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Jane Austen, Bridgerton, and Facebook Censorship

The people, the fear, and the websites, that shut us up.

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[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

The other night, without trying, I managed to say something so forbidden, so taboo, so radioactive, that Facebook felt it necessary to, without so much as a warning, instantaneously and permanently erase a discussion thread of dozens of posts. I didn’t swear or threaten or even type in all caps. Women from all over the world were saying thought-provoking things about Jane Austen novels, and the new Netflix series, Bridgerton. I was in the middle of responding to a complete stranger telling me that my post had made her day. Facebook waved its magic censorship wand and the entire thread went POOF.

Does this matter? Yes, because people getting together and having frank and civil conversations about culture is one of the activities that keeps civilization going. And it matters because it was women making sure that other women didn’t say anything that they didn’t want “uppity” women to say. Harrison Butker didn’t shut down this exchange. Women did.

Facebook’s erasure matters because it was so trivial. I’m nobody. Nobody famous was participating. I tentatively expressed a minor opinion about a TV show. The words appearing on computer screens had an audience of hundreds, not millions. They would be read, and then forgotten, in a few days.

Even in private gatherings, behind virtual closed doors, we are not free to speak, to hear, to express, to have an opinion that a petty shrew who goes after anyone who has anything she doesn’t have, including an idea, might object to. We can’t even offend a Facebook algorithm.

It’s not just the rich and famous who need to police their speech. It’s the conversations at the laundromat, or the bus stop, or the Facebook discussion group, that rouse fury so intense that these conversations must shrink.

The other night was not the first time I’ve been punished for speaking. I was probably born to be a spinster. Football, pantyhose, fingernail polish, beer, cigarettes, shoplifting, fast cars, teen shotgun marriages: just a few of the lures whose seductiveness to my friends merely perplexed me. I was always off in the woods, in the library, or dreaming of far-off places. I wanted to read, to write, to think, and to speak. And boy oh boy were those activities not okay for girls in my hometown.

In high school, I worked as a nurse’s aide full time and saved every penny. I told my breathtakingly handsome Italian Stallion dance partner, “This summer I’m going to attend classes at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland!” I would have loved to have taken him with me.

He looked at me as if I were crazy, “Why would you want to miss summer down the Jersey shore?”

I still feel that sinking feeling I felt during that dance. He was so tall, so muscular, and so patient of my inability to differentiate between right and left feet. We were pressed up against each other so close that I could practically teach an anatomy lesson from every bicep, triceps, and pectoral I was, appreciatively, feeling. But we were inhabiting different planets.

It took me a long time to overcome the socioeconomic and cultural barriers to getting an advanced degree, but when I finally went to grad school, I experienced a life-changing revelation. I was in Stephen’s Lounge, a quiet place to study, on the campus of U.C. Berkeley. I felt something I had never felt before. A contentment, a feeling of rightness, a peace, and a joy. I was finally somewhere, after years of being the weird girl, where reading, writing, and expressing opinions were all okay, accepted, expected, and celebrated.

I quickly learned, though, that even on campuses, dedicated to scholarship and free inquiry, there were things one is not supposed to say. I remember that seminar where a fellow grad student with lax hygiene informed me, to general approval, that Westerners cannot judge clitoridectomy, because it is a ritual, just like Catholic confirmation, and any criticism of it was “Racist.”

This girl was rich, and a descendant of many generations in America. Her personal and domestic filth were an affectation that, she seemed to think, made her one with the wretched of the earth. Cleanliness is godliness to Polish immigrants, and to many truly poor people. The really poor can’t show off with a car or a college degree; personal hygiene is a way to communicate self-worth. How many of us have mothers who said, “You could perform surgery on my kitchen floor it is so clean!” Or “Water is free and soap is cheap!”

But that rich, dirty girl had the approval of the entire seminar, including the professor. I got hostile stares and gossip. “She’s not like us; she doesn’t have the right stuff; she’s not fit to be here.” The word “working class” was applied to me, and not in a good way. In spite of those lovely moments in Stephen’s Lounge, I was still the weird girl, and I was still being told to stop thinking, stop writing, and just shut up and go with the flow.

