The $50,000 Question: How America Bought a Defense Secretary

By Dr. Wil Rodriguez

TOCSIN MAGAZINE

At precisely 11:47 PM on a Friday night in late January 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance stepped into the Senate chamber to break a 50-50 tie. With a single vote, Pete Hegseth—a Fox News commentator with allegations of sexual assault, domestic abuse, and chronic alcoholism trailing behind him like spent shell casings—became the United States Secretary of Defense. The vote wasn’t just historic for being only the second time in American history that a Vice President had to break a tie for a Cabinet confirmation. It was historic for what it revealed about the price of power in modern America, and what we’re willing to overlook when the bill comes due.

The number that haunts this confirmation isn’t 50-50. It’s $50,000—the price Hegseth paid to a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017. It’s a figure that should trouble us not because of its size, but because of what it represents: the going rate for silencing inconvenient truths in a nation that claims to value accountability.

But this story isn’t really about Pete Hegseth. It’s about us, and the Faustian bargains we make when expedience trumps principle, when loyalty supersedes competence, and when the machinery of power operates so brazenly that it no longer bothers to hide its mechanisms. This is a story about how American democracy confirmed a man to oversee the world’s most powerful military despite—or perhaps because of—a confirmation process that revealed not his fitness for office, but the rottenness of the system meant to evaluate it.

The Theatre of Confirmation

The Senate confirmation process, in theory, serves as a constitutional checkpoint—a mechanism to ensure that those entrusted with immense power possess the character, competence, and judgment the office demands. In practice, Hegseth’s confirmation revealed it to be something else entirely: political theater where the script is written before the curtain rises, where questions are asked not to elicit truth but to create soundbites, and where the outcome is predetermined by party allegiance rather than individual merit.

Hegseth paid approximately $53,000 to a woman who accused him of sexual assault. He admitted this payment during the confirmation process, framing it not as an acknowledgment of wrongdoing but as a pragmatic business decision—the cost of making a problem disappear. His attorney explained that Hegseth paid because he “felt strongly” it was the right thing to do, a phrase that manages to suggest conscience while admitting nothing.

The woman’s allegations were detailed and disturbing. The settlement was a classic hush money arrangement: money changes hands, non-disclosure agreements are signed, and uncomfortable questions evaporate into legal confidentiality. But here’s what should chill us: this transaction—a payment to silence a sexual assault allegation—was not disqualifying. It was merely a line item in a confirmation hearing, discussed and dismissed as if it were a parking ticket rather than a potential crime.

But the allegations didn’t stop there. Hegseth’s former sister-in-law submitted an affidavit stating that he had been abusive to his second wife to the point that she feared for her safety. Hegseth denied these claims. His ex-wife, in divorce proceedings, did not make formal allegations of abuse. We’re left with competing narratives, he-said-she-said dynamics, and the convenient fog of marital privacy laws that make domestic violence notoriously difficult to prosecute or prove.

Reports of chronic alcohol abuse surfaced. Anonymous sources—colleagues, acquaintances, people who’d worked with him—described a pattern of excessive drinking, concerning behavior, judgment compromised by intoxication. Hegseth dismissed these as politically motivated smears. Perhaps they were. Perhaps they weren’t. The confirmation process, theoretically designed to separate truth from slander, instead became a partisan battlefield where allegations were either accepted wholesale or rejected entirely based on which side of the aisle one occupied.

The vote was 50-50 in the 100-member Senate, with Vice President Vance casting the decisive vote—only the second time in American history that a Vice President had to break a tie for a Cabinet confirmation. This historically rare circumstance should have prompted soul-searching. Instead, it was treated as a procedural footnote, remarkable only for its statistical rarity rather than what it revealed about the nominee’s unsuitability.

The Mathematics of Moral Compromise

Let’s examine the arithmetic of this confirmation, because numbers don’t lie—they merely reveal truths we’d prefer to ignore.

$50,000: The cost to silence one woman’s allegations.

Zero: The number of Republican senators who seemed to consider whether the payment itself—regardless of underlying guilt—demonstrated a pattern of using money to avoid accountability.

Three: The number of Republican senators who broke ranks—Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins expressing concerns about Hegseth’s qualifications—barely enough to create drama but insufficient to change outcomes.

