WEBVTT
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Let's start with a familiar lie.
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No one will know about it.
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It's in a private chat.
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That sentence has buried more reputations than any headline.
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Last week it buried an entire wing of the Republican Party's youth movement.
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Politico dropped nearly 3,000 pages of leaked Telegram messages from the Young Republican National Federation, the group that's supposed to represent the next generation of GOP leadership.
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Inside that chat, racist jokes, anti-Semitic banter, praise for Hitler, references to rape as a punchline.
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It was like a dark corner of the internet, except they weren't anonymous trolls.
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These were people in office on payrolls and sitting on national committees.
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And when the story broke, the country's reaction split into.
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Some Republican leaders, many in the Democratic Party, condemned it.
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Some Republican leaders condemned it as well.
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But others, including Vice President J.D.
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Vance, shrugged and said that kids do stupid things, especially young boys.
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They tell edgy, offensive jokes.
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Like that's what kids do.
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But here's the problem: the obvious problem.
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These weren't kids.
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They were adults.
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And they were supposed to be the future of the Republican Party.
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So in today's episode of the PR Breakdown, let's talk about why anonymous chats are never anonymous, why private is a myth, and how a crisis like this becomes a case study in failed accountability.
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Let's go back to where it begins.
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The Telegram chat was called Restore YR War Room.
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That would be the Young Republicans.
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It ran for seven months, January through August, and involved at least 12 members of state-level young Republican groups.
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Let's go down the list.
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Do I have any shame naming these names?
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No, I do not.
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They are not minors.
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They are people who are involved in a public chat.
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And it was in the political article.
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Here we go.
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Peter Gwinta, New York's young Republican chair and chief of staff to Assembly member Mike Riley.
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He joked about loving Hitler and sending political opponents to the gas chamber.
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He was fired from his assembly job and resigned from his chair role.
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Bobby Walker, vice chair in New York, described rape as epic.
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He resigned soon after Political published the chat.
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Joe Meligno, general counsel for the same group, again, remember J.D.
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Vance called them kids, joked about the Hitler aesthetic and fixing the showers.
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He was removed from the organization.
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Annie K.
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Caddy, a national committee member and Gwynta's reported partner, said she was, quote, ready to watch people burn.
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She now faces removal from her national post.
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Alex Dwyer, chair of the Kansas Young Republicans, reacted with a smiley emoji to the Hitler messages.
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The entire Kansas chapter was dissolved.
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William Hendricks, Kansas vice chair, repeatedly used anti-black slurs.
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He was banned from future GOP youth roles in the state.
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Luke Mosaman, Arizona events chair, called for sexual violence against a political opponent.
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He lost his campaign job.
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Samuel Douglas, a Vermont state senator and head of the state's young Republicans, mocked Indian Americans.
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Vermont Governor Phil Scott demanded his resignation, and the state GOP suspended him.
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Brianna Douglas, his wife and communications chair, shared anti-Semitic stereotypes.
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She resigned amid the backlash.
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Michael Bartels, a senior advisor at the U.S.
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Small Business Administration, didn't post slurs but failed to intervene.
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He is now under internal review by the SBA.
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And Rachel Hope, an Arizona events director, shared white supremacist slogans.
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She was removed by state GOP leadership.
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Again, do any of them sound like kids?
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This was not a rogue intern problem.
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It was a network of people with power and a culture that told them hate was just another joke thread.
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When Politico broke the story, the Young Republican National Federation condemned the chat as vile and inexcusable, demanding resignations across the board.
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And as I said earlier, Kansas decided to shut its entire young Republican chapter down completely.
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That's not a slap on the wrist.
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That is a full organizational obituary.
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But then came the political response and it split down the middle.
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Some Republicans, like Representative Michael Lawler and Vermont's Governor Phil Scott, no surprise he was in the chat, called for immediate resignations.
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Others just tried to poo it away.
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In an interview on the Charlie Kirk show, Vice President J.D.
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Vance said this That kids do stupid things, especially young boys.
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They tell edgy, offensive jokes.
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Like that's what kids do.
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All right, maybe kids tell offensive jokes, but those weren't just offensive jokes, and those weren't kids.
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But then he warned his own children to assume some scumbag might leak your message one day.
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Now notice what's missing from that sentence.
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Any mention of not saying anything racist or anti-Semitic or violent things.
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This is again just trying to deflect and diminish what the chat said and did and what the implications from that chat were.
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That's not moral leadership.
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Right now, that's the administration's leadership.
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But if you were in that situation, and let's say you were a spokesperson at a company and you were dismissing it as kids, that's crisis management when it goes off the rails.
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Because those ages of the chat members between 24 and 35.
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The typical age of a college graduate, 21, 22.
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They weren't boys, they weren't kids, they were grown adults with salaries, staff, and influence.
