It Could Happen Here - How to Stop the Far Right in Three Easy Steps
Episode Date: September 9, 2024Mia and Robert discuss an unlikely electoral program to defeat the far right: an MLM crackdown, supplement regulations, and legalizing direct car sales.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy informat...ion.
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Call Zone Media.
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back Call zone media. what that's looked like electorally, what that's looked like in the streets, and the sort of deleterious effects that it has had on effectively everyone in the US.
And this is going to be a little bit of a different episode.
We've talked about a lot of the responses to the far right,
sort of in terms of sort of direct actions and sort of confrontations.
What we haven't really done is talked about what can be done electorally.
And I do think that a significant portion of talked about what can be done electorally and i do think that a
significant portion of the far right can be defanged and eventually defeated through a series
of of things that are not particularly complicated but the problem is that defeating defeating the
far right means going beyond simply trying to win every single election, which is the current sort of democratic strategy, right? Yeah. If you want to actually defeat the far right, winning every
election is not a viable strategy. We've seen this fail already with Hillary Clinton. We cannot rely
on simply winning every election into the future. You have to go beyond mere electoral victory
towards using your electoral victory to actually defeat the base of the far right.
When the Republican Party held power for 12 years following the ascension of Ronald Reagan,
they did it by destroying the political base of the Democratic Party. They shattered America's
trade unions and rebuilt the economy to ensure unions would no longer be able to provide the
ideological and financial support the Democrats had relied on. If we are going to defeat the far right, we need to wage the same kind of campaign against them. Now, luckily for
us, unlike Ronald Reagan, we do not need to completely rebuild the American economy to
knock the legs of the far right out from under them. There is, in fact, a pretty minimal program
that we can implement to defeat the far right that is very simple it has three
components first a crackdown on mlms that drives them effectively completely underground yeah by
which we mean multi-level marketing for these appearance schemes right which are a major source
of funding for the far right i mean this is where trump comes out of right this is why he did that
fake university like this is a big part of his base yeah yeah we're going to get more into that in a second
uh the the second very important one is a regulatory overhaul of how the fda regulates
supplements oh boy which sounds like it yeah extremely technical and nerdy thing but supplements
are another enormous cash spigot for the far right. Yeah, this is where Alex Jones and Joe Rogan get their shit.
Yeah.
Yep, yep.
And the third is another kind of wonky change that will be extremely important,
which is making sure to allow car companies to make direct sales to customers,
thus undercutting the enormous and extremely politically powerful base
of right-wing American car dealership owners. Yeah, who donate more money to political causes than any other career field
in this country. Yeah, and you may not believe us yet just from this sort of basic introduction,
but these three simple reforms, MLM regulation, regulation of dietary supplements, and the direct
sales of cars will destroy so much of the financial and political base of the far right that they will, at least temporarily, and in the sort of mid-range
term, become significantly less of a threat than they are now. So we are going to start with MLMs.
Yeah, as Robert has sort of alluded to, MLMs are a very, very important political base for the far
right. I'm probably the most famous and the one that Robert has done an entire show on.
So go listen to that if you want a really actually in detailed thing on the history of Amway.
Amway and the sort of political family, the DeVosses that they've generated, are an incredibly important part of the emerging far-right. I mean, obviously, most famously, Betsy DeVos, who married into the
Klan, was our Secretary of Education under Trump. You know, the sort of Prince family is embedded
into this. And Amway famously used its own internal communications to stump for Republican Party
candidates and also uses its base and also directly its own funds to fund the Republican Party and a bunch of Republican congressional candidates.
Now, obviously, and this is something that is true of all of these reforms, is that everything we're doing here,
they're morally and politically good in their own right, right? MLMs are scams. They're extremely exploitative.
And their role, I think, in the far right is a lot more important than people understand even even
if you just look at the money you're sort of missing part of what's going on with MLMs.
MLMs aren't just a cash spigot they're a part of how the far right builds its ideological base.
