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Billionaire donors, votes for corporate handouts, lack of socialist ID, and last-minute effort make a Donavan McKinney endorsement the wrong move

By Anthony D.

Metro Detroit DSA members will be asked at the June 13 General Meeting to vote on the endorsement of current State Representative Donavan McKinney’s campaign for U.S. Congress, just two weeks before absentee ballots go out for the August 4 primary. McKinney has had no significant prior relationship with the chapter. His track record as a State Representative includes voting for billions of dollars in corporate handouts and accepting campaign donations from billionaires and corporate PACs.

McKinney is not running as a democratic socialist and a DSA endorsement this close to Election Day would be a significant backslide into the pre-Bernie era of our organization, when our chapter routinely endorsed progressive Democrats whose campaigns we played no major part in building.

What Are We Building?

As DSA evaluates candidates for endorsement, we should consider how they fit into our broader electoral project and its goals. While consensus is rare in DSA, the various political tendencies within it seem to agree that we want DSA to act like a party. We want DSA’s infrastructure and identity to be clearly independent from the Democratic Party. We believe this is necessary to distance ourselves from politicians who would argue that capitalism is not the problem. We want DSA to be a vehicle towards the transformation of society in which the working class has full democratic control of our government, economy, and workplaces.

The type of party and its character remain up for debate, but DSA members expect the candidates that we run will differentiate themselves from Democrats by being clear that our goal is to win socialism. To that end, the 2025 and 2026 election cycles have seen an unprecedented number of DSA-endorsed candidates around the country running for office and publicly identifying as democratic socialists in their campaigns, after having spent many years organizing inside DSA.

DSA endorsements are unlike those given out by individual politicians or nonprofit organizations that simply act as a rubber stamp of approval based on personal relationships or the policies the candidates are running on. Instead, DSA endorsements are material commitments to run members of our party for office. Rather than relying on progressive candidates to come to us with campaigns that are already fully formed as we did during DSA’s pre-Bernie era, the best DSA candidates’ campaigns are conceived of within DSA and engage members to run them themselves. These campaigns are driven by DSA members who fundraise, write the platform, determine the messaging, run the canvasses, build a social media presence, phonebank, knock doors, and design the flyers we hand out. Through this process, the candidates we run remain rooted in DSA and act as an extension of the movement.

Unfortunately, McKinney and his campaign are none of these things. He has no experience organizing in or with DSA. His campaign did not grow out of the chapter and is not being run by DSA members. His social media and campaign literature include no mention of being a democratic socialist and his website was updated sometime since May 31 to add it.

Track Record

McKinney has served as a State Representative since 2023, so it’s useful to review his past campaign donations and how he’s voted while in office. During his 2022 and 2024 campaigns, he accepted donations from various billionaires, corporations, and corporate PACs including:

• $1,000 in 2022 and $500 in 2023 from billionaire Matthew Moroun, a prolific Republican Party and Trump campaign donor as well as the owner of the Ambassador Bridge who allegedly conspired with the Trump administration to attempt to block the rival Gordie Howe International Bridge from opening
• $1,250 from Ida Byrd-Hill, CEO of Automation Workz, whose company created SenseiiWyze, “an AI-powered behavioral intelligence platform that predicts warfighter and front-liner technology readiness under pressure”, according to her LinkedIn page
• $500 from JC Huizenga, who created National Heritage Academies, a for-profit company that runs 103 charter schools in nine states
• $1,000 from Jim George, whose development company was awarded a $5 million grant in the state budget for a housing project without any competitive bidding
• $2,000 from Realtors PAC of Michigan, whose top contributor is Morgan Stanley
• $1,750 from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan
• $1,050 from billionaires Tom and Theresa Preston-Werner. Tom Preston-Werner, the founder of GitHub, was forced to resign in 2014 over allegations of harassment by a former employee.
• $500 from Detroit Regional Chamber PAC, who shaped polls to promote former Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan for Governor, then endorsed him. The Detroit Regional Chamber recently joined a coalition to promote data centers.