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Calling them kids is PR code for please don't hold anyone accountable.
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But here's the rule in communication: you don't get to claim youth when you hold power.
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Once you step into leadership, just joking isn't an option.
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Even though they were considered young Republicans, many people might assume it's a bunch of college students.
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No, this is just Republicans who happen to be on the young side of adulthood.
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But let's talk about what this story really exposes, and that's the illusion of privacy.
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Every private chat is one screenshot away from public.
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And every person who laughs along at a slur is already building their own scandal in slow motion.
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I can tell you, recently I worked with a client who went through this issue.
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They hired me because there was a potential that their name could be leaked in a private chat that was on a website that I never even heard of.
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And in the call, other websites were mentioned, some that I definitely knew about, but many I had never heard of them.
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These types of websites, you think if most people in the mainstream don't even hear about them and everyone is anonymous, well, it's never going to get out.
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But yes, there are sometimes leaks or breaches, but also people can triangulate, and that's what happened to the person who I was talking to.
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Their name wasn't leaked because of some cyber hack or cyber breach.
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It was leaked because someone triangulated who they were by looking at past chats and past comments.
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And the issue is this person thought that their name and business and everything that they're affiliated would fall apart simply because of this leak.
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And the person who I was talking to was a very reasonable person.
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And it was someone who also admitted, I wouldn't normally say these things, which is the whole point.
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These young Republicans didn't get caught because they slipped up once.
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They got caught because they believed privacy meant protection.
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When people get into a group like this, it forms a community.
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And if that community has an assumption of animidity, people can say things they wouldn't normally say out in the light.
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Assumed privacy does not mean protection, it means delayed exposure.
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When people think no one is really watching, that's when you find out who they really are.
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In PR terms, this is called a values gap.
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The difference between what an organization says publicly and what it tolerates privately.
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Every brand, every campaign, every company has one, or they should at least.
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And when the gap gets too wide, it collapses.
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Because the internet doesn't just expose what you say, it reveals what you allow.
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Those seven months of chat logs, they weren't just racist and cruel.
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They were normal.
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And that's the terrifying part.
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No one said stop.
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No one said that's wrong.
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They just kept typing.
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Silence wasn't by accident, it was approval.
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And then came the apologies.
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If you've ever wanted a crash course and what not to say after a scandal or PR crisis, last week was it.
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Let's break down some of them.
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Peter Gwinta, he was the name I mentioned at the beginning.
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He was the New York young Republican chair and chief of staff to Assembly member Mike Riley.
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He's the one who joked about loving Hitler.
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He said, quote, I'm sorry to those offended by the inexcusable language found in our private chat, end quote.
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Translation.
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Oh my gosh, I'm sorry to those offended.
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And he talked about Hitler.
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That is such a bad apology.
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Bobby Walker, vice chair in New York, he's the one who described rape as, quote, epic.
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He had to resign.
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His apology, he said the logs, quote, might have been taken out of context, but added that he's committed to moving forward with greater care, end quote.
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Translation, I'd like to apologize without admitting guilt.
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And one of the most common phrases, this was obtained to inflict harm.
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In other words, the translation, the real victim is me.
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Every one of the statements affiliated with this chat, and there could be more that come out, fail the crisis test.
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Because a real apology requires naming the behavior.
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I made racist and anti-Semitic remarks, naming the harm.
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I hurt specific communities and betrayed public trust, accepting the consequence.
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I resigned from my role, committing to change.
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Here's how I'll repair the damage within there, the indestructible PR framework.
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Own it, explain it, promise it.
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If it doesn't include it, it's not an apology.
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It's a press release.
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Now let's get practical.
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Here are five PR truths that should be in the Bible of every organization in America.
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One, privacy is temporary.
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Every group chat is one screenshot away from daylight.
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Right like it will leak because it will.
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Two, silence is consent.
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If you read, if you sit in a room or a thread where racism or hate is the norm, you are a part of it.
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Three, cancel culture isn't real.
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Accountability is.
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Losing a job for praising Hitler isn't cancellation.
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That's consequence.
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Four, culture beats strategy.
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You can have the best messaging plan in the world, but if your internal culture is rotten, the public will find out.
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And five, screenshots outlive careers.
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You can delete a post, but you can't delete a screenshot, especially when someone else has it in their phone.
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And that's not paranoia, it's permanence.
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So the lesson here isn't just for the GOP, it's for anyone leading in the digital age.
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Already lost it.
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If your defense is, we were just joking, you're not leading, you're deflecting.
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Leadership isn't what you post on social media, it's what you tolerate when no one's watching.
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So here's your breakdown Anonymous chats are never anonymous, accountability is not optional, and private is not a place, it's a delay.
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And when that delay ends, the truth always shows up.
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That's all for this week on the podcast.
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Thanks so much for listening.
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Bye for now.