MLMs teach you to convert all of your personal relations into potential assets for sales.
you to convert all of your personal relations into potential assets for sales. This is obviously evil on a moral level, but it's also insidious on an ideological level. The MLM logic of turning
all of your most precious relationships into sales vectors changes how you see the world.
And this is why Republican recruiting inside Amway worked so well. Once you've been trained
that literally everything, even your sort of closest friends and your dearest relationships with your family are just
business opportunities, it's extremely easy to convince you of the rest of the Republican Party
platform. In the same way, the experience of being in a union and organizing with your co-workers
once reliably turned out the ideological base of the left, MLMs have generated enormous political
bases for the right. And unfortunately, this sort of
ideological threat doesn't just go away if people are able to get out of MLMs, or especially if,
you know, they're sort of cast out of MLMs because they simply are a broken brand of money and are
in debt. The isolation and alienation that comes from pushing away, you know, every single relation
that's close to you from attempting to sell them soap or
whatever makes people isolated and alienated and makes them more vulnerable to far-right
radicalization yep and this is why driving these mlms under isn't just a way to sort of cost
republican party money because that's not enough to defeat the Republicans. They can
find other sources of money. What you need to do is systematically remove parts of their political
base. And when I say remove parts of their political base, what I mean is you have to
go after the systems that are creating more members of the far right. Going after MLMs is a
way to do that. Now, the FTC has gone after MLMs before. They sort of famously, as you talked about
in that episode on Amway,
they went after a bunch of MLMs in the 80s.
But this sort of caused MLMs to get smarter
and has been pretty effective
in sort of warding the FTC off
from really going after MLMs since then.
Yeah, which is, by the way way like another you you were just talking about
how the way mlms impact like the minds of the people participating in them like prepares them
you know for the far right yeah the way in which this this sense of impunity has developed among
the people who run and participate in these things due to their capture of the legal system uh is also a part of like why
the far right works the way it does that sense of impunity yeah and part of the reason why they have
that impunity is is just the way the ftc goes after these companies right i mean there was in
in the in the mid 2010s the ftc went after neutral light which is one of the biggest and oldest mlms
but the way they went after them was they
issued them a $200 million fine, and that's a lot of money, but it didn't drive Neutralite out of
business. And as the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, if government regulation just means
setting fines, and if the fines still allow the business to make more money than they lost from
the fines, then that's just the government taking a cut. It's not
actual regulation. And if you're one of these businesses and the worst that could happen to
you is the government takes a cut, you end up with 2008, right? Where all these banks know
they're going to get bailed out and they know the worst punishment that's going to happen to them
is just the government taking a small cut and they can go back to just making all their money.
of the government taking a small cut and they can go back to just making all their money so in order to actually go after mlms we can't simply rely on the ftc you know even if you were to sort of put
in charge a more a more militant ftc that was more willing to go after stuff there needs to be actual
regulatory change here and that is possible but difficult but if if we actually want, if we're actually deeply serious about wielding political power to defeat the far right and to keep them from reemerging and keep them out of power generationally, then this is the start of what we have to do.
So we mentioned Neutralite, which is a very, very powerful MLM.
Neutralite is important because it is actually two kinds of business that are extremely important
to the far right at the same time.
It is part MLM, but it's an MLM that also sells dietary supplements.
And when we come back from these ads, we will be considering the role of the virtually
unregulated dietary supplement markets in the rise of the far right more broadly. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.
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Oh, boy.
The supplement market.
There is a lot less that has been written about this than there should be.
So dietary supplements are barely regulated by the FDA.
People are getting scammed all over the place.
Enormous numbers.
I mean, I've seen numbers that were suggesting, I mean, 200 million people take some kind of dietary supplement if you include things like sort of vitamin gummies, et cetera, et cetera. This is an enormous business.