In the state legislature, McKinney has voted for billions of dollars in corporate handouts. This included a vote to send $1.4 billion into the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve (SOAR) Fund, a corporate slush fund administered by a public-private partnership agency that requires lawmakers to sign non-disclosure agreements and has produced only 1,846 jobs as of October 2025. A separate vote sent $630 million to the site of Ford’s battery plant in Marshall and another $170 million into the SOAR fund. Ford’s battery plant has created just 100 jobs thus far and the SOAR fund has been killed entirely. McKinney has voted with Helena Scott, opponent of DSA-endorsed candidate Chris Gilmer-Hill, 99% of the time. He has not endorsed Chris Gilmer-Hill despite their overlapping districts.

McKinney, to his credit, said all the right things during his interview with the Electoral Committee to try to move us to action on his behalf. During the Q&A, he committed to coordinating on votes with Rashida Tlaib, if elected, and to identifying as a democratic socialist on his campaign literature, website, and social media.

However, McKinney launched his campaign in April 2025, making it more than a year old, and there has been nothing stopping him from identifying as a democratic socialist before now, without our endorsement. It seems unlikely that just a few weeks before absentee ballots go out, he would revamp his campaign, literature, and website, with very little time to reach voters with brand-new messaging. If he’s had a sudden change of heart, that’s admirable, and would be indicative of DSA’s progress. But his track record in Lansing should concern us about whether or not he’s ready to meaningfully change course on his politics. His actions weigh stronger than his last-minute words.

It’s Too Late

With more time, these shortcomings could be overcome by developing a relationship with McKinney and moving him closer to our politics. But Metro Detroit DSA has never endorsed a candidate this close to Election Day in its post-Bernie era. Absentee ballots will arrive to voters just two weeks after our June General Meeting. With two-thirds of voters voting by absentee in Michigan, there’s no opportunity to do anything other than knock doors for an already set-in-stone campaign, with its literature already printed and ads bought. At best, a few thousand doors knocked may translate to a few hundred votes in a primary election that saw 81,125 votes in 2024, which would equate to less than 0.25% of the total votes cast. DSA’s endorsement will be essentially irrelevant to the outcome. Endorsing now and claiming a DSA victory if McKinney wins would be lying to ourselves and to our base.

Table 1 below shows how the timing of our potential endorsement would compare to that of our past endorsements dating back to 2020. McKinney would be the latest we have ever endorsed a candidate, just seven days before absentee ballots are mailed out and 129 days later than our average endorsement date. Compared to the timing of congressional candidate endorsements by other DSA chapters around the country, McKinney’s endorsement would be 89 days later than the average of the 18 candidates.

Changing our approach to endorse a campaign that is more than a year old would indicate to future candidates that they do not need to get involved in DSA and our organizing work in order to win our endorsement. It limits us in the future to reacting to candidates that come to us with a fully formed campaign — including campaigns that do not share DSA’s politics — rather than bringing the candidates into the organization and developing them into lifelong socialist organizers who we then run for office as an extension of our party. It signals that it is acceptable for DSA-endorsed candidates to act individually, deciding to run for office and building their campaign and its messaging on their own without our organization and its collective process behind them.

Learning From The Past

Admittedly, we would not have endorsed Rashida Tlaib in 2018 according to the criteria that I’m advocating we apply to McKinney in 2026. But DSA has matured, our organizers are far more experienced, and we are eight years removed from the lessons learned in a pre-Bernie era. That era saw our chapter hand out numerous endorsements to various liberal and progressive candidates like Kat Bruner James and Abraham Aiyash that did not pan out.

In 2019, Kat Bruner James, running for Ferndale City Council, said during our endorsement interview process that she would run on a slate with our other two endorsed candidates. She later turned heel and instead ran on an opposing Democratic establishment slate when it opened a better lane to victory. The chapter voted unanimously to pull her endorsement and she was elected ahead of our candidate.

In 2020, Abraham Aiyash, running for State Representative in Hamtramck, said during the endorsement interview process that he “was not going to Lansing to make friends.” In 2022, when Michigan Democrats took full control of the state legislature for the first time since 1984, Aiyash became the Majority House Leader and used the position to pressure other Democrats to vote for billions in corporate handouts.

We’re lucky to have Rashida, but she was a rare exception back then, within a flawed approach to socialist electoral politics in which we took too many unfamiliar candidates at their word.