When I started posting on the internet, I thought, “This will change everything. The truth will find a new voice that the police, the bankers, and the press cannot silence.” I was part of an active and popular online community inhabited by political leftists and cultural hippies. I learned some harsh truths there about the internet’s limited power to convey truth.

After 9-11, no one wanted to hear that Islam had anything to do with it. You could say it; you could back it up with facts. The facts fell on deaf ears. “So you’re saying that all Muslims are terrorists. I know lots of nice Muslims.” Of course no one said that all Muslims are terrorists. But just like that graduate seminar, where criticism of gender apartheid was silenced with the conversation-stopping accusation, “racism,” any criticism of jihad was similarly deflected with straw men.

And then there was the left-wing hippie antisemitism. It astounded me. I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now. I didn’t understand the prominent Jewish community members, even the community leaders, who remained mum about the community-wide problem of antisemitism. There was the Christophobia. A union organizer from Oregon said that if he could, he would round up all Christians in America and kill them all. I was the only person to object to that post.

There was a misogyny so twisted you needed a Rosetta stone to decode it. The community’s women were all bravely liberated. Their liberation consisted mostly in public announcements of their promiscuity and a cheapening of the public self, as in “Let me tell you in detail about my latest STD journey.”

All these liberated women had attitudes that were as restrictive as a 1950s corset. They arrived at those attitudes through the most “progressive” of routes. “Men and women are equal” become “Men and women are the same.” One could not argue that women faced challenges that men do not, because to do so was to buy into “outdated” “biological determinism.” Men didn’t need to exercise special concern for women; such a demand relied on outdated ideas of “chivalry.” “Chivalry” was not important because men and women were equally strong, equally able to fight physical fights, equally eager for one-night stands. Men were victims of abusive women to the same degree that women were victims of abusive men.

The women supported all of this, partly because they felt it politically necessary to believe it, partly because it was flattering to tell themselves that they were not vulnerable, and partly because the men ate it up and praised them for everything they said that let men off the hook. The men in the group basked in being victims; the women played earth mother to needy men.

An obese, unkempt girl – she posted photos of herself – mourned that the only man who would date her was homeless and he wanted to live in her apartment. I tried to be helpful. Please don’t laugh; no doubt you can imagine how this all turned out. I mentioned that “men learn to love the person they are attracted to; women learn to become attracted to the person they love.” I subtly suggested, oh, maybe a diet. Maybe some exercise. Maybe some new clothes. I was denounced as a troublemaking freak and I left.

So, yeah, I’m a spinster, and truth to tell, I often feel more alone with others than when I am by myself. When talking to myself, I don’t have to ask myself, “Who will be upset if I express this thought?”

The other night I was watching the Netflix series Bridgerton. Bridgerton is based on a series of novels published by Julia Quinn between 2000 and 2006. The Netflix series began in 2020. It’s produced by Shonda Rhimes, a 54-year-old Chicago native. Rhimes’ mother was a college professor; her father was an administer. Rhimes is a very successful TV producer and writer. Rhimes is black and she is an activist.

The Bridgerton novels are set in England between 1813 and 1827. The main characters are British nobility. The plots revolve around balls, carriage rides, and romance. In Rhimes’ TV series, Regency-Era England is populated by white, black, and Asian nobility.

In some versions of colorblind casting, a black actor performs a character or historical personage meant to be white. For example, in 2021, British TV released a series depicting the life of Anne Boleyn, one of the wives of Henry VIII. In this series, Boleyn was played by Jodie Turner-Smith, a black actress. Viewers are to forget that Turner-Smith is black, and see, in her performance, a woman who was actually white. In Rhimes’ Bridgerton, the black and Asian actors are meant to be perceived as black and Asian. This Bridgerton is an AU – that is, an alternative universe. In the Netflix Bridgerton’s alternative universe, black and Asian people were British nobility.

Bridgerton’s multiracial cast of Regency nobility is one feature hailed as “updating” or “modernizing” Jane Austen. Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) was an English novelist. Her six best-known novels take place among English gentry. These novels focus on girls’ attempts to achieve a successful marriage. Austen’s works have many fans, many imitators, and many cinematic adaptations, two hundred years after their publication.

