The long
read
From the
KKK to the state house: how neo-Nazi David Duke won office
In the
1970s, David Duke was grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. In the 80s, he was
elected to Louisiana’s house of representatives – and the kinds of ideas he
stood for have not gone away
By John Ganz
Thu 25 Jul 2024 05.00 BST
On 21 January 1989, the day after George HW Bush’s
inauguration, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a
neo-Nazi, and the head of an organisation called the National Association for
the Advancement of White People, finished first in an open primary for the 81st
legislative district of the Louisiana house of representatives. Running as a
Republican, he came out ahead of the state party’s preferred candidate, John
Treen. Republican National Committee staff members went to Louisiana to bolster
Treen’s faltering campaign and work against Duke. “We will do anything to
defeat this man,” the Bush campaign manager and then RNC chief Lee Atwater
declared to the Wall Street Journal.
The former and current Republican presidents endorsed Duke’s
opponent and made advertisements on his behalf, to little avail: Duke would go
on to win the runoff vote a month later and enter the state legislature. Over
the next three years, Duke would aspire to higher and higher office. These
subsequent campaigns, unsuccessful though they were, garnered Duke an
ever-expanding platform for himself and his cause, bedevilled the
establishment, and suggested deep structural failures in American society and its
political system. But how did Duke, previously an abject failure in personal
and political life, come to defy the direction of his chosen party and
represent the crack-up of an old order?
It was oil that brought the Dukes to Louisiana. David Hedger
Duke, David’s father, originally from Kansas, was an engineer for Royal Dutch
Shell who relocated his family to New Orleans after being stationed for a time
in the Netherlands. Duke’s father was a deeply conservative Goldwater
Republican and a harsh disciplinarian, and his mother was emotionally distant
and an alcoholic. Duke was a lonely, unliked child – peers called him “Puke
Duke” and refused to play with him. He retreated into books.
In 1964, at age 14, he became interested in a network of
organisations, the Citizens’ Councils, which were formed across the US south in
the 1950s to oppose school integration and voter registration. Duke began to
hang out at the Citizens’ Council office in New Orleans and make himself a
nuisance to the staff, who took pity on him when they learned of his unhappy
home life. When he showed up with a copy of Mein Kampf and started spouting off
antisemitic opinions, members of the council would later say that they were
horrified and tried to dissuade him from going full Nazi, but this version of
events strains credulity. The group’s founder Leander Perez was hardly quiet
about his antisemitism.
Duke’s devoted nazism did not improve his social life. At
Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, he decorated his dorm room
with a Nazi flag, a picture of Adolf Hitler, and German second world war
propaganda. It was at LSU where Duke began his political career, delivering
tirades against the Jews in Free Speech Alley on campus, otherwise home to
anti-war and other radical protesters in the late 1960s and early 70s.
Photographs of Duke tramping around campus in his Nazi uniform from this time would
prove to be an encumbrance when he later tried to clean up his image for
mainstream politics.
Duke’s entire career would be characterised by attempts to
simultaneously gain mainstream respect and be the predominant leader of the
subcultural world of the Klan and neo-nazism. Until 1989, he would largely fail
to accomplish either. In his bid to rebuild the Klan in the 1970s, he enjoined
his lieutenants to avoid saying the N-word in public with the press present (an
exhortation imperfectly heeded even by Duke himself) and to present themselves
as a white civil rights organisation. Duke preferred to appear in public in a
coat and tie rather than the traditional white robes. He permitted women full
membership. As was required for recruiting in southern Louisiana, Duke’s Klan
also dropped the organisation’s traditional anti-Catholicism.
But Duke’s penchant for personal self-promotion alienated
his lieutenants and supporters. During a failed state senate campaign, he
fought with a deputy over a TV advertisement he wanted to air that showed him
lifting weights in a tank top and short shorts; the dispute eventually led to
the deputy’s resignation.