Looking Forward

When Dylan Wegela ran for State Representative in 2022 and applied for our endorsement, our Electoral Committee voted against moving his endorsement forward because he had no prior relationship with the chapter and was running in a district in which only five DSA members resided. We asked him to prove himself in the state legislature and to keep showing up to DSA events. Immediately after taking office, he was the single hold-out vote (McKinney voted yes) for a tax policy bill that included $1.4 billion in corporate handouts. Dylan publicly held firm against Democratic Party leadership even as they threatened to punish him (by undoing the cancellation of public school debt for one of the cities in his district).

The chapter later endorsed Dylan in part due to this principled stance. He became an active member of the chapter and has been a leader in recruiting and training more socialist organizers in his district, creating a model of what legislators can do when they strongly identify as socialists and see themselves as organizers.

As DSA grows, more candidates and elected officials will want to join our movement. We should welcome them, but endorsing someone with a questionable track record that very few of us have any relationship with is antithetical to our strategy for winning socialism. We should take the same careful approach with McKinney that we did with Dylan, by declining to endorse him and asking that we maintain an organizing relationship. If he wins, we could revisit the endorsement in 2028 when he’s become involved with the chapter and we can meaningfully shape his re-election campaign and the outcome.

Anthony D. has been active in the chapter’s electoral and labor organizing work since 2019 and is a member of the Bread & Roses caucus. He previously served as the chapter’s co-chair during the 2021–2022 term.

He’s currently active in Socialists Organizing Western Wayne (SOWW), a geographic working group that was created to organize locally alongside our Socialists in Office (SIOs) — Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, State Representative Dylan Wegela, and Westland City Council President Mike McDermott — where their districts overlap in Westland, Romulus, Inkster, and Garden City.

Too Little, Too Late: Against a Donavan McKinney Endorsement was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rashida Tlaib needs a socialist partner in Congress. Reject idealist notions of movement building.

By Charlotte G. and Aaron B.

What does it mean to be a socialist? Is being a socialist defined by what exists inside one’s mind alone? No. This is idealism, a framework lacking in a material analysis of the structural forces that truly move political agents and the masses through history. Socialism, we assert, is the action one does, through the construction of a left pole that will pull the working masses into its orbit.

This does not preclude the internality of any individual who moves through liberal democracy from having any effect whatsoever on their choices, but the question is: can you actually rely on that to build a mass movement? Can you rely on ideologically refined individuals to escape marginality and be a hegemonic political force in the world that can actually abolish the present state of things?

We assert that Donavan McKinney is a socialist both through the position he occupies in politics and what exists within his mind’s eye.

Who Is Donavan McKinney?

Donavan McKinney is a lifelong Detroit resident, having grown up on the northeast side with his grandmother while his mother worked to keep their family together. Despite the hard work of his family, they moved 13 times primarily due to evictions, which often included couch surfing with extended family and stints of living in their car. As a child he spent upwards of five hours a day on public transit just to get to school. This level of immiseration is all too common in Detroit, especially among its internally colonized black population, but ultimately what does any of this mean? Many people who grow up impoverished end up becoming traitors to their class, but is that the direction Donavan chose? No.

Donavan, coming from this working class background, put it into action by pursuing a degree in public policy, working as a legislative director, doing community engagement through a nonprofit, and then becoming an organizer for Service Employees International Union Healthcare Michigan (which is composed primarily of low-income black and brown workers). This is a career path indicative of someone who believes in organizing for the betterment of his community, so it makes sense that since becoming a State House Representative for the 14th district (now 11th since redistricting), he has been consistently taking on the monetary influence of entities like DTE in our politics, pushing bills to protect victims of police abuse, winning millions of dollars for violence prevention programs, securing more than half a billion dollars to replace lead pipes, and calling for a ceasefire in Gaza since November 2023. But even so, one might say “any progressive liberal can do these things!” “Economism!” Donavan’s history and character prove otherwise.