One: The margin by which American democracy decided that allegations of sexual assault, domestic abuse, and alcoholism were acceptable in the man controlling the world’s largest military arsenal.

But perhaps the most telling number is one we can’t calculate: the cost to American credibility. How do we lecture other nations about rule of law when our own confirmation process treats credible allegations of violence against women as political inconveniences? How do we maintain moral authority on the global stage when we’ve demonstrated that access to power requires only party loyalty and a checkbook large enough to bury mistakes?

The confirmation process revealed a transactional understanding of accountability. Problems aren’t addressed; they’re purchased. Justice isn’t pursued; it’s negotiated. Truth isn’t discovered; it’s agreed upon by parties with vested interests in specific narratives. This isn’t governance—it’s a marketplace where everything has a price and nothing has value.

The Fox News Pipeline to Power

Hegseth’s journey to Secretary of Defense is instructive. He is a veteran—service that should be respected. But his qualifications for overseeing a $700 billion department with three million employees rest primarily on his tenure as a Fox News commentator. He didn’t command divisions. He didn’t craft military strategy. He didn’t navigate the bureaucratic complexities of Pentagon management. He performed military expertise on television, which, in the current political landscape, proved more valuable than actually possessing it.

This is the logical endpoint of a culture that values performance over competence, where looking the part matters more than being able to do the job. Hegseth is telegenic, articulate, ideologically reliable. He knows how to deliver a soundbite, how to project confidence, how to sell a narrative. These are the skills that got him confirmed, and they are precisely the skills least relevant to the actual work of defense leadership.

The Fox News-to-Cabinet pipeline represents something deeper than mere cronyism. It reflects a fundamental confusion between commentary and competence, between analyzing decisions and making them. Television personalities succeed by simplifying complex issues into digestible narratives. Defense Secretaries must navigate precisely the complexity that television commentary eliminates. These are not just different skills—they’re opposite orientations toward information and decision-making.

But in a political environment where loyalty is the highest virtue and expertise is suspect, the Fox News pedigree becomes a feature rather than a bug. Hegseth isn’t being appointed despite his lack of traditional qualifications—he’s being appointed because his qualifications are perfect for what this administration values: unwavering loyalty, ideological purity, and the ability to sell whatever decisions are made as not just correct but inevitable.

What We’ve Normalized

Step back from the particulars of Hegseth’s confirmation and consider what we’ve accepted as normal:

A Cabinet nominee credibly accused of sexual assault who paid his accuser to remain silent is not automatically disqualified. This is now normal.

A Cabinet nominee with documented patterns of alcohol abuse is not automatically disqualified. This is now normal.

A Cabinet nominee accused of domestic violence by family members is not automatically disqualified. This is now normal.

A Cabinet nominee whose primary qualification is television performance is not automatically disqualified. This is now normal.

A confirmation process so partisan that the Vice President must break a tie for only the second time in history is treated as a procedural curiosity rather than a screaming alarm about the nominee’s unsuitability. This is now normal.

We’ve normalized the abnormal so gradually that we no longer recognize how far we’ve fallen. Each boundary crossed makes the next transgression easier. Each standard abandoned makes the absence of standards less remarkable. We’re not sliding down a slippery slope—we’re in free fall, and we’ve convinced ourselves that the sensation of plummeting is actually flight.

The danger isn’t just Hegseth. It’s that his confirmation establishes a precedent. If credible allegations of sexual assault, domestic abuse, and alcoholism are insufficient to derail a Cabinet nomination, what would be? If a Vice President’s tie-breaking vote for a Secretary of Defense is treated as unremarkable, what confirmation would give us pause? We’ve answered the question “How low can we go?” with a resounding “There is no bottom.”

The Military We Deserve

Hegseth was defended by Republican senators who support his goal of implementing a “warrior culture” in the Pentagon and eliminating what they consider “woke distractions” like diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Unpack that defense, because it’s revealing. Hegseth’s lack of qualifications, the troubling allegations, the absence of relevant command experience—all of this is acceptable because he promises to fight the right cultural battles. He’ll eliminate diversity programs. He’ll refocus the military on “lethality.” He’ll purge “woke” ideology from the ranks.