I'm going to read from Rajani R. Starr, who wrote an article about supplement regulation in the
American Journal of Public Health. If you're going to read this, by the way, this is slightly out of date because the next year i don't know if this is part
of this the next year ftc a little bit overhauled their supplement regulations but here is star
quote the dietary supplement health and education act which is the big thing that sort of deregulated
supplements prohibits supplements that pose a substantial risk of injury, allows the Secretary
of Health and Human Services to issue immediate bans on substances that are imminent hazards,
and authorizes the FDA to implement current good manufacturing practice guidelines. The law also
requires pre-market notification for new dietary supplements defined as supplements that were not
marketed in the U.S. before October 15th, 1944, which is when
the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act went into effect. Products violating these
regulations are deemed dangerous, adulterated, misbranded, or otherwise unlawful. And that all
sounds well and good until you get to the next sentence, which is, quote, however, supplements
need not be evaluated for efficiency, and only limited data on safety are required for new supplement ingredients.
Yeah. So like you were not supposed to let people sell dangerous supplements,
but we're also not supposed to check to make sure the supplements are safe or work.
Yeah. Yeah. And as the FDA itself admits that even the little tiny notifications
for things like new ingredients that the FDA, you know, FDA imposes in 2016, you supposed to like notify the fda if you put new ingredients but like even that just isn't happening
these companies just don't care they're just not either not even like doing the little tiny legal
mandate stuff they're required to i should also note a large part of the blame for particularly
the supplements but also i mean mlms actually they play a role in it too it's the state of utah
yeah by the way the political power of the state of utah is a huge part of why because supplements
are a massive fucking industry in utah so are mlms so by the way our teen treatment facilities the
ones where they like kidnap your children and torture them these are all things that the state
of utah in specific will fight
like hell to stop from being fixed in any way, shape or form. Yeah. And that bill I keep talking
about the Dietary Supplement Health Education Act, that is the baby of Utah Senator Orrin Hatch,
who is a terrible right wing force in American politics. And the fact that Orrin Hatch has been
this effective and the fact that Utah serves as such a powerful base here demonstrates something that's important about this political strategy, which is that it has to be a federal level political strategy.
Because there are a lot of states where Republicans effectively have strangleholds.
You need to use the federal government to bypass the unbelievable block of sort of political power in these states.
block of sort of political power in in these states i want to read a little bit more from that article by star about what kind of regulations are required for supplements because i think it's
it's extremely dire in and of itself yeah quote manufacturers are not required to confirm the
identity of all ingredients supplied to them sure why would they need to do that yeah no
unbelievable and they're not required to follow remember how
i talked about there's uh current good manufacturing practices guidelines yeah following those
guidelines does not guarantee the absence of all contaminants moreover unlike drugs which are
considered unadulterated or misbranded if they do not achieve compliance with national standards set by u.s pharmacopoeia and national formulary
dietary supplements may choose to be compliant only six brands of dietary supplements are
currently verified by u.s pharmacopoeia so they don't have to work they can choose whether or not
they want to be submitted to see if any of this stuff works. Now, in theory also, the marketing of dietary supplements is supposed to be regulated by the FTC.
But is the FTC regulating all of these false claims people are making about their dietary supplements?
No, of course they're not doing that.
So why do we care about supplement market?
Robert has talked about this at the very beginning of the episode.
The easiest answer for why we should care about supplement markets is simply the figure of Alex Jones,
who we have talked about extensively on this show.
It's been on Behind the Bastards.
If you want a really, really in-depth look at who Alex Jones is,
the podcast Knowledge Fight is the single best resource I think anyone has ever created.
Yeah, it would be hard to beat.
Yeah, it's i it unbelievably detailed but alice jones
has you know as an individual figure has done more to sort of spread the ideology of the far right
and turn this country into what it is now then maybe almost any other single person other than
someone like trump right he is probably most well known now as as, quote, the Sandy Hook guy, which he's extremely mad at people calling him, but he's why everyone thinks that, not everyone, but a bunch of people think that Sandy Hook was a false flag.