The other feature meant to be an update and an improvement on Austen is Bridgerton’s nudity and simulated sex scenes. There are no kisses in Austen’s novels (this is debated), and beloved film adaptations, like the 1995 Pride and Prejudice, might include only one kiss, or none. Audiences requiring nudity and sex in their entertainment insist that Austen’s lack of sex scenes is a flaw, a flaw that the superior modern era has repaired with ample dollops of boob-and-butt glimpsing, spit-swapping, and simulated humping.

Like a lot of women who don’t like romance novels, I am fascinated by them. I read one Bridgerton novel. It was one of the two worst novels I’ve ever read. (The other was by Harold Robbins.) I watch Netflix’s Bridgerton because I’m interested in pop culture by and for women. I also like looking at pretty things – sets, clothes, scenery. But I ask myself, “Why do women like this so much? Why is this not working for me? Am I really gay, or a man, but I don’t realize it?”

The other night, I was watching season three, episode two, entitled “How Bright the Moon.” The male romantic lead, Colin, is depicted, bare-chested, in bed, between two younger women, both of whom expose their breasts. A sheet covers all three performers’ groins. Colin turns his erotic attention from one girl to another. He is clearly in a state of arousal. He glances at a clock and realizes that he is late for something – perhaps another carriage ride. He jumps up. The girls gaze at him longingly. They are depicted as very much enjoying being his service providers. The girls are clean, well-fed, and healthy looking. The bed, sheets, and furnishings are luxurious, right out of a Victoria’s Secret ad. These actresses are not depicting recurring characters and will probably not be seen again.

Shonda Rhimes’ production company is named Shondaland, which sounds almost like what “shame country” might sound like in Yiddish. Shondaland’s calculations are obvious in the above-described scene. In previous Bridgerton episodes, Colin was the pipsqueak kid brother to the episode’s romantic leads, his older siblings. To transform a background character into the new episode’s lead, a “Bridgerton glow-up,” as the New York Times calls it, is necessary. In our modern, sex-positive era, a pipsqueak younger brother character is transformed into a romantic lead, not by depicting him accomplishing something honorable, or sacrificing himself for a noble goal, or exhibiting a feat of strength. No, he takes off his clothes and cavorts with hookers.

“A vast, hostile, soulless, wicked all-devouring but also fatally attractive place that makes and breaks, that tempts, inflames, satisfies, yet corrupts and ultimately kills.” That’s historian Dan Cruikshank’s encapsulation of Georgian London, where one in five women were prostitutes. Pregnancy might end in infanticide. Makeup was lead-based; rouge was tin-based; mercury treated VD. Prostitutes literally poisoned themselves to remain attractive, or merely to avoid death from VD. Desperate country girls were placed on an auction block and then stripped, as rich Johns bid for the right to take the girl’s virginity. Streetwalkers got “three penny” for “upright” penetration in an alley. “Child prostitutes,” reports the Daily Mail, “were not uncommon. A magistrate on a ‘search night’ in the 1750s discovered to his horror that, of the 40 prostitutes arrested, most of them were under the age of 18 and some were as young as 12, and this at a time when 14 or 15 was generally accepted to be the age of puberty.”

Did the prostitutes enjoy their work, as depicted in Bridgerton? “She was cold as ice, seemingly totally devoid of feeling. I rose convinced that she had no passion for the male sex,” wrote memoirist William Hickey of his encounter with famed prostitute Emily Warren. Warren was forced into prostitution at age twelve, after she was discovered by a madame as she, Warren, was leading her blind beggar father around London.

Josephine Butler (1828 – 1906) is one of my heroines. I wish she were better known. She was a devout Christian and she dedicated her life to victims of the sex trade, including child prostitutes. I wish Netflix would produce a series about her.