Equally embarrassing were the pseudonymous books he wrote
and attempted to sell. The first, African Atto, was a fake martial arts guide
for Black Power militants, written by one “Mohammed X”, that diagrammed various
fighting moves to use against white opponents. Although he later offered
different explanations, it seems like the book was part of a misbegotten
moneymaking scheme. Duke’s other volume, Finders Keepers, was a guide to sex
and dating for the modern single woman. Written under the pseudonyms Dorothy
Vanderbilt and James Konrad, the book advised ladies how to please their men,
mostly with stuff cribbed from women’s magazines, equal parts revolting and
banal. Duke had apparently hoped the book would become a bestseller and solve
his financial difficulties, but it was an utter flop and further alienated his
lieutenants, who quickly figured out that he wrote it. The salient thing about
the book is that, as one of his aides said, it was “too hardcore for the right
wing and too softcore for the perverts”. This remark sums up the essence of the
Duke phenomenon: he was caught between his desire for publicity and mainstream
acceptance and his infatuation with the secretive underworld of extremism.
One piece of advice Duke offered in Finders Keepers is
notable for having a real echo in his personal life: its exhortation for women
to engage in extramarital affairs. In reality, Duke’s compulsive womanising had
begun to put a strain on his relationship with his fellow Klansmen. One
recalled, “We had to get David out. He was seducing all the wives.”
In 1979, Duke created the NAAWP, the National Association
for the Advancement of White People, a group ostensibly focused on
discrimination against whites. But efforts to make his operation more
respectable did not succeed. Friends report Duke going from table to table at a
Sizzler steak house asking for donations for the NAAWP, paying the bill with
what he could scrounge up, and then pocketing the rest. Meanwhile, he would
have his daughters share a hamburger to save money.
Yet Duke did somehow manage to scrape together the money for
plastic surgery. He went to Calvin Johnson, a top plastic surgeon in New
Orleans, to get a nose reduction and chin implant. Then Duke underwent chemical
peels to remove wrinkles around his eyes. Around the same time, while paying no
income taxes because he claimed he did not meet the threshold, he was showing
up in Las Vegas and playing craps for tens of thousands of dollars.
Duke doggedly ran for office, losing again and again. In
1988 he even ran for president on the ticket of the far-right Populist party
activist and Holocaust denier Willis Carto and received 0.05% of the vote – but
he did not give up. In 1989, he decided to contest the special election for
Louisiana House District 81 in Metairie.
There were reasons why District 81 might be a particularly
soft target for Duke. First of all, the district, plumped by white flight from
New Orleans, was 99.6% white, petrified by the spectre of Black crime in the
neighbouring metropolis. In addition, the state’s economic situation had
significantly deteriorated during the Reagan years. While some of the US
experienced the 1980s as a delirious boom time, Louisiana faced double-digit
unemployment, and the low price of oil throughout the decade hobbled the state’s
relatively generous public spending. On top of the state’s oil woes, Metairie
was a victim of the broader stagnation of middle-income wages that the entire
country experienced in the 1980s.
When Duke began to make public appearances in Metairie, he
found a receptive audience. Patrons at a working-class dive bar stood and
applauded when Duke came through the door with campaign flyers. His appeal was
not limited to downtrodden blue-collar white people; it crossed over, more
quietly perhaps, into the precincts of middle-class respectability. Now
registered as a Republican, he was invited by the party’s branch in Jefferson
Parish to address their candidates’ forum. Behind closed doors, he received a
friendly welcome, with the state Republican party chairman slapping him on the
back and praising his presentation.
Duke freely admitted to his past Klan membership, which, as
he pointed out, he shared with many respectable public figures, including the
long-serving senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd, but he denied ever being
a Nazi. When inconvenient photographs re-emerged of him in a brownshirt’s
uniform on the LSU campus with a sign reading “Gas the Chicago 7”, Duke claimed
that such antics constituted a “teenaged stunt” and “a satire” rather than “a
defense of totalitarianism”.
Duke’s platform was shot through with thinly veiled
anti-Black racism: he denounced “welfare dependency”, affirmative action, and
minority “quotas”. He put a eugenic spin on these issues, calling for a
reduction in “the illegitimate welfare birthrate that is bankrupting us
economically and is the source of much crime and social ills”. Duke was
offering a standard Reagan-era conservative attack on welfare and affirmative
action, aside from his willingness to touch the burning racial core of the
issues. At the same time, he was attuned to the lower-middle-class homeowners
he lived among: he also offered a full-throated defence of a property tax
exemption for houses valued under $75,000.
