Brad Johnson on the Nashville Bombing – Who is to Blame?

Around 0630 on Christmas Day, an explosion from an old RV detonated in front of an AT&T building said to house massive servers. A set of remains were recovered from the scene and witnesses reported hearing a series of gunshots before the explosion. Brad Johnson speculates on who is behind this communications take-down attempt.

Brad Johnson retired as a Senior Operations Officer and Chief of Station with the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations. He has served domestically and abroad with numerous assignments often during periods of armed conflict. He has served overseas in direct support of the War against Terrorism. Mr. Johnson is a certified senior expert in Counterintelligence issues with extensive direct experience in the field. He is a senior expert in surveillance and surveillance detection issues. He has proven expertise in dangerous operational environments with the highest level of training and extensive direct experience in tradecraft for dangerous areas. His proven expertise also extends to denied operational environments (most difficult and restrictive) with the highest levels of training offered anywhere in the USG or the world and extensive direct experience. Mr. Johnson has served overseas as Chief of Station multiple times. He is an enrolled member of The Cherokee Nation, a Federally Recognized Tribe and is currently the President of Americans for Intelligence Reform.

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[Music]
00:00
brad johnson it is boxing day
00:03
and yesterday morning on christmas day
00:06
december 25th at i think 6 30 in the
00:09
morning
00:09
in nashville tennessee
00:12
a dilapidated rv parked mysteriously in
00:15
front of a building which
00:17
contained a great deal of the servers
00:19
which people colloquially refer to as
00:21
the cloud
00:23
and may have been involved in a lot of
00:24
them important data
00:26
distribution and storage
00:28
[Music]
00:29
this rv started broadcasting a warning
00:31
to evacuate i think for half an hour or
00:33
more
00:35
before it exploded with such force that
00:38
it damaged many buildings
00:40
that’s about all i got what can you tell
00:43
us about that
00:45
yes that uh the they’re on on television
00:49
there are people who recorded it i am
00:50
assuming they’re security cameras it
00:52
doesn’t matter but
00:53
there are recordings of a woman’s voice
00:54
coming on saying if you can hear this
00:57
get away also there was there are the
01:00
police reported that uh there was a call
01:02
in uh warning in advance of the
01:05
explosion as well
01:06
to the police and that’s what got the
01:08
police there on the scene
01:10
and where they evacuate started
01:12
evacuating people based on that
01:15
so this is this is something
01:17
extraordinarily interesting and
01:19
of course my initial reaction hearing
01:20
about the bob last christmas morning
01:22
thinking okay this is
01:24
muslim extremist terrorist attack iran
01:27
you know al qaeda isis take your pick
01:28
surrogates working for one of them
01:30
uh that was of course my just knee-jerk
01:32
reaction hearing christmas morning
01:34
and certainly iran has been making
01:36
threats just lately of taking some
01:37
action so
01:38
that was my initial reaction now that
01:40
pretty quickly fell apart
01:43
based on some of the things that you’re
01:44
already mentioning and
01:46
uh this is this is a very interesting
01:49
incident here in the in
01:50
in the scheme of things and i would say
01:52
this represents something
01:54
new i mean not new in the total scheme
01:57
of things like it’s never happened
01:58
before but
01:59
new in recent developments and the
02:02
reason i say that and this is something
02:04
i see a lot of people commenting on
02:05
which they’re absolutely focusing
02:07
correctly on on this issue and that is
02:09
that this was very
02:10
specifically designed not to cause
02:14
casualties and uh now
02:18
just take the facts in mind now like i
02:20
said my initial reaction christmas
02:21
morning
02:22
uh you know terrorist but this was done
02:25
christmas morning
02:26
when at six six thirty in the morning
02:29
nobody’s on the street everything is
02:30
closed all the late night stuff is
02:32
closing around
02:32
four-ish and all the early morning stuff
02:34
opens up later
02:36
so this was specifically targeted at a
02:39
time
02:39
to minimize people being on the street