What fueled this robust trade in human flesh? Male lust of course, but, more significantly, the very same force that made Pemberly possible. Darcy is the male lead of Austen’s most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice. Pemberly is his impossibly grand mansion. When Elizabeth, the female lead, first sees Darcy’s home, she is awestruck. In fact, it is in viewing his mansion, not in meeting him, that causes Elizabeth to fall in love with Darcy. When they first meet, Elizabeth hates Darcy. Elizabeth’s sister demands to know when Elizabeth agreed to marry a man she had previously hated. Elizabeth replies, “I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”

Elizabeth seeing her future fiancé’s mansion for the first time is so significant that it’s a favorite scene in various adaptations; see here and here. Elizabeth first seeing Pemberly is as close as Pride and Prejudice comes to a first kiss. What made Darcy so rich that a mere glance at his home could cause a woman who hated him to fall in love with him? The same forces that made children so poor that they could be roped into sex slavery.

In England, “Never was the chasm between rich and poor more stark than in the Regency era …  the wealthiest gorged themselves on the fruits of Britain’s industrial might, while the working classes endured lives that were often nasty, brutish and short” according to BBC History Magazine. “In the 1830s, middle-class Londoners could expect to live to 44 but working-class ones only 22, just 50 per cent as long. Working-class people in towns like Liverpool, Preston and Manchester were lucky if they reached 19, at a time when average life expectancy from birth in the UK was more than 40.” In London in 1816, John Quincy Adams wrote, “The extremes of opulence and of want are more remarkable, and more constantly obvious, in this country than in any other I ever saw.”

I bore anyone who knows me by mentioning too many times that my parents were literally peasants. My mother was born in a river while her mother took a break from working in hot summer fields. She grew up in a house that my grandfather built by hand. In this country, my people were coal miners. My father mined coal as a child. He could have been the subject of a Lewis Hine muckraking photograph.

I used to find it very difficult to appreciate Jane Austen’s novels and their cinematic adaptations. I mentioned my resistance to Austen in the above-mentioned online discussion site. Charlie Ryan was a gay man in L.A. We never met, but we loved “talking” to each other at the site. We were both big film fans.

Charlie respected me enough to yell at me. “How can you not value Jane Austen? She’s a genius. You have to read her again. You have to watch the 1995 Pride and Prejudice again. Keep watching it till you get it,” Charlie nagged. “Yes,” Charlie acknowledged, “its rewards are subtle. There are no car crashes or explosions.” When a film fan says, “There are no car crashes or explosions,” he is saying, in code, “Don’t be too stupid to appreciate this subtle work of art.” “Watch the eye contact,” Charlie went on. “Watch the societal interplay.”

And, Charlie insisted, “Jane Austen cares as much about class as you do. She talks as much about class as you do, but in a different language. Keep reading, keep watching, till you learn that!”

I did what Charlie told me to do. And I’m glad I got to tell him that he was right, before he died, prematurely, from his smoking habit. Austen is debated by experts, and I am not one. I can’t say if she was left-wing or right-wing. I can say that, while she produced miniatures of the only life she was qualified to write about – and that was not the life of an impoverished child prostitute – she was aware of, and she felt for, the overwhelming wound of her Regency world. That wound was the gulf between classes.

In Persuasion, Lady Russell nearly ruins her goddaughter Anne’s life by persuading her not to marry the love of her life, because he is a sailor who would have to work to make his way in the world. Lady Russell wants Anne to marry a member of the landed gentry. But that titled man is a creep, and it would be a disaster for Anne to marry Lady Russell’s choice. Anne befriends another “unsuitable” person, Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith is a chronically ill and impoverished widow. Anne’s father looks down on this friendship. He would prefer that Anne spend time with Lady Dalrymple, a Viscountess, who, in spite of her high station, lacks charm.

Similarly, Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice is another rich and titled woman who is not an attractive character. In spite of her arrogance and rudeness, Mr. Collins, a “conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly” social-climbing cleric, practically crawls in front of Lady Catherine. His lifestyle depends on her approval. Her wealth and his insecurity unman him. Also in Pride and Prejudice, Lydia Bennet, a fifteen-year-old, allows herself to be seduced by Wickham, a caddish soldier. Neither the book nor films spell out in detail the fate that Lydia skates all too close to. But intelligent readers know that fate. Lydia could have ended up on London’s streets, or its auction blocks.