Duke had the advantage of facing a divided field: there were
four other Republicans running. According to Louisiana’s open primary rules,
every candidate regardless of party ran on the same primary ballot, and then
the top two faced each other in a runoff. John Treen, the brother of the former
Republican governor David Treen, was a particularly vulnerable opponent for
Duke. Both Treens had been involved in the segregationist movement as members
of the Citizens’ Council and the States’ Rights party, a fact that made a
principled rejection of Duke’s racism awkward at best, and made civil rights
groups hesitant to assist Treen’s campaign.
In the first round of voting, Duke came in first with 33% of
the vote; Treen came in second with 19%. New Orleans archbishop Philip Hannan
issued a statement to his parish priests to read at services before the runoff:
“The election will determine the convictions of the voters of the district
about the basic dignity of persons, the recognition of human rights of every
person, the equality of races made by Divine Providence.” Presumably, it was
hoped that this moral message would resonate with the voters of the
predominantly Catholic district. “This bishop in New Orleans, I never did like
him,” Earline Pickett, the 75-year-old wife of a retired oil engineer, told the
Washington Post. “He likes colored people. He says we should love colored
people. But they’ve been different from the beginning, and God must have had a
reason for making them that way.”
The intervention of the national GOP had very little effect
either. A party that was run by Atwater was ill-equipped to repudiate Duke’s
politics of bigotry. Atwater, after all, was the mastermind of Reagan’s
Southern strategy, which aimed to win votes from southern white people
resentful of integration. More recently, in the 1988 presidential election,
Atwater had been behind the infamous Willie Horton ad, which used the image of
a convicted rapist to stir up fear of Black crime. Their meddling just allowed
Duke to further burnish his outsider credentials.
In February, the runoff vote was held. Turnout was unusually
high for a local election: 78%. Duke edged Treen by 227 votes, thus winning
office as a state representative. “If I had anything to say to people outside
the state,” the author Walker Percy told the New York Times when they came down
to report on the District 81 race, “I’d tell ’em, ‘Don’t make the mistake of
thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and
yahoos. He’s not. He’s not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he’s
appealing to the white middle class. And don’t think that he or somebody like
him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.’”
The Republican National Committee voted to “censure” Duke,
but the Louisiana state party ignored the resolution, despite the efforts of a
Louisiana GOP activist named Beth Rickey to discredit him. She had followed
Duke to a convention in Chicago and recorded a secret speech where he told the
crowd of skinheads and Klansmen, “My victory in Louisiana was a victory for the
white majority movement in this country.” He concluded his speech: “Listen, the
Republican party of Louisiana is in our camp, ladies and gentlemen. I had to
run within that process, because, well, that’s where our people are.” Even when
the press carried pictures of Duke shaking hands with the chairman of the
American Nazi party, Louisiana Republicans did nothing.
The party was scared of Duke’s voters, who had reacted
angrily when the national GOP tried to act against him. There may have been
other reasons for the lack of initiative. “I began to suspect that there was
more agreement with Duke on the race issue than I had heretofore believed,”
Rickey later reflected. Duke thought so, too. “We not only agree on most of the
issues,” he told the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, “we’ve come to the point of
friendship. They’ve accepted me. The voters have accepted me. The legislature
has accepted me.”
Duke succeeded in continually getting mass media attention
for himself. In November 1989, he appeared on ABC News’s Primetime Live with
Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer. The usually formidable Donaldson had trouble
with the soapy Duke. Donaldson read out some of Duke’s writing, and Duke denied
having written it or finessed it into a more respectable-sounding opinion. When
pressed about writing that “Negros are lower on the evolutionary scale than
Caucasians”, Duke replied, “Well, I don’t think I wrote that. I do believe that
there is a difference between whites and blacks. I think that there is an IQ
difference. But I think the way to determine a person’s quality and
qualifications is in the marketplace of ideas, through testing, for instance in
universities, through applications for jobs.” (This opinion was gaining
mainstream acceptance: in 1989 the solidly centre-right establishment American
Enterprise Institute thinktank began funding the research of Charles Murray
that would culminate in his cowritten book The Bell Curve, containing its own
claims about race and IQ.)