Never mind that the U.S. military is widely considered the most capable fighting force in human history, and it achieved that status while implementing the very diversity and inclusion programs Hegseth plans to eliminate. Never mind that military effectiveness isn’t undermined by recognizing that soldiers come from diverse backgrounds and that strength emerges from harnessing different perspectives rather than enforcing conformity. Never mind that “warrior culture” is meaningless rhetoric divorced from the actual complexities of modern military operations, which require diplomatic sophistication, technological expertise, and strategic thinking far beyond the battlefield machismo that Hegseth’s supporters valorize.

The “warrior culture” rhetoric is revealing in what it excludes. It doesn’t mention strategic planning, logistical coordination, alliance management, or any of the unglamorous work that actually makes militaries effective. It’s purely aesthetic—a vision of the military drawn from action movies rather than operational reality. And it’s this aesthetic vision, rather than actual competence, that secured Hegseth’s confirmation.

In April 2025, Hegseth issued orders to merge Army Futures Command with Training and Doctrine Command, and merge four-star headquarters Army Forces Command with Army North and Army South into a single headquarters, while eliminating at least 20% of four-star general positions. These are massive organizational changes, implemented quickly, by a Secretary in office for barely three months. Are these changes based on careful analysis? Are they improvements to military effectiveness? Or are they the predictable actions of someone whose primary qualification is the confidence to make dramatic changes regardless of expertise?

We’re conducting an experiment in real-time: What happens when you place someone manifestly unqualified in charge of the most powerful military in human history? What happens when allegiance to ideology matters more than competence in execution? What happens when the primary criterion for defense leadership is willingness to fight culture wars rather than actual wars?

We’ll find out. And we’ll pay the price, whatever it is.

The Senators Who Said Yes

History will not be kind to the 51 senators who confirmed Pete Hegseth, but we should understand what motivated them. This wasn’t a failure of information—the allegations were public, documented, discussed extensively during the confirmation process. This was a choice, made with full knowledge of who Hegseth is and what he represents.

Some senators genuinely believe that Hegseth’s cultural agenda matters more than his qualifications or character. They’ve accepted a transactional morality: the allegations are regrettable, but they’re willing to overlook them in service of larger goals. This is how good people rationalize supporting bad candidates. They tell themselves that the ends justify the means, that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, that politics requires dirty hands. These are very old rationalizations for very old compromises, and they’ve never led anywhere good.

Other senators voted for Hegseth out of partisan loyalty. Party unity matters more than individual conscience. Opposing a president’s nominee—especially early in an administration—invites retaliation, threatens legislative priorities, and marks you as disloyal. The incentive structure of contemporary politics rewards compliance and punishes defection. These senators didn’t necessarily believe Hegseth was qualified; they simply decided that the personal cost of opposing him exceeded the abstract harm of confirming him. This is cowardice dressed up as pragmatism.

Still other senators calculated that opposing Hegseth was politically dangerous. Their constituents—or at least the loudest, most politically active among them—want these cultural battles fought, want these “woke” programs eliminated, want someone who’ll own the libs rather than someone who’ll competently manage the defense apparatus. Voting against Hegseth meant potentially losing a primary challenge, meant facing well-funded opposition, meant being branded as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) and exiled from the party apparatus. For politicians conditioned to prioritize survival above all else, the choice was obvious.

What all these senators share is a willingness to subordinate judgment to expedience. They’ve accepted that character doesn’t matter if ideology aligns, that competence is optional if cultural signaling is present, that credible allegations of violence against women are less important than party unity. They’ve made a choice about what matters and what doesn’t, and they’ve communicated that choice to the nation and the world.

History will record their names. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who broke ranks, will be remembered differently than those who didn’t. But even their opposition was purely symbolic—they knew their “no” votes wouldn’t change the outcome, so they got to register principled disagreement without actually risking anything. This is the cheapest form of political courage: opposition only when it’s safe.

The Woman We’ve Forgotten

Amidst all the political calculation, let’s remember who gets lost in this story: the woman who accused Pete Hegseth of sexual assault. We don’t know her name—the non-disclosure agreement saw to that. We don’t know the details of her allegations—confidentiality provisions buried them. We don’t know if her accusations were true—the $50,000 settlement guaranteed we never would.