One of Austen’s most poignant allusions to class is also very subtle. In Emma, Miss Bates is a poor spinster who lives with her widowed mother. She is a pleasant person but she can’t stop talking, and she seems unaware of how her chatter affects others. Her survival is vulnerable; she depends on her neighbors’ charity for foodstuffs like pork and apples. Emma, the title character, a pretty, young, rich girl, is unkind to Miss Bates.

This scene is one of the most vivid in Austen, to me. Every character feels every bit like someone I might know in 2024. Every character expresses an aspect of myself. Emma demeans Miss Bates in a way that Emma is convinced is very clever and certainly not discernable to Miss Bates. Emma is confident that Miss Bates, because she is old, poor, unmarried, and chatters a great deal, is also intellectually dense and emotionally wooden. That is, Emma is sure that Miss Bates is beneath her, not just in social standing, but also in human worth. Emma is also certain that others will assess as clever her mockery of a poor spinster. Emma just knows that she has displayed her own superiority by elevating herself above the Miss Bateses of this world.

But Austen won’t allow Emma to cling to any of her snobby, snotty, callous assumptions. Mr. Knightley, one of the most attractive characters in the book, reprimands Emma in a way that might very well be Austen’s reprimand for Regency society. Knightley – the adverb form of “Knight in shining armor” – reminds Emma that Miss Bates “is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion … How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation? …  to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her … This is not pleasant.”

No, Austen saying, “This is not pleasant” to a pretty, rich girl who was just mean to a poor spinster is not exactly Jesus saying, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into heaven,” and it’s not “Workers of the world, unite!” But it moves me and I can’t help but think that it moved audiences of its time.

I thought of all this while watching Bridgerton’s prostitution scene the other night. I quickly typed up my thoughts. I was afraid to post in a Facebook group dedicated to Jane Austen. I am no Austen expert. But, again, I have that urge to speak, and so I spoke.

I wanted to say that the prostitution scene in Netflix’s Bridgerton struck me as the betrayal by a woman – Shonda Rhimes – of the women for whom she claims she is making entertainment. The female lead of these episodes is played by Nicola Coughlan, a plus-size, 37-year-old actress. Some are celebrating that Netflix made a plump, mature actress a romantic lead. That’s all part of the modern improvements to Regency romance.

Okay, I wanted to say. It’s great that fat girls are having their chance. But the prostitutes. Are we not supposed to think about them? Are we supposed just to focus on the chest hair on shirtless actor Luke Newton, whose character Colin has been elevated from younger brother brat to hot lead? And regard the two prostitutes servicing him as mere decoration? Are we supposed to forget about the class issues in Regency England?

And I struggled to communicate more. I tried to say, “Ya know, Netflix is just so patting-itself-on-the-back righteous that it’s got this whole colorblind casting gimmick going. That’s oh-so liberatory. But is it really? The BBC says that ‘From 1761 to 1807, traders based in British ports hauled 1,428,000 captive African people across the Atlantic and pocketed £60 million – perhaps £8 billion in today’s money – from the sale of enslaved people.'”

I wanted to say more. According to Royal Society of Arts Fellow Jason Hickel, “new research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik, just published by Columbia University Press” shows that “Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.”

And yet Netflix’s Bridgerton depicts blacks and Asians in silks and satins, diamonds and pearls, enjoying leisurely carriage rides and hot sex with English viscounts and viscountesses. Is that really “inclusion” Or is it “erasure”? Are people just bodies, just skin colors?

No! I wanted to say. All those people who saw my mother as merely “white,” as enjoying “white privilege,” had no idea of the village where she grew up, the unique, rich, Slovak culture. They had no idea of why she had to quit school in America, though she was a brilliant student, and go to work as a young teen and never stop working, ever, in her life. These people didn’t know who Janosik was, or why he was hung by a meat hook, or anything about Nazi occupation or Red Army rapes or Prague Spring. To reduce my mother to “white” was to erase her. Just so, to put a black actor in a silk suit is to erase what really happened to black people in Regency England.

All these folks, so proud of themselves, because they just luv colorblind casting. Shouldn’t any real rejection of racism require more of us than merely liking a Netflix miniseries? Should such pride not require us to at least watch a miniseries like Roots?