Not only has he been a DSA member since before the COVID pandemic, he has described himself as a democratic socialist prior to seeking endorsement on multiple occasions, including an appearance on the For the Sake of the Argument podcast. He has shown interest in attending our GMs independent of the endorsement and joining a socialist congressional caucus, has committed to attending our SIO meetings, is enthusiastic about learning more about the intellectual aspects of socialism, and has expressed a belief in eventual class independence through the party surrogate. These are not the marks of an opportunist; they are the marks of someone who is dedicated not only to improving the conditions of Detroiters, but to learning and building a movement that can birth a socialist party for the masses.

What is the Current Electoral Situation?

Donavan McKinney is running in the 13th Congressional District against incumbent Shri Thanedar, a member of our chapter before we overwhelmingly voted to expel him for his support of Indian Prime Minister Modi and AIPAC. Afterwards, Shri chose to attack and “disavow” our chapter after October 7th, to build better relationships with the Zionist lobby and to cynically use our image and past relationship (especially after we disavowed him) to build his own political career. Donavan, on the other hand, supports a single democratic Palestinian state, Medicare For All, a Green New Deal, a powerful labor movement, and rights for all people regardless of their citizenship status and location in the world. He is already working closely with Rashida Tlaib, calls himself a democratic socialist in person and on his website, and has already planned an event with the nationally DSA-endorsed candidate from Colorado, Melat Kiros.

All of Donavan’s opponents have dropped out save for Shri, who has the advantage of being an incumbent. Shri has money from AIPAC and other corporate PACs for TV ads, mailers, and billboards, all just to make meaningless symbolic moves to impeach Trump while knowing he doesn’t have the votes. All Shri has is name recognition, which is why every time someone answers a door and hears Donavan’s message they are immediately on board. This is not an unfamiliar situation to our chapter and many other chapters across the country. Where other organizations struggle to take on candidates with this kind of backing, our chapter has excelled at it in the recent elections of Denzel McCampbell and Chris Gilmer-Hill. When our opponents have leaned on the establishment and their capital, our chapter has managed to beat the odds.

In this case, we would be doing work we are already doing. There is about an 80% overlap between Chris Gilmer-Hill’s district and the one in which Donavan McKinney is running. If our chapter focused our efforts on that 80% overlap, we would be able to handily deliver this election to Donavan with minimal lift. This is a close race but as history has shown us, people power can overcome corporate capital.

How Would this Endorsement Build the Movement?

When endorsements come up, there is always a fear of opportunism. Shri Thanedar is someone who came to our chapter, and while not endorsed, was able to cynically use our organization to elevate himself and then throw us aside (after we had expelled him) when we no longer suited his needs. There are opportunists who come to our chapter, but Donavan is not one of them. With Donavan, we have the ability to remove Shri from office, sending a powerful message to electeds and candidates who would try to use our chapter to advance their political career — we are capable of unseating any candidate, even incumbents, who do not adequately represent the needs of their constituents and the larger working class, and our political vision is to be respected because we have the means of enforcing it.

Chapter capacity is a strange thing — if you don’t use it, you lose it. People come to our chapter to be engaged in work and to change the region and make real differences. With the low number of elections in 2027, we will have the opportunity to find work in other areas. We propose that 2027 be the year of the SIO — deepening the work we do with our SIOs and focusing our efforts within their districts. With Chris Gilmer-Hill, Rashida Tlaib, Denzel McCampbell, and Donavan McKinney, we will have at least one elected in every part of Detroit, which opens up tremendous organizing opportunities within the city. There is no shortage of fights our chapter can take on — ICE, Flock cameras, and divestment are just some of the ongoing issues where our chapter can intervene. Having the team listed, we will have the reach to educate and activate every Detroit zip code, not only to bolster our chapter’s ranks but the larger socialist movement.

By adding MI-13 to our territory, we have the potential to reach people and communities that have been long forgotten and left behind by the current economic and political system. Donavan has shown great enthusiasm in using his platform as a congressman to educate his constituents about the ways that capital dominates their lives in order to bring politics to them. Not only will this boost our membership, it will help boost the capacity for the poorest Detroiters to self-organize to reshape their communities into bulwarks against capital. For too long American socialism has been dominated by the downwardly mobile white middle class and Donavan can be a key ally in the diversification of our movement.