What we do know is this: A woman came forward with allegations serious enough that Hegseth’s attorney advised him to pay $50,000 to make them go away. We know that this woman is now watching the man she accused oversee the United States military. We know that the Senate confirmation process treated her allegations as a minor inconvenience rather than a serious concern. We know that, whatever happened between them, the message sent to her and to every other woman watching is clear: your accusations, however credible, matter less than political expedience.

This is the human cost of the transaction. The $50,000 Hegseth paid was the price of her silence. But what was the cost to her? What does it feel like to watch your assailant—if indeed that’s what he was—ascend to one of the most powerful positions in government? What does it communicate to women everywhere about the value of coming forward, about the likelihood of being believed, about whether justice is possible when your accused has power and resources?

Sexual assault allegations are notoriously difficult to prosecute. They often come down to competing testimonies, he-said-she-said dynamics that are impossible to adjudicate beyond reasonable doubt. This is why settlements are common—they provide certainty for both parties, even if they don’t provide truth. But when the accused is seeking public office—especially office requiring public trust and authority over others—doesn’t the public deserve to know? Don’t we have a right to understand the character of those we empower?

The non-disclosure agreement served Hegseth’s interests perfectly. It eliminated a legal threat, silenced a potential critic, and created enough ambiguity that supporters could plausibly claim the allegations were never proven. But it served the public interest not at all. We’re asked to trust Hegseth with enormous power while legally prohibited from knowing crucial information about his character and past conduct.

And what message does this confirmation send to women in the military? Hegseth will now oversee the same military institutions that have struggled for decades with sexual assault, harassment, and the systematic marginalization of women service members. How can survivors in the military trust a Secretary of Defense who allegedly committed the very acts they’ve suffered? How can they believe their reports will be taken seriously when the person at the top of the chain of command allegedly paid to silence similar allegations?

The confirmation isn’t just about Hegseth. It’s about every woman in uniform who’s been assaulted, every woman who’s been told to stay quiet, every woman who’s watched men with credible allegations against them get promoted while she faces retaliation for speaking out. Hegseth’s confirmation tells these women that their experiences don’t matter, that their safety is negotiable, that the institution will always protect powerful men over vulnerable women.

The Precedent We’ve Set

Every Cabinet confirmation establishes precedent. Future nominees and senators will look back at Hegseth’s confirmation to understand what’s acceptable, what’s disqualifying, where the boundaries are. And what precedent have we set?

We’ve established that credible allegations of sexual assault are not disqualifying if the accused has sufficient political support and resources to settle quietly. We’ve established that patterns of alcohol abuse are acceptable if they’re categorically denied and dismissed as political smears. We’ve established that domestic violence allegations can be overcome with sufficiently vigorous denials and friendly character witnesses. We’ve established that relevant experience and competence are optional if the nominee has the right ideological commitments and television presence.

We’ve lowered the bar so far that it’s no longer clear where the floor is. If Hegseth can be confirmed, who can’t? What allegations would actually be disqualifying? What lack of qualifications would be too severe? We’ve answered these questions, and the answer is: there are no disqualifying factors if you have party loyalty and political protection.

Future administrations will remember this precedent. Future nominees with troubling pasts will point to Hegseth and say, “If he could be confirmed, why not me?” Future senators will face pressure to confirm problematic nominees by colleagues who’ll argue, “We confirmed Hegseth despite worse allegations—how can we oppose this nominee for less?” The ratchet only turns one direction: each transgression accepted makes the next one easier, each standard abandoned makes its absence less remarkable.

This is how norms die—not in a dramatic collapse, but in a steady erosion where each compromise makes the next one inevitable. We don’t deliberately decide to abandon principles; we just make one exception, then another, then another, until the principle itself is forgotten and the exceptions are the new normal.

What Military Leadership Actually Requires

Let’s discuss what we should actually want in a Secretary of Defense, because it’s been lost in the culture war rhetoric and partisan maneuvering.

The Secretary of Defense oversees a department with an annual budget exceeding $700 billion, three million employees, and installations in dozens of countries. The job requires managing massive bureaucracies, navigating complex inter-service rivalries, coordinating with allies, planning for emerging threats, and making life-and-death decisions that affect thousands of service members and millions of civilians.