Showing a newsletter Duke had distributed during his days as
a blatant Nazi, which suggested partitioning the country into different ethnic
enclaves, Donaldson pointed to part of a map that had Long Island set aside as
a homeland for the Jews. The New York studio audience laughed; Duke’s plastic
face curled into an innocent-looking smile – he found his way out: “Sir, that
map is tongue-in-cheek.” Duke encouraged viewers to write him at his Baton
Rouge office. The volume of mail that poured in shocked the statehouse staff;
it was more than they had seen for any other legislator. (The other feature on
Primetime Live that night was Donald Trump, ranting about Japanese investment
in the US economy, under the headline “Who Owns America?”)
In 1990, at large, raucous rallies across the state, Duke
parlayed his high profile into a US Senate race against the uninspiring
conservative Democrat J Bennett Johnston. Duke won 43.5% of the vote to
Johnston’s 54%. Johnston’s victory was due to the fact that he won nearly the
entire Black vote. But Duke netted 59% of the white vote. Duke’s election night
party at a Lions Club outside New Orleans was practically a victory
celebration. There was much to look forward to: next year the governor would be
up for reelection.
“I will swing the pendulum back,” Duke told the small crowd
at the announcement for his candidacy at the Hilton in Baton Rouge. No more
“welfare abuse”, no more affirmative action, no more social programs for the
“underclass”, but “more prisons”, an end to desegregation busing, and the death
penalty for drug dealers. It would also be a liberation from the strictures of
political correctness, a win for freedom of expression. “Don’t you see?” Duke
told his followers. “You’ll be more free to say whatever you want to say, man
or woman, if I’m elected.”
As the 1991 election neared, the governor, conservative
Democrat Charles Roemer, had good reason to feel confident. Early polling
showed him comfortably ahead of his main opponents, David Duke and former
governor Edwin Edwards, also a Democrat. Roemer had defeated Edwards in 1987
with a pledge to clean up the government. Edwards was amiable, fun, but he
could not be called clean. First elected in 1972, he had been the first
candidate since Reconstruction to campaign for the Black vote; he fused
Louisiana’s downtrodden ethnic minorities into a powerful coalition with
organised labour. While the good times rolled, that public tolerated Edwards’
excesses: the womanising, the gambling, the insider deals and corruption. But
when Edwards returned to office in 1983, he failed to bring back the good old
days of the 70s: the state’s fiscal straits were too dire, and he was forced to
jam through budget cuts instead of expansive giveaways to an adoring populace.
Roemer, a graduate of Harvard Business School, appealed to
the public with his combination of technocratic competence and anger at
corruption. But he was aloof, ill-suited for the glad-handing style of
Louisiana politics. It turned out that eliminating corruption alone couldn’t
rescue the state’s fiscal situation. Despite these disappointments, Roemer
still harboured some ambitions. In early 1991, he switched his party
affiliation to Republican. The national GOP was happy to bolster the ranks of
the Louisiana party with non-Duke Republicans, and for Roemer, the attraction
was equally clear: with Bush’s popularity soaring as a result of the Gulf war,
any association with the president seemed like a vote-winner.
Although the open primary system meant anyone could run, the
GOP held a caucus and endorsed Clyde Holloway, a rock-ribbed fundamentalist who
was popular with the state’s evangelicals and anti-abortion community. But Duke
demanded to address the caucus. After attempting to forestall Duke’s speech,
party leaders relented to the crowds, who were chanting, “Duke! Duke! Duke!”
The leaders were shocked by the frenzy. “It’s like we’re attending a party
convention in Germany in the 1930s and Hitler is coming to power,” a longtime
GOP operative confided.
Though Duke never successfully passed a bill as a
legislator, he scored a partial victory in the 1991 session. He had proposed a
bill to offer mothers on welfare $100 a year to have a birth control implant.
In the end, the measure was watered down to just provide information about
birth control. There was very little ambiguity in what was meant by “welfare
mothers”. At a rally, Duke said, “The greatest problem facing this state is the
rising welfare underclass,” and the crowd yelled back the n-word. Duke pretended
not to hear. But when he trotted out similar lines at a Kiwanis or a veterans’
hall, he received polite applause.