And, importantly, here's from NPR, quote, most of free speech systems, which is Alex Jones, the corporate name for Alex Jones' company, most of free speech systems revenue to this day,
about 80% comes from dietary supplements,
according to court records.
Now, these court records come from one of a number of lawsuits against Alex Jones
for defaming the families of the victims
of the Alex Jones shooting.
I'm sorry.
For defaming the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting.
Sorry.
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, in the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting. Sorry. Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, in the process of discovery,
we got a bunch of information about how Alex Jones'
internal media empire actually works.
Now, if you followed Alex Jones over the years,
you know that he's hawked everything from silver to satellite phones.
But it is the dietary supplements that actually sell, right?
As an NPR article said, about 80% of his revenue comes from dietary supplements.
And this is not a sort of small independent media outlet, right? Free speech systems,
again, is Alex Jones' company, was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This is an enormous far
right media empire. And supplement sales allow right-wing
figures like Alex Jones to bypass the reliance on ads, which removes a lot of potential leverage
from activist groups who wage pressure campaigns against, you know, they did this against Tucker
Carlson, for example, where people went after their advertisers and showed them the stuff Tucker
Carlson was saying on Fox before he got kicked off and what do you want to fund this and you know that was actually a decent a sort of effective strategy but you know and the
funny part about this is if you look at the end of tucker carlson's show right the ads on that show
were ads from the my pillow guy who is a a far-right extremist in his own right and a very important election denier and a bunch of supplement companies
supplement sales are a durable and renewable grift because there's already an extensive network of
suppliers and distributors right-wing brands who want to make a bunch of money can just sort of
slap their name onto existing supplements that they buy wholesale and then they can market them
to their viewers and this gives them an extremely profitable and lucrative source of funding and
this is used all over the place right again it impacts what they say and like how they like the
obsession they have with like seed oils and what's destroying your ability like your testosterone and
all of these like different far-right conspiracy theories about
what kind of stuff you shouldn't be eating. All of this stuff is related to the supplement
business, right? They are trying to drum up and destroy trust in public health and drum up
conspiracy theories for their own profit. And so it's not just a matter of this is how they get
money, but this also is why they do some of the things that are so harmful. Yeah. And as you're saying, this is cyclical,
right? The incentive structure for going further and further into these conspiracies and selling
more and more of these supplement things, it's a spiral. It keeps on just increasing in size and
increasing in size due to the feedback loop from the incentive structure that selling these supplements creates. Now, this is actually not an enormously difficult
sort of field to just completely shut down. The next branch we're going to talk about,
I think, is actually a much harder political fight. But a lot of the market for this can be
defeated by just having the FTC actually regulate supplements the way they do drugs because and this
is really important these supplements are being marketed as drugs right the advertisements that
these people are already doing are already illegal the ftc is not supposed to allow people to sell
supplements like this they shouldn't be able to be manufactured like this and this is again as
with banning mlms this is something that helps the consumer because it'll mean that whatever supplement market exists
after sort of a massive regulatory sweep and crackdown will be much safer, it will be much
more effective, and it will also destroy the base of far-right media. If you can cut the knees out
of this sort of far-right media ecosystem, you can cut the knees out of this sort of far-right media ecosystem,
you can go an enormous way towards solving
the crisis of the far-right
that has been brought upon
this country.
Speaking of crisis...
Yeah, we're going to let
the ads talk about the ads
and then we're going to come back
and close by talking about
car manufacturers
and the American gentry.
Yeah.
Hey, I'm Jack B. Thomas, Yeah. join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks
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and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,
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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep
getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love
technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that
actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every
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and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled
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We're back. And this is a fun one. This is also like one of my particular favorite things to hit
because i don't think a lot of people know how much the republican party is just a party of
used car dealers yep probably the most famous piece that talks it's not really fully about
car dealerships but it mentions their sort of political effect and the kind of class that they belong to is maybe the best thing the Atlantic has published in the last decade, at least one of the best things they've published.
And it's an article on the American gentry by the journalist Patrick Wyman.