Towards Hegemony and Building THE Party

Looking at the larger picture, our chapter should take a step back and assess how it wishes to engage candidates and pull them into our orbit. Often we ask that our candidates come into our organization with a perfect understanding of how our organization functions and our ideology, a full commitment to all of that with complete selfless intent. It is unfettered, ineffective idealism.

We have an opportunity to pull someone into our orbit and contribute to building a national DSA presence the likes of which has never been seen before. We do not accomplish this by sitting out elections. We as socialists and communists must intervene if we are to create a left pole in Metro Detroit that can actually make a change. Our interventions must be comprehensive and encompassing if we are to win the battle for hegemony. We must accept and develop not only those who exist at the center of our gravity but those who are pulled into it. The masses and history will move without us. The question is whether or not we want to have a seat at the table.

We took Shri’s membership, we took his office — now let’s take his seat.

Charlotte is an American Communist and member of the Membership Engagement and Political Education Committees. Aaron is the former Co-Chair of MDDSA and later Electoral Chair. Aaron is one of the leaders on the Chris Gilmer-Hill for State Rep being run by our chapter. Both are members of Groundwork — a caucus dedicated to building a mass socialist party governed by all of its members.

Building Hegemony and Socialism Through Action: Vote Yes to Endorse Donavan McKinney was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[[{“value”:”

By: Nicholas W

BOSTON – On May 8-9, 2026, the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) held its 181st Annual Meeting at the Hynes Convention Center..

The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) is the largest union in Massachusetts and the state affiliate of the National Education Association.  Alongside 36 fellow delegates elected from the Cambridge Education Association, we met over 1500 delegates from across the state representing K-12 and higher education workers. 

I have organized as a rank-and-file educator ever since I became a teacher over ten years ago. In 2019, I joined Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU), a militant rank-and-file caucus within the MTA,  after learning about their involvement in the Dedham Education Association’s strike the same year. Not only was this my first time attending the annual convention as a delegate, it was my first time as a member of a caucus that was competing to maintain leadership in my statewide union. 

Contentious Politics – Organizing for Palestine

The Annual Convention is the highest decision body of the MTA, where we elect our leadership, including both President and Vice President, as well as the Executive Board and Board of Directors. Membership utilizes Roberts’ Rules to debate and vote on resolutions, elect the President and Executive Board, budgets and operations. The Convention  is where the magic happens outside of the shopfloor: which political path our union should take and what priorities our union should organize around.

This year’s convention was packed with resolutions and bylaw changes, along with a very contentious leadership election. 

The MTA Rank and File for Palestine (MTA-RFP) introduced six New Business Items (NBIs), which included endorsing the #DropTheADL campaign and protecting the freedom of speech of rank-and-file educators who speak up against genocide and war. NBIs are the last items to be voted on at the convention; because of that, many of them do not get to be voted on by the delegates and get assigned to the incoming Executive Board to decide. 

This year was no different. Seeing that time was running out to vote on the MTA-RFP NBIs, a delegate decided to make a rule change that allowed members to vote in a straw poll in an effort to move through the items quicker. The results of the straw poll would then be given to the incoming leadership to guide them in whether to adopt specific NBIs not formally voted on by the membership. As the straw poll began, many teachers, tired and exhausted from two days of deliberating, began to leave the convention hall. A tiny Zionist contingent with  support from outside organizations, such as Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, called for quorum three times to end the vote of the straw poll and ultimately had their way before members were allowed to vote on the MTA Rank and File for Palestine backed NBIs. 

Other contentious battles revolved around the budget. One central question involved increasing dues to expand our organizing budget for 2026/2027 year, as well as changing our bylaws to allow for a direct vote of all MTA members for the office of president. Currently, only elected delegates to the annual meeting are allowed to vote for union leadership, but this would open up the election to all rank-and-file members. Concerns over the integrity of the election, such as lack of guardrails to block outside groups from taking advantage of our democracy, and the cost of setting up a brand new election system animated the debate. 

Battle for Leadership

By far the most contentious battle was over the MTA  presidency and vice presidency.

Three candidates ran for president with running mates for vice president. Representing the old guard of union politics was John Sullivan of Belmont Education Association and Gayle Carvalho, of the Quincy Education Association. The old guard has historically played a non-confrontational role with the state and has shied away from taking a stance on political issues. This year was no different, as both Sullivan and Carvalho’s campaigns highlighted going back to “bread and butter issues,” and not getting entangled in controversial political fights, such as solidarity with Palestine.