And isn’t Rhimes, the child of university professionals, doing what we’ve all been required to do, at the risk of sounding racist if we don’t go along? That is, focus exclusively on race, and ignore class, including the poor of Regency England, including the poor of West Virginia?

And, I tried to say, Austen addressed class, although, of course, she did so in ladylike ways that wouldn’t rattle too many cages too harshly. Bridgerton doesn’t just abandon the question of class. It betrays the victims of class, like the servants, who are given no agency, like the prostitutes, reduced to mere props for the male lead. Cyril Dickman worked at Buckingham Palace for fifty years. When Anthony Hopkins played a butler in Remains of the Day, Dickman told Hopkins, “There’s nothing to being a butler, really; when you’re in the room, it should be even more empty.” In Bridgerton, the class issue is as invisible as Cyril Dickman’s butler.

I was afraid to post all this, especially since I’m no expert. I knew there were reasonable objections to my positions. I wanted to hear the objections, see what I was missing, and engage with others. So, I pressed, “post.”

I was astounded and delighted. Within minutes dozens of posts appeared. Women from all over offered positive feedback. I was so touched. People offered interesting alternative points of view. Experts shared their knowledge, and educated me.

It was so great that I could handle the small percentage of abuse. This abuse came, not from men telling me to go get married and have kids and stop thinking and writing. No. It came from women. One woman, a gorgeous young blonde, with two daughters who look like the child models Kate and Ashley Olsen, told me to get off my “high horse.” But posts like that, from the kind of women who go around telling other women to shut up, were only about one percent of the posts.

The rougher posts took a different tack. A woman who uses an angry face with the caption “Vaccines saves lives” as a profile picture, and who, ironically, posted criticism of Harrison Butker, said, “If you have a problem with the diversity in Bridgerton then you are racist.”

In response, I was ready to say, “You missed my point. I don’t have a problem with the ‘diversity’ in Bridgerton because there is no ‘diversity.’ Every character is a member of the English nobility.”

As I was typing up a reply, the entire thread disappeared.

I sent private messages to a couple of the group admins. The next day, I received a reply. The admin told me she was a volunteer, with limited time. She said that the thread was flagged, not by admins, but by Facebook itself. Even though Facebook kept sending her warnings, she said, she repeatedly approved the thread. She mentioned that it wasn’t my initial post that Facebook was flagging, but rather the minority of posts by women “accusing” me of “racism” and also engaging in “name calling” and “rudeness.” The key term the disrupters used was “racism.” That word doomed the thread to oblivion.

Hey. Just call me Miss Bates. My whole life, I’ve felt this urge to talk. My whole life, people have told me to shut up. Sometimes the message has come from men, and it’s a gendered thing. That hurts, but the get-off-your-high-horse message hurts even worse when it comes from a woman.

I think of two friends from my hometown. One was a guy, and one night we were in the kitchen of my childhood home. I shared my writing with him. He said it was “embarrassing.” We lost touch. We reconnected via Facebook. He’s now a best friend. Time and life changed him. He now supports my writing.

R. was a girl I absolutely adored. I remember one twilight in the high weeds in her backyard, catching fireflies. I remember dinner at her long family table, with all seven of her siblings. I remember her tender support when my brother was killed. Families like hers are the backbone of this world. I thought that my friendship meant as much to R. as hers meant to me.

One day on Bergen Ave, our childhood street, R. said to me, “You use big words. We’ve talked about this, and if you don’t stop, we’re going to beat you up.” Our friendship was never the same. R. and I reconnected via Facebook, around the same time my sister, whom R. knew, died of a brain tumor. I posted my grief. In her very first post on my page, after decades of silence between us, R. made fun of me. “You were always so melodramatic.”

Don’t get me wrong. I still love R. I will never forget and I can never repay her support after my brother’s death. It’s not thoughts or feelings that bug R. It’s verbalizing them. Talking about things was just a weird thing to do for people from our town.

I’ve been able to make peace with some men who have told me I talk too much. The women who tell other women to shut up? I have not found peace between our tribes.

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

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