Wyman argues that huge swaths of America are ruled by what he calls the local gentry.
that huge swaths of america are ruled by what he calls the local gentry these are millionaires notably these are not billionaires these are these are multi multi millionaires whose wealth
derives from immediate wealth extraction from the surrounding communities and places like wyman's
childhood home of yakima washington these elites have enormous local power over the territory they
rule like the landed gentry of old. Here's Wyman, quote,
the conspicuously consuming celebrities and jet-setting cosmopolitans of popular imagination
exist, but they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed elite group,
one that sits at the pinnacle of the local hierarchies that govern life for tens of
millions of people. Donald Trump grasped this group's existence and its importance, acting,
as he often does, on unthinking but effective instinct. When he crowed about his quote,
beautiful boaters, lauding the flotilla of his supporters trailing MAGA flags from their
watercraft in his honor, or addressed his devoted followers among a rioting January 6th crowd that
included people who had flown to the event on private jets,
he knew what he was doing. Trump was courting the support of the American gentry, the salt of the
earth multimillionaires. You see them as local leaders in business and politics, the underappreciated
backbone of a once great nation. Now, Wyman is largely focused on the agricultural gentry because that's, you know, the sort of agro-barons who are very important to this story but are kind of auxiliary to this.
And that's largely because he's talking a lot about the places where he grew up, which are agricultural hubs.
But a very critical component of this American gentry, of this local elite class, are car dealership owners.
And their wealth and influence literally cannot be overstated.
The journalist Alexander Salmon wrote this in an article in Slate in 2023.
Quote, auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1% of American earners.
of American earners. Car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors, it turns out,
make up the majority of the country's 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.5 million a year.
Crunching numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, data scientists and author Stefan Zdivodovic found that over 20% of car dealerships in the U.S. have an owner banking more than $1.5 million a year,
which is absolutely absurd.
That is an unbelievable amount of money for people who really, when you think about it,
don't do anything.
Like, what is the actual service that a car dealer is doing?
Well, I mean, the primary thing that they do is rip people off because the entire way
that car sales work is based on fraud yep right like it's
based on getting you to buy things that do not actually work like service packages and whatnot
that you often will not get any benefit from and it's a lot of it is based around also just
outright scams you know altering the information buyers have access to so they don't realize like problems with a used car or
whatever like it's it's all fraud right yeah and and as as is becoming ever true of american life
fraudsters scammers and people who are just their entire existence is dedicated to ripping you off
have more and more political power in this country. Here's a salmon from that same article, quote, as of 2021, the top 100 dealership groups in the US had annual revenues of around $100 billion,
more than any company that actually makes cars. The National Automotive Dealer Association,
NADA, became one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with 16,000 dues-paying members
spanning 32,500 franchises. Soon enough, a stop at the annual NADA convention became routine for
presidential hopefuls and even presidents. Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton
all attended ahead of presidential runs. Bill Clinton and both Bushes came after they left the
White House. And the fact that Democrats are showing up to this is appalling on a moral level, right?
This is an entire organization of fraudsters.
And it's not, it doesn't even work, right?
Car dealers donate six to one for Republican causes.
But they really want that one.
Yeah.
It's the same thing with like, you've got Schumer going out for the crypto caucus now,
where like, well, only a fraction of those guys are going to donate to DIMS.
And it's all a scam.
He doesn't really care as long as some of it goes to him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, the thing that's more dangerous about these people, and I think it's even more dangerous than something like crypto money, is that these are local elites, right?
And they are dispersed enormously across the country.
This is something that Salmon is very sort of specific about.
It's something that comes up in Wyman's piece.
It's something that comes up if you do any research about this at all.
A huge part of the power is because these people are spread geographically
across the country.