This work demands strategic thinking—the ability to see multiple moves ahead, to understand how different variables interact, to anticipate consequences and plan accordingly. It demands diplomatic sophistication—the capacity to work with allies, negotiate with adversaries, and understand the geopolitical implications of military decisions. It demands managerial competence—the skill to oversee vast organizations, delegate effectively, hold subordinates accountable, and ensure that strategic visions translate into operational realities.

It demands judgment—perhaps above all else, judgment. The ability to distinguish reliable intelligence from noise, to separate genuine threats from exaggerated ones, to know when military force is appropriate and when it’s counterproductive. The wisdom to understand that military power is most effective when held in reserve, that the best wars are the ones never fought, that strength is demonstrated through restraint as often as through action.

And it demands character. Not the performative machismo that passes for strength in political theater, but actual character: integrity, honesty, accountability, the courage to tell superiors what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear, the humility to admit mistakes and learn from them, the empathy to understand that strategic decisions have human costs borne by service members and their families.

Does Pete Hegseth possess these qualities? His confirmation hearing suggested otherwise. He offered ideological talking points rather than strategic vision. He demonstrated TV personality skills—confident delivery, staying on message, pivoting from uncomfortable questions—rather than the depth of thought that serious leadership requires. He promised to implement a “warrior culture” without defining what that means or explaining how it would improve military effectiveness.

His plan to eliminate diversity programs reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how modern militaries work. Diversity isn’t a “woke distraction”—it’s an operational necessity. The U.S. military operates globally, interacts with populations that don’t look or think like us, and requires cultural understanding and linguistic capability that only comes from recruiting soldiers from diverse backgrounds. Eliminating these programs doesn’t make us stronger—it makes us less capable of understanding and engaging with the world we’re trying to influence.

His proposed organizational changes—merging commands, eliminating general officer positions—might be necessary efficiency reforms, or they might be poorly considered changes that disrupt functioning systems without improving outcomes. The problem is that we can’t tell, because Hegseth hasn’t demonstrated the depth of knowledge or strategic thinking required to distinguish between them. He’s making dramatic changes because dramatic changes signal decisiveness, regardless of whether they’re actually improvements.

This is governance by gesture—all confidence and no competence, all ideology and no strategy, all performance and no substance. It’s what you get when you prioritize cultural signaling over actual capability, when looking strong matters more than being effective, when the appearance of leadership substitutes for its reality.

The Real Cost of This Confirmation

The true cost of confirming Pete Hegseth won’t be tallied for years. It won’t appear in budget reports or casualty statistics. It will manifest in ways difficult to quantify but impossible to ignore.

It will appear in the decisions not made, the threats not anticipated, the strategies not developed because the person in charge lacks the judgment to see them coming. It will appear in alliances weakened by diplomatic incompetence, in adversaries emboldened by perceived American weakness, in service members who distrust leadership that doesn’t reflect their values or understand their concerns.

It will appear in qualified military officers who retire early rather than serve under leadership they don’t respect, in Defense Department civil servants who resign rather than implement policies they know are misguided, in allies who question American judgment and adversaries who test American resolve.

It will appear in the women who don’t report sexual assault because they’ve seen how the system protects powerful men, in the service members who don’t speak up about problems because they’ve learned that loyalty matters more than truth, in the next generation of military leadership who understand that competence is optional if ideology is correct.

Most of all, it will appear in the slow degradation of institutional credibility—not just the Defense Department’s, but democracy’s. When confirmation hearings become partisan performances, when serious allegations are dismissed as political smears, when loyalty trumps competence and ideology supersedes judgment, citizens lose faith that the system works. They conclude that power is its own justification, that rules apply only to the powerless, that might makes right because there’s no longer any standard of rightness that power must answer to.

This is the real cost: not the money wasted or the strategies mishandled, but the trust destroyed. Democracy requires citizens to believe that the system, however imperfect, generally works—that qualified people rise, that serious allegations are seriously investigated, that there are standards everyone must meet regardless of political connection. Hegseth’s confirmation shatters that belief.

Where We Go From Here

So what now? Pete Hegseth is Secretary of Defense, confirmed despite everything we know about him, empowered to make decisions affecting millions of lives. We can’t unconfirm him. We can’t pretend this didn’t happen. We can only reckon with what it means and decide how to respond.