02:42
and that neighborhood where it’s at is a
02:43
very active neighborhood
02:45
there’s a lot of both business and
02:46
residential in that area
02:48
so at peak times say morning rush hour
02:51
or
02:52
evening time when people are out and
02:54
about headed home those sorts of things
02:56
they could have had a lot of casualties
02:58
on this sort of thing but specifically
02:59
did not like i said
03:01
if you had to pick a morning where
03:02
nobody’s much is out at
03:04
6 6 30 in the morning christmas morning
03:06
is one of those
03:07
so and and apparently
03:11
uh nobody was killed in the blast
03:14
other than apparently it looks like
03:16
there’s human remains at the actual
03:18
blast
03:19
now kind of a second area to this now
03:21
there’s lots of reports out there a lot
03:23
of
03:24
ear witness accounts uh people that were
03:25
there uh who heard
03:27
shooting and there were initial reports
03:29
of shooting and then
03:30
a lot more have come on and now i’ve
03:32
seen multiple people come on tv going oh
03:34
yeah i heard shots
03:35
and it was in three batches the shots
03:37
there was a three shots fired
03:39
up and then a few minutes go by
03:42
uh or you know several minutes go by i
03:44
mean this took place over say a 15 or
03:46
20 minute period according to these
03:48
various reports
03:49
and then there was a second round of
03:51
shooting with maybe five shots going off
03:54
and then later on there was a period of
03:56
shooting with 10 to 15 shots going off
03:58
so
03:59
uh interesting it’s like an escalation
04:01
of shooting
04:02
leading up to the explosion with the
04:04
dead body now i’m
04:06
speculating here but with the dead body
04:09
blown up in the blast and if it’s you
04:11
know they’re only finding little bits
04:12
and pieces that means they were
04:14
very close to the initial blast it looks
04:16
like there was somebody actually in the
04:18
vehicle
04:19
who turned on the warning stayed with
04:21
the vehicle
04:22
to make sure a suicider
04:26
essentially suicide bomber in this who
04:28
uh
04:29
stayed with the vehicle to make sure
04:30
that it went off and it wasn’t
04:31
interfered with prior to the blast now
04:33
again speculation on my part but that’s
04:35
how this seems to be shaping up which
04:37
again
04:38
is a very interesting fit into this
04:40
scenario
04:41
and so you had a person who’s there
04:43
maybe jumped out of the vehicle and pop
04:45
up
04:45
to shoot it at the police to make sure
04:47
that they didn’t
04:48
the bomb people didn’t approach this to
04:50
try and turn off the
04:52
the or you know dismantle the bomb
04:55
just so it wouldn’t go off and so then
04:57
again and a few minutes later they maybe
04:59
approached again more shots again
05:00
speculative
05:01
but then there must have been an
05:03
exchange of gunfire to have 10 or 15
05:05
going off like that just again
05:07
speculation but that’s the way it looks
05:09
to me
05:10
and then if uh a minute or two after
05:12
that the bomb goes off
05:13
so that part of it is speculative but
05:16
the the shots being fired
05:19
the warning announcement coming from the
05:21
vehicle the call
05:22
in all of these things christmas morning
05:25
timing very early in the morning wee
05:27
hours of the morning to
05:28
to just to make sure that there was
05:30
nobody on the street who would get
05:32
accidentally killed that’s very
05:34
interesting now that harkens back
05:36
uh and it certainly smacks i would say
05:38
it’s an extraordinarily strong indicator
05:41
that this is domestic terrorism
05:44
terrorism no
05:44
no question but domestic terrorism and
05:47
the reason i say that is because
05:49
historically you saw a lot of that back
05:50
in the 60s and 70s where you had the
05:52
weather underground and black panthers
05:55
and there were there was a whole bunch
05:56
of groups that were here
05:58
also in europe where you had the red
06:00
brigade and all of these different
06:02
groups including in spain the basque
06:04
uh groups that were were fighting for
06:06
basque independence
06:08
all of those groups you would see very
06:10
commonly among them
06:12
these call-ins ahead of time because
06:14
they wanted to make the political splash
06:17
but they didn’t want to have a large
06:18
number of victims because they didn’t
06:20
want the
06:21
the political backlash you kill a lot of
06:24
people you piss off a lot of people
06:26
and so clearly i mean 100 percent
