural.
"Steinhardt liked things like the earned-income tax credit," From said. "You
know, no one who works full-time ought to be poor. He always used to come
around to that principle."
If there's a tie that binds Steinhardt's roles with The New Republic and the
Sun, he says, "it's personal loyalty" to both Lipsky and Peretz. And though he
likes to debate ideas, he seems to have little interest in politicians, and
little taste for politics. He claims he didn't cast a vote in the 2000
presidential election, but he speaks glowingly of Bush's presidency. When I
ask him to cite a contemporary politician he admires, the first name he
produces is Democrat Cory Booker, the African-American Newark City Councilman
who is running for mayor against incumbent Sharpe James. He invokes Booker
with an air of grave solemnity, but the answer is a cop-out: Booker seems
great, but at this point he's more a vessel of expectation than an actual
political leader. He hasn't had to wrestle publicly with dissatisfying
choices, risking voters' disapproval and contributors' judgment.
Whereas Hertog selects his words with prolonged care, Steinhardt seems to grab
them out of the air as they appear before him. After about 15 minutes of
why-he's-doing-this, he smiles and stops himself: "What I should have said and
didn't say is that I made both these investments to get rich. Shouldn't that
be the reason you make investments?" When I ask the obligatory editorial
independence question, he's a little more frank than Hertog: "If tomorrow
Peter wrote an editorial that I clearly didn't understand the justification
for, I would ask him, sure." (Neither Beinart nor Wieseltier would agree to
speak for this article, though Beinart did send along an e-mail comment to the
effect that Hertog and Steinhardt have been supportive and cooperative.) When
I ask how much money he's in for, guessing that between The New Republic and
the Sun it must be several hundred thousand dollars a year, he fixes me with a
stare that means business: "Oh, no, no, no, it's more than that. Because Marty
doesn't have to come up with any money unless the losses exceed a certain
number, and that number is several million dollars." Finally, asked how he
plans to get the magazine in the black, he speaks with a candor that a staffer
in the middle of the masthead might find a touch ominous: "The New Republic
has probably not been looked at with a sharp business eye in a long, long
time. Maybe it shouldn't. I'm not sure. But to the degree that Roger and I
bring something to the party, it's the likelihood that we will ask questions
that haven't been asked until now. And how that will change The New Republic
remains to be seen." So far, the staff has accepted a 10 percent pay cut in
exchange for no layoffs, and the Washington offices are relocating from Dupont
Circle to the earthier precincts around Metro Center.
RELOCATION HAS COMMENCED AS WELL FOR SETH Lipsky, who gained wide esteem in
the 1990s as editor of Forward. It seems hard to imagine now, but Forward was
published in Yiddish as recently as 1990. It was Lipsky who persuaded the
Forward Association to publish an English-language version. His dream had been
to make the weekly paper a daily, and when he broached the subject with
Steinhardt at a Brooklyn Heights restaurant in 1993, "he was so derisive of me
and my ideas," Lipsky said, "that my wife"--that would be Amity Schlaes,
erstwhile of the Journal, now a Financial Times columnist--"left the dinner
and went to smoke a cigarette with the owner." By 1995, Steinhardt had stopped
being derisive, and at Lipsky's urging he bought half the paper. The
arrangement lasted five years, until the association, which retained the right
under the contract to control the editorship, sent Lipsky packing, threatening
to close down the paper if he didn't leave.
It was a shame that it came to that, because Lipsky's Forward was widely
admired, even by many liberals, as a conservative but unpredictable and
engaging voice. The paper's coverage of the 1991 Crown Heights riots, for
example, was some of the best that appeared in the city. Two years later, the
paper went on to shock the conservative Jewish political movement it had
helped create in New York by endorsing David Dinkins over Rudolph Giuliani
(Lipsky says this was a decision of the old liberals and socialists that he
merely chose not to fight.) The paper added new cultural elements and sought a
younger audience. "He could provoke the Jewish establishment in ways that I
thought were just joyous," Steinhardt said.
Lipsky doesn't want to discuss his departure from the paper, but he does
invoke Forward as a model for the Sun. "The Forward," he said grandly,
"literally won the Cold War." He means that it was Jay Lovestone, working out
of Forward's offices and with Forward money, who sent Irving Brown to Europe
to found the anti-Communist International Confederation of Free Trade
Unionists, which spawned Solidarity, which notched the first chinks in the
totalitarian armor, which ultimately brought the whole shebang tumbling down.
He tells me this history in some detail because he wants me to understand his
conception of what a newspaper is capable of. He chose the name Sun because
the old Sun, whose most famous nineteenth-century editor was abolitionist
Charles A. Dana, had, in Lipsky's view, high standards and a clear sense of
mission. In the new Sun, which will publish five days a week, Lipsky hopes to
bring that clarity to bear on a city that he believes still labors under the
oppressive legacy of decades of liberal turpitude. "I don't feel that the
crisis is over in New York," he said. "I don't feel it came upon this city
with the attack on the World Trade Center, and I don't feel that it's over."
Added managing editor Ira Stoll: "The debate is so skewed here. Where's the
voice that's saying we need further reductions in taxes? Where's the voice
that's saying we need to continue to take a hard look at rent control?"