And because they are the richest people or among the richest people in the
sort of small areas that they dominate,
they have unbelievable amounts of
political power and because they are again unbelievably wealthy they can funnel this
money directly into local politics on a scale that cannot be matched by your sort of grassroots
organizations this allows them to buy everything from city councils to seats in congress and they're
they effectively unionize like in portland they've got the Portland Business Association, which is, to a significant extent, allied with the police and dominates
local politics. They're the ones who buy the mayor's election. They're the ones who make
deals with the Portland Police Officers Union. This is the way in which a lot of power gets exercised that actually
impacts your daily life yeah and they've also been doing things like like coordinating and doing
strategy sharing about defeating unions but i mean this is why most of these business associations
were formed was specifically to destroy unions in the early 20th century and you know i mean the the
auto lobbying group was formed to do auto lobbying because these car dealerships don't have unions that that's another thing that we'll come back to it a little bit. But yeah, these car dealerships are a durable and extremely powerful force in electoral politics, and they deliver seats. And this is this is the most important thing. If you're an electoralist, right? These people consistently deliver seats to Republicans by flooding an amount of money
into local races that people can't compete with. And because of this, they admitted miserate the
lives of hundreds of millions of people. And they can also largely be destroyed in a single stroke.
That's maybe overselling it a little bit, but their power largely rests on an enormous array
of state level monopolies that ban the direct sales of cars to consumers or prevent
car companies from competing with local retailers this is something the auto lobby has been
you know the auto association lobby nada has been fighting for for ages they've gotten it in an
enormous number of states yeah and this by the way you know in terms of abilities to like disrupt
things this is a big part of like how tesla is different from other auto manufacturers is in most states there are some states where they're not allowed to do this
but in most states they sell directly to the customer which is like back before musk became
as political a figure was actually a major reason why these people didn't like him well they still
don't this is actually a really interesting thing is what the thing i want to close on here yes yes
i yes these people still hate musk and they hate electric cars because electric cars, to a large extent, are both a being directly sold by companies and B, it's harder to you actually have to do service on them in a way that that makes it more expensive for these these companies to write about.
This is something that Salmon has written about extensively.
So they absolutely despise electric cars. And this is actually a political opportunity for us,
right? Because Elon Musk now is, again, one of the, I think he's still the richest person in
the world, technically, until sort of all of his stocks implode. But this is an opportunity also
to split parts of the Republican base, right? Because the local government monopolies that
these car dealers have are
actually enormously unpopular among a lot of the other parts of the republican base right elon hates
them actual car manufacturers hate it no one likes car dealers like no yeah and like and this is
everything you know this is all something that libertarians hate because libertarians look at
this and this is one of the few times libertarians are right they look at this and go oh yeah well these people have been
literally granted market monopolies there are a lot of places where if there's already a car dealer
there if you're if you're a car company you can't compete with these things so these are state
sanctioned monopolies so there's large portions of the republican base to oppose these companies
and if you can you can use this as a wedge issue to split the Republican base.
And that that's sort of where I want to close on as much as I've been talking about these three
very specific things, right? Banning MLMs, or at least having extremely large regulatory crackdowns,
regulatory crackdowns on supplements, and legislation to allow direct car sales.
What we're trying to do here isn't just getting rid of the money
that supports the far right.
We're trying to destroy their institutions
and we're trying to fracture their base, right?
Going after MLMs destroys their ability
to sort of produce more,
like produce more Republicans from these MLMs
and produce more people in the far right
from these MLMs.
Going after supplements is a way to destroy
the right-wing media ecosystem,
which has been
crucial to the rise of the far right. And going after cars can help split the emerging Republican
coalition by pitting two parts of the Republican base against each other, pitting these car dealers
versus Elon and versus the auto manufacturers. Well, Mia, great episode. This is a nice starter.
This is, again, something we're going to continue to talk about because I really think we can't hit enough on this.
Obviously, these three things don't solve every problem with the far right.
But this is like if you could actually like package these together into a legislative agenda, it could be the equivalent of like the nuclear option for these people.
So, yeah, yeah, I think this is a smart thing to be hitting.
We will continue to talk about this in more detail,
but you know what?
We're done for the day.
Go do something else.
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