First, we must refuse to normalize this. Hegseth’s confirmation is not normal, not acceptable, not the way things should work. We must resist the authoritarian playbook that normalizes the abnormal through repetition and gaslighting. Each time someone suggests that the allegations against Hegseth don’t matter, we must insist that they do. Each time someone claims his lack of qualifications is irrelevant, we must demonstrate why competence matters. Each time someone argues that party loyalty justifies any compromise, we must argue back that principles matter more than politics.

Second, we must hold Hegseth accountable. Every decision he makes, every policy he implements, every organizational change he orders must be scrutinized with the skepticism his confirmation earned. When he makes mistakes—and he will make mistakes, because everyone does, and inexperienced leaders make more of them—we must document them, publicize them, and demand accountability. We cannot allow the Senate’s dereliction of duty during confirmation to mean a blank check during his tenure.

Third, we must remember. The senators who confirmed Hegseth made a choice. They chose party over country, loyalty over judgment, expedience over principle. They are on record. Their votes are documented. When they face reelection, when they claim to care about women’s safety or military effectiveness or good governance, we must remind them—and their constituents—of this vote. Democracy has a short memory by design, but citizens must remember what politicians prefer we forget.

Fourth, we must demand systemic reform. The confirmation process is broken—not just for Hegseth but structurally. When credible allegations of serious misconduct can be dismissed along party lines, when the process becomes purely performative, when outcomes are predetermined by partisan loyalty rather than individual merit, the system isn’t working. We need reforms: independent investigations of serious allegations, mandatory standards of competence and character, consequences for senators who abdicate their constitutional duty to advise and consent in favor of rubber-stamping party nominees.

Fifth, and most importantly, we must rebuild the institutions and norms this confirmation damaged. Trust is destroyed quickly and rebuilt slowly. We must demonstrate, through actions over years, that this was an aberration rather than a new normal. We must insist on qualified nominees, serious confirmation processes, and accountability for those who fail to meet standards. We must prove that democracy can correct its mistakes, that systems can recover from corruption, that standards matter even when they’re violated.

This is hard work. It requires sustained attention when the news cycle has moved on. It requires principle when expedience is easier. It requires courage when going along is safer. But it’s necessary work, because the alternative is accepting that this is who we are now: a nation that confirms manifestly unqualified nominees with credible allegations of violence against women because party loyalty matters more than anything else.

The Question That Remains

In the end, we’re left with one question that the confirmation process never adequately addressed: Why?

Why was Pete Hegseth, among all possible candidates, the person Donald Trump chose to lead the Defense Department? Not why Trump nominated him—the Fox News connection, the loyalty, the cultural signaling all explain that. But why was this particular nominee worth spending political capital on? Why force 50 senators to take a politically costly vote? Why break a historic tie? Why risk institutional credibility and international reputation?

The answer, I suspect, is that Hegseth’s deficits are his qualifications. He’s chosen precisely because he lacks the experience that might make him independent, the expertise that might make him skeptical of bad ideas, the institutional credibility that might make him harder to control. He’s chosen because his primary loyalty is to the person who elevated him, not to the institution he leads or the country he serves.

This is how authoritarianism works: not through dramatic coups but through the gradual replacement of competent, independent leaders with loyal, dependent ones. You don’t need to destroy institutions if you can simply staff them with people who’ll do what they’re told. You don’t need to eliminate standards if you can appoint people so manifestly unqualified that standards become meaningless.

Hegseth’s confirmation is a test: How much will we accept? How far can standards fall before people rebel? How many norms can be violated before the system collapses? These are the experiments being run on American democracy in real-time, and Hegseth’s confirmation suggests the answer is: more than we’d like to think.

But experiments can fail. Tests can be failed. And there’s still time—barely, but still time—to say: No further. This is where the line is drawn. We accepted this, to our shame, but we will not accept the next one. We failed this test, but we will pass the next.

Whether we do depends on choices we make individually and collectively in response to this confirmation. Do we shrug and move on, accepting that this is just how things work now? Or do we insist that this is unacceptable, that we demand better, that democracy requires citizens who care enough to hold the powerful accountable even when it’s difficult?

The answer will determine not just the success of Hegseth’s tenure, but the future of American democracy itself.

Pete Hegseth is Secretary of Defense. That’s done. But the story isn’t over. It’s just beginning.

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