Well, it's here. Hertog put up the initial money for the business plan;
Steinhardt and the other investors, who include Conrad Black, a conservative
Canadian press baron, came later. Hertog says all will be well if the paper
has a circulation of 30,000 after a year. No one will talk money too
specifically, of course, but one gets the sense that this is no Washington
Times, drinking from a bottomless well of resources. The Sun's editorial
operation is shoestring; its news-gathering staff numbers 10, including Lipsky
and Stoll. Lipsky says he sees no point in "being a success d'estime without
making a profit." The suggestion is that the circulation target is rather
firm.
Watching to see whether the paper hits that mark should be fascinating
business. New York does not, of course, lack for a conservative voice; the New
York Post sees to that. But the Post's conservatism is suffused with the kind
of confusion one might expect to find when servants (the editors) attempt to
anticipate the whims of the master (Rupert Murdoch). Sometimes the tabloid is
principled, sometimes it's knee-jerk. Other times it's nativist. Periodically
it's tarted up with too much T&A. Overall it's more clearly consistent about
what it doesn't approve of than what it does. One can expect, by contrast,
that Lipsky and Stoll's Sun will be crystal clear about what it wants. It'll
be the voice of this velvet conservatism, particularly on the domestic issues
about which it's passionate, most of which are also urban: vouchers; education
standards; sclerotic municipal unions; the accumulated state, local, and
federal tax burden; and crime. These issues constitute the "crisis" to which
Lipsky refers. He reckons himself its Paine, and he has a year to make 30,000
other people reckon likewise.
FINALLY, THERE'S PERETZ. HE WOULD, I GATHER, BRISTLE at being called any kind
of conservative. "I've never been uncomfortable, he said, "calling myself a
liberal." Fine, but for most of the last decade his magazine has moved away
from the kind of liberal standard-bearing that animated it in the Michael
Kinsley and Hendrik Hertzberg years of the 1980s. In fairness, the magazine
had conservative writers then--Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer--but its
editorial policies usually reflected a robust anti-Reaganism.
For much of the 1990s, it engaged instead in a degree of liberal
open-mindedness and interest in debate that, on several well-known occasions,
transmuted into liberal self-flagellation, whose antipode one somehow never
sees in the conservative journals. Possibly the two most famous pieces the
magazine ran in the 1990s were Betsy McCaughey Ross's attack on the Clinton
health bill, which helped kill it, and a piece by Charles Murray adapted from
The Bell Curve. Kinsley, no longer at The New Republic by then, shredded
McCaughey Ross's flimsy scholarship, and she went on to embarrass herself as
an actual politician in continually imaginative ways. The Bell Curve was
racism pretending to be science. Both, the Murray piece especially,
scandalized many liberals. I ask Peretz if he now regrets either. After
long--that is, long--pauses, he decides not to defend the substance of either
but to defend the editor's decisions to publish them (in both cases,
Sullivan). "The New Republic has a history of doing exactly that kind of
thing," he said. "A lot of things that editors have set down as an issue of
their own independence."
The irony is that lately, under Beinart, some of the magazine's liberal spark
has returned, on domestic and cultural questions in particular (a recent cover
story attacked Bernard Goldberg's Bias). Peretz didn't like the fact that
during the last presidential election the magazine went along with many of
"the cliches I thought the rest of the press was pushing" about his friend Al
Gore. That aside, he said, "I haven't gotten along better with any editor than
Peter."
But will Hertog and Steinhardt? Peretz says that once they stepped forward as
suitors, all other considerations were quickly dropped. He says that he and
Steinhardt have "virtually identical" politics, while in Hertog he found "a
very interesting man and a rare character type--a real
businessman-intellectual."
He had had several conversations with Joel Hyatt, an Ohio native and founder
of Hyatt Legal Services who now teaches at Stanford. In fact it was Gore who
put Peretz and Hyatt in touch, but Hyatt says "my offer was to buy 100
percent" and to become, in essence, the new Marty Peretz. For his part, Peretz
asserts that "I wasn't ready to quit being me." Another suitor was Haim Saban,
creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a major Democratic
contributor. But Saban, Peretz says, "was too much a `party man' for my
tastes. It was just sociologically wrong." Peretz wanted passive, not active,
investors.
Hertog and Steinhardt are sociologically right in every way. They are
committed Zionists. They are intelligent and engaging men. They are interested
in ideas and debate. But one thing they might not be--something they seem
rarely to have been, in their political activities or their business
careers--is passive. It may be premature to say that what these "velvet
conservatives" are doing with The New Republic and the Sun will become
something bigger; on the other hand, it's already something bigger than it was
this time last year. Hertog, Steinhardt, Peretz, and Lipsky have the money,
the acumen, and the forums to do whatever they wish. "I'm not sure this
represents anything more than these two guys getting together to do
something," said Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, a friend of Hertog's
for a decade. "But yeah, the tectonic plates are due for a shift, and there's
a reform Republicanism that can marry up fairly comfortably with the sort of
center-right Democrat."
Hertog and Steinhardt may not see themselves as the vanguard of a
movement--yet. But it's difficult to imagine them as modern-day Banquo's
ghosts, invisible to the larger world, checking Macbeth's conscience. They're
learned men; I'm sure they know how much impact Banquo's ghost finally had.
MICHAEL TOMASKY is a political columnist for New York magazine.
-- End --
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