In the middle was current Vice President Deb McCarthy of the Hull Teachers Association running for president and Dean Robinson, of the Massachusetts Society of Professors running as VP. McCarthy, who has a history of union militancy throughout her career as an educator, largely highlighted her experience as the Vice President of the MTA and the accomplishments she and the outgoing President, Max Page, worked on. This included passing the Fair Share amendment, which imposes a 4% surtax on annual income exceeding $1 million that funds public education and transportation and the elimination of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam as a high school graduation requirement through a ballot initiative in 2024. Robinson focused on his contributions to policy, such as expanding Mass Health and working on single payer initiatives in the state. Their supporters made up a mix of former EDU members and MTA-RFP members which demonstrates that they had support from other left factions within the MTA.

To the left were Matt Bach of the Andover Education Association and Deb Gesualdo of the Malden Education Association running for President and Vice President respectively, who are also members of  Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU).  

Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU)

 EDU members have a record of winning positions in leadership. Barbara Madeloni was first — she won the presidency unexpectedly in 2014 to take the first step in ousting a largely moribund and undemocratic business union leadership that ran the MTA for decades. Merrie Najimy and Max Page were Madeloni’s successors. Each election brought a stronger slate of EDU members to push the union left and focus on issues that members most cared about. Since 2019, under EDU leadership, Massachusetts educators have gone on strike multiple times, despite  Massachusetts state law prohibiting any form of work stoppage, and won large concessions from their bosses. 

In 2019, Dedham teachers became the first local to strike since 2007. They were followed by Brookline, Haverhill, Andover, Woburn, Malden, Newton, and, most recently, the historic and coordinated strike of North Shore educators in Beverly, Gloucester and Marblehead. All of these strikes were substantial victories for their members, including increased pay, especially for the lowest paid education workers, such as paraprofessionals, smaller class sizes and contract language that protects students and staff from ICE. Throughout these outbursts of increased worker militancy, EDU has led the charge by transferring their strike program to different MTA locals throughout the state. It is also important to point out that the Dedham, Brookline, Andover, Malden, and Haverhill strikes were led by presidents who are also members of EDU. 

Internal Divisions of EDU

During each MTA election cycle, EDU endorses candidates from their membership to run for office. While there is no hard rule within the caucus barring candidates to run for leadership within the MTA who did not receive an EDU endorsement, usually, EDU members accept results and campaign for their union sibling.

That was not the case this year. While Matt Bach and Deb Gesualdo won the endorsement from EDU after a lengthy runoff election, outgoing MTA VP Deb McCarthy and college professor Dean Robinson decided to run for office even though they lost the EDU endorsement. This effectively split the “left” vote and gave room for the old guard, represented by John Sullivan and Gayle Carvalho, a stronger chance of winning at the Annual Meeting. Max Page, EDU member and outgoing president, stayed true to his EDU commitments and endorsed Bach and Guasaldo despite working alongside McCarthy over two terms. 

Ultimately, Bach and Gesualdo, who both received the most votes during the initial election and runoff election against Sullivan and Carvalho, were elected to the presidency which means that EDU has continued its streak of winning leadership within the MTA. EDU also maintained a solid leadership on the Executive Committee and Board of Directors. Nonetheless, this election has exposed real divisions within EDU and inside the MTA itself. 

Endless debates over what was actually “germane” to a resolution, cranks punishing their fellow delegates with their endless amendments, and most importantly, serious debate over the strategy and politics of our organization all characterized the MTA Annual Convention. Nonetheless, what made the experience of union democracy feel so much more real was that all of this was happening within the context of my workplace; the location I spend so much of my time and energy teaching my students and organizing my coworkers so we can build a better world for us, our students, and their families.

Under those conditions, the stakes feel — and are — different.

Nicholas W is a rank-and-file member of Cambridge Education Association (CEA) and Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU), a rank-and-file caucus within the MTA. 

The post Militant Rank-and-File Stays in Leadership of Massachusetts’ Largest Labor Union appeared first on Working Mass.

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