06:28
conclusive
06:29
this was designed to minimize and which
06:32
apparently it successfully did minimize
06:35
uh casualties out of this thing so that
06:38
i would say is
06:39
it’s conclusive that this is probably a
06:42
domestic group that has done this so now
06:45
who and of course what you’re hearing
06:46
out of mainstream media
06:48
right now is it’s oh it’s this white
06:51
right-wing
06:52
uh terrorist groups that are violent
06:53
that are out there all the time now of
06:54
course
06:55
i harken back to the all the reporting
06:57
that we have done at americans for
06:59
intelligence reform
07:00
and a lot of the reports that we’ve put
07:01
out that has been picked up and spread
07:03
around by a lot of different groups
07:05
and that is on the tvs report the report
07:06
that’s terrorism and extremist violence
07:09
in the united states that’s the acronym
07:11
now that report has is what is being
07:13
used as the basis to say there’s all
07:14
this right-wing violence
07:16
including by director wolf of dhs and a
07:19
lot of other people the fbi
07:20
they’re all saying oh right-wing
07:21
violence is a real problem however
07:23
that’s completely
07:24
bogus the 218-page report goes detail by
07:28
detail by detail on all this stuff blows
07:30
it completely out of the water
07:32
right-wing violence is almost
07:33
non-existent in the united states
07:35
you’re welcome to go look at the website
07:37
at intel reform dot org find that report
07:39
and you can see it’s all bogus just
07:42
quickly to
07:42
to reiterate what some of the things
07:44
done in the tvis report
07:46
they manipulated the information on uh
07:49
the 911
07:50
uh hijackers that ran into the new york
07:52
building in the pentagon
07:53
and the trade towers and uh they called
07:56
those guys
07:57
white non-hispanic even though a
08:00
category exists in the report
08:02
in that area for arabs it didn’t mark
08:04
arabs for the
08:05
arab bombers that that suicide bombers
08:08
from that
08:09
9 11 they marked them as white
08:11
non-hispanic they did that so that they
08:13
could call it
08:14
white right-wing violence 911
08:17
white right-wing violence i mean talk
08:19
about lie
08:20
i mean just blatant lie and
08:24
one of the other things they did is they
08:25
took 28
08:27
court cases of where somebody was
08:29
involved in violence
08:30
the perpetrator was white and so they
08:33
said that again all these examples are
08:35
of
08:35
white right-wing extremist violence and
08:38
that brought these numbers way
08:39
up because of the number of people
08:41
killed however in every single one of
08:43
those 28 cases
08:44
nobody involved the prosecutor did not
08:47
say these were part of some extremist
08:49
group
08:49
uh they didn’t say that it was terrorist
08:51
related nowhere in
08:53
any of those 28 cases was any of that
08:55
stuff mentioned it was all completely
08:56
bogus they just picked 28 cases where
08:59
some white guy happened to be
09:01
criminally involved for whatever reason
09:03
and
09:04
violence and so they used that to try
09:06
and support this argument that there’s
09:07
all this right-wing violence
09:09
so all of these arguments coming out of
09:10
dhs and state department and all of
09:12
these people that and the fbi talking
09:14
about right-wing violence
09:15
is completely bogus so that’s one of the
09:17
things that’s very important out of this
09:18
so
09:19
it’s almost certainly not any sort of
09:22
like conservative right-wing group and
09:23
why would they blow it up
09:24
pretty clearly the target of this
09:27
seems to have been this a in a t
09:31
building where
09:31
there are reports of cloud storage being
09:33
going on in there i don’t think it would
09:35
have been a
09:36
huge cloud storage facility because
09:39
those are usually done
09:41
kind of out further in you know getting
09:43
into the almost rural areas where
09:45
suburban changes to rural
09:47
where they’re close to power sources
09:49
because the steady electricity is
09:51
very important in downtown urban areas
09:53
is not that
09:54
so there are huge huge storage
09:56
facilities coming up
09:57
all over are in those areas close to a
09:59
source of electricity so they have
10:00
guaranteed power
10:02
and where they can make huge huge mega
10:04
centers full of
10:06
you know bazillions of of computers out
10:09
there to store this stuff
10:10
near a river i think to cool it also i
10:12