David Duke was an implausible tribune for the overburdened
taxpayer. The Times-Picayune reported that he had not paid property taxes for
three years. But charges of hypocrisy could not damage Duke, who had a strange
power to make voters alter their opinions to fit him. Roemer’s staff organised
a focus group of white, blue-collar swing voters from Jefferson Parish. They
were asked a series of questions about a hypothetical candidate who had dodged
the draft, avoided taxes, had plastic surgery and never held a job. The group
reviled the imaginary pol. But when the same questions were asked naming Duke,
the group grew testy and defended him. (“Only dumb people pay taxes,” one woman
said. “Politicians and millionaires don’t because they are smart. Duke must be
smart.”)
Despite the evidence, Roemer simply could not imagine that
Duke had mass appeal, and believed the polls that said he was comfortably
ahead. He refused to air attack ads, and he spent the last Sunday before the
election watching football. Edwards ran first with 33.7%, Duke second with
31.7%, and Roemer third with 26.5%. The incumbent governor had finished third
and was now out of the race. Although Edwards was in the lead, he faced
challenges in the runoff.
Edwards was unsettled by the degree of rancour Duke could
inspire. At a debate in front of the state convention of the American
Association of Retired Persons (AARP), Edwards discovered how deep the Duke
appeal went. Edwards promised improvements in services for seniors; the crowd
wasn’t interested, but they lapped up Duke’s lines about the illegitimate
birthrate and the welfare underclass. Edwards tried to appeal to facts: “A
welfare mother only receives an extra $11 a week with each extra child she bears.
Can you see a woman sitting around the kitchen table scheming to get pregnant
to get another $11 a week?” The crowd shouted back, “Yes!” Edwards protested:
“He’s appealing to your base emotions. Who is going to be next? The disabled?
The old? You better think about it.” He was drowned out by boos. The Louisiana
AARP endorsed Duke.
But Duke soon came under assault from all sides, as if the
immune system of the state and the nation was activated against a pathogen.
Money poured into the Edwards campaign. Business interests aligned themselves
with the Democratic candidate. Civil society groups focused on surfacing Duke’s
past statements on race and the Jews. The press grew more aggressive against
him. Even Roemer gave a full-throated endorsement of Edwards, his former foe.
The massive onslaught yielded ambiguous results. Some polls
showed Edwards ahead at just 46% to 42%; Duke was dominating the white vote
with 58%. When pressed about Duke’s past, voters responded that Edwards, too,
had an unsavoury past. “We know about Duke’s past, we know about Louisiana’s
future, we know he doesn’t care for negroes, we know he won’t get along with
the legislature and, just maybe, we like it!” one voter wrote to the
Times-Picayune.
Again, Duke had no problem attracting media coverage,
particularly on TV. “Broadcast is always better,” Duke said. On TV he could
avoid the two great enemies of demagogues: context and memory. If questioned
too sharply, he could just play the victim. Here was this nice-looking,
clean-cut guy being badgered by some snooty journalist. He always got his
message across, one way or another: “I just think white people should have
equal rights, too.” Now what was so unreasonable sounding about that? He could
also just flat-out lie. He told a weekend anchor on a network affiliate in New
Orleans that he had polled 8-12% of the Black vote in Louisiana – he was not
pressed on it.
“Take it from someone who has spent most of his adult life
working in this medium,” Ted Koppel lectured sternly into the camera at the
start of ABC’s Nightline. “Television and Duke were made for each other.” Then
Nightline proceeded to give him 30 minutes of free airtime. Duke did Larry King
Live and The Phil Donahue Show in ’91. Phil Donahue and his audience yucked it
up to Duke’s jokes. The Times-Picayune called his Larry King appearance “a
solid hour of largely uninterrupted propaganda and uncontradicted lies”.
Contributions trickled in to Duke from around the country.
He was breaking through to people who would not necessarily move in the
Holocaust denial and KKK subcultures. He started to get small envelopes of $5,
$20, $40. A retired schoolteacher in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, told the Boston
Globe: “I like the fact that he thinks that everyone should get an even break –
white or black or Jewish or anything else. I think we have had a lot of
antiwhite racism.” George Marcou of Baraboo, Wisconsin, a retired brewery
engineer, told the Chicago Tribune, “I don’t really think he is a racist.