mean i’m not sure about that but
10:13
i think the nsa server farms are under a
10:16
river
10:17
because you just they produce so much
10:19
heat
10:20
certainly possible don’t know about that
10:22
aspect of it but what was certainly
10:24
there was
10:25
communications facilities when this was
10:26
blown up it knocked out
10:29
communications in two states and now
10:32
people are speculating that georgia was
10:33
one of those that according to the
10:35
reporting that’s not true
10:36
georgia wasn’t impacted but two other
10:38
states
10:40
and you had communications knocked out
10:42
you had
10:43
uh cell phone communications regular
10:45
phone communications
10:47
9-1-1 things like that were all
10:49
completely knocked out
10:51
so this is just again hearkening back to
10:54
those days where you had all these
10:55
leftist extremist groups in the united
10:57
states and in europe
10:59
uh trying to make their political points
11:01
this is precisely
11:03
the uh modus operandi of those guys
11:07
you they all would have these explosions
11:09
they would attack facilities for
11:10
communications and transportation
11:13
and all of these things they had their
11:16
different theories but basically the
11:18
theory of the left then was always to
11:20
provoke a reaction by the government so
11:22
that the government became so draconian
11:24
and trying to protect all of this stuff
11:26
and infringing on people’s rights
11:28
that the population would rise up in
11:31
popular support
11:32
of these left-wing populist in their own
11:34
mind populist movements so
11:36
that’s the general communist theory they
11:38
all kind of operate that way
11:40
so the only one that’s really out there
11:42
that fits this criteria
11:43
and is kind of the lead candidate for
11:46
being guilty of this
11:47
is antifa uh they’re the ones they have
11:50
they’re large they’re they’ve got
11:52
experience with this sort of thing
11:53
they’re capable of doing this sort of
11:54
thing
11:55
they have you know veteran troops
11:57
they’ve already run some assassination
11:59
operations out in uh oregon where we saw
12:02
the guy get shot twice in the head the
12:03
red hat guy out in portland
12:06
they had a large group of about 25
12:08
people they videotaped it themselves
12:10
you can go see the antifa video if
12:12
you’re curious about it to show
12:14
how they ran that operation and so you
12:16
know the group that’s
12:17
organized and has the wherewithal and
12:19
the funding and the experience
12:21
and also the desire this would be
12:24
something they would want to do
12:25
in a case like this they don’t want huge
12:28
uh numbers of dead people they don’t
12:30
want mass casualties in a case like this
12:33
because they’re not targeting trump
12:34
supporters this is just
12:36
general population stuff maybe to attack
12:39
communications which would be part of
12:40
what they
12:41
you know they’re pushing for we’ve seen
12:43
what they want they want chaos in the
12:45
streets
12:46
because that gives them the opportunity
12:47
to step in and take control
12:49
again this is the standard operating
12:51
procedures standard crapola
12:53
that you’ve seen out of the left for
12:54
decades here in the united states and
12:56
europe so
12:57
that’s kind of my you know how this
12:59
appears to be unwinding now there’s a
13:00
lot of
13:01
data yet to come in but you know all
13:04
these people that are out there saying
13:05
right-wing violence
13:07
i just don’t see it i mean what group
13:10
what
13:10
trump-supporting conservative group
13:13
you know opposition to the communism
13:15
that we see taking
13:17
root so strongly here in the united
13:18
states what group like that
13:20
would benefit from taking out
13:23
communications
13:24
or taking out cloud storage and things
13:26
like that it just makes no sense
13:28
the only people that are using those
13:30
sorts of things for corruption and doing
13:31
all of those things are the left
13:33
so if they were covering up their own
13:34
tracks by blowing up some sort of cloud
13:36
storage thing or
13:37
if they were practicing how to uh
13:41
create chaos in the streets and disrupt
13:43
communications
13:44
all that points to these leftist groups
13:46
like antifa
13:47
now as it can you know i would say
13:50
probably some sort of spin-off antifa
13:52
back
13:53
group antifa tends to be very
13:54
horizontally organized
13:56
so my guess would be something along