Either that or I’m blind. There are probably things we’ve all done that we’re
sorry for.” And William J Zauner of Brookfield, Wisconsin: “He’s saying what a
lot of people are thinking.”
In their first debate together, the surprisingly slick David
Duke wrongfooted Edwards. With the last debate on 6 November, Edwards would
make sure it would not happen again. He began smoothly, rattling off facts and
figures about the state in his warm Cajun drawl, with a friendly, optimistic
mien, a performance Duke could not match. Duke mostly held his own for the
first half hour, then he started to get rattled. One of the panellists, Jeff
Duhe, a political correspondent for Louisiana Public Broadcasting, asked, “Mr
Duke, you claim and appear to be a spokesperson for the common man and his
common ideals. Since high school, could you please describe the jobs you’ve had
and the experience they’ve given you to run a $9bn organisation such as the
state of Louisiana?”
Duke fumbled with the answer, citing a long-ago teaching job
in Laos, various small-business efforts and political campaigns. “Are you
saying you’re a politician and you run for office as a job?” Duhe pressed. Duke
became agitated and angry, citing the efficiency of his campaign. Edwards piled
on: “Fella never had a job! He worked for nine weeks as an interpreter in Laos
and then they fired him because he couldn’t understand anybody. He has been in
seven campaigns in eight years, he won one. Is that an efficient kind of
campaign? Heaven help us if that’s the kind of efficiency he’s gonna bring to
state government.”
Then it was the turn of panellist Norman Robinson, a Black
correspondent for WDSU-TV in New Orleans. “Mr Duke, I have to tell you that I
am a very concerned citizen. I am a journalist, but first and foremost I am a
concerned citizen,” Robinson began slowly, with deliberate passion. “And as a
minority who has heard you say some very excoriating and diabolical things
about minorities, about blacks, about Jews, about Hispanics, I am scared, sir …
I have heard you say that Jews deserve to be in the ash bin of history, I’ve
heard you say that horses contributed more to the building of America than
blacks did. Given that kind of past, sir, given that kind of diabolical, evil,
vile mentality, convince me, sir, and other minorities like me, to entrust
their lives and the lives of their children to you.”
Duke tried to play down his record – as having been “too
intolerant at times” – but Robinson would not relent: “We are talking about
political, economic genocide. We’re not talking about intolerance … As a
newfound Christian, a born-again, are you here willing now to apologise to the
people, the minorities of this state, whom you have so dastardly insulted,
sir?”
Duke gave an impatient apology and tried to change the
subject to reverse racism. Robinson tried to get Duke to admit that there was
racism against Black people. “Look, Mr Robinson, I don’t think you are really
being fair with me.” Robinson: “I don’t think you are really being honest,
sir.” Duke sputtered, lost his temper, and never regained composure.
On Election Day, 16 November 1991, Black voters turned out
at a rate of 78%. The result was a blowout: Edwards 61%, Duke 39%. Still, Duke
won 55% of the white vote statewide. And despite it being revealed during the
campaign that he had made up the “Evangelical Bible Church” he’d said he
attended, he won 69% of white evangelical and fundamentalist voters. He had
also taken 56% of Cajuns, who had once flocked to their champion Edwards.
Edwards addressed a jubilant crowd at New Orleans’s
Monteleone Hotel. “I ask the nation, the national press, I ask all those whose
opinions we respect to write and say of us that Louisiana rejected the
demagogue and renounced the irrational fear, the dark suspicion, the evil
bigotry and the division and chose a future of hope and trust and love for all
of God’s children,” the white-haired governor-elect roared triumphantly, in the
cadences of a time gone by.
“Prophecy is reserved for those who are given that special
gift, which I do not possess. But I say to all of America tonight, there will
be other places and other times where there will be other challenges by other
David Dukes. They too will be peddling bigotry and division as their elixir of
false hope, they too will be riding piggyback on the frustration of citizens
disaffected by government … We must address the causes of public disenchantment
with government at every level … Tonight Louisiana defeated the darkness of
hate, bigotry and division, but where will the next challenge come from? Will
it be in another campaign in Louisiana? Or in a campaign for governor in some
other state? Or a campaign for president of the United States?”
Adapted from When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists,
and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, published by FSG
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