13:58
those lines now if this goes forward
13:59
you’re going to have a lot of
14:01
pressure from democratic party
14:04
mainstream media
14:05
the you know about half of the
14:07
republican party you’re going to have a
14:09
lot of pressure from all of those groups
14:10
to blame the right but i
14:12
again i remind everybody i cannot
14:14
reiterate this enough
14:15
that’s all bs you know go take a look
14:17
like i said at the tvis report 218 page
14:20
report
14:21
it just blows them out of the water i
14:23
mean absolute fact after fact after fact
14:26
catching them lying and lying and lying
14:28
that they’re they’re essentially
14:30
is no right-wing violence in the united
14:31
states there
14:33
is a a cascade of violence by the left
14:38
and of course that’s why they’re doing
14:39
this because they want to blame the
14:41
right for everything that they do
14:42
we’ve seen reporting coming out of media
14:44
saying that these
14:46
no-go zones in seattle and now portland
14:48
and all of that that there’s
14:50
secretly infiltrated by right-wing
14:52
conservatives
14:53
who are the ones breaking the windows
14:55
and throwing in firebombs i mean what a
14:56
loader
14:57
and it’s it’s all bs this is clearly
15:00
left-wing violence
15:02
this is another left-wing violent
15:03
attempt this is all part of i
15:05
it looks to me like this is all part of
15:08
that
15:08
kind of overall effort by the left these
15:11
extremist groups to
15:13
to be able to create chaos disrupt
15:15
communications
15:16
uh you know stop you know kind of
15:20
organized response and this is the type
15:22
of thing with this old rv
15:25
they could do this all over the united
15:26
states and it would not be that hard to
15:28
do
15:29
they don’t have to do it in that many
15:30
places so
15:32
i would say this is probably one of
15:34
those things that’s a proof of concept
15:36
they ran the attack
15:37
looks like they had somebody willing to
15:38
commit suicide uh to
15:40
you know as a suicide bomber to set this
15:43
thing off
15:43
and i think those pieces will all be put
15:47
together and like i said
15:48
they’re going to try to spin this off
15:50
into weirdo
15:51
tinfoil hat right we right-wing sort of
15:53
crapola but
15:54
you know as this comes forward we’re
15:56
gonna start to see uh
15:58
where all the pieces from the bomb and
16:00
who that dead individual are and all of
16:01
those sorts of things
16:03
and it’s it’s uh it’s all it’s gonna go
16:05
back to the left that’s that’s that’s
16:06
the origin of this thing
16:08
because it fits this 50-year mo of the
16:11
type of stuff they do
16:12
okay so i have a two-part i have a
16:14
two-part question for you
16:15
sure one question in two parts so
16:18
there’s
16:19
a lot of internet rumors specifically on
16:21
twitter that i’ve seen
16:23
that is suggesting that these particular
16:25
servers contain critical
16:26
election data and that this explosion
16:29
was to prevent
16:30
discovery of how votes were flipped and
16:34
and so on and so on so that’s an
16:35
interesting thing now
16:37
of course some of the sources are pretty
16:39
good in terms of the people that are
16:41
retweeting that sort of thing they’re
16:42
pretty reliable people
16:43
but what interests me is that the people
16:46
who
16:47
typically if you do a terrorist attack
16:49
it literally has no point
16:51
unless you say who did it and why right
16:54
there’s
16:54
it’s kind of like doing a political
16:56
assassination if if nobody knows why it
16:58
happened
16:59
then you’re not preventing anybody else
17:00
from doing it it just doesn’t help
17:02
achieve your purpose
17:03
so since the no group has come out
17:05
specifically and said they did this or
17:06
why they did it
17:08
and it is kind of difficult to figure
17:09
out what the objective was i agreed
17:11
it has to have been a left-wing group
17:14
most likely
17:15
because who else would want to do that
17:17
but since there’s no statement of
17:19
responsibility or a purpose
17:21
then then it kind of adds a little bit
17:23
of fuel to the idea that they’re
17:24
they were trying to get to information
17:26
on those servers what do you think
17:29
i did i made reference to that earlier i
17:32
i don’t believe so because
17:34
uh that that assumes that there’s only
17:36
one location where that information is
17:38
stored
17:39
and that’s just not probable
17:42
if if that sort of thing was done and it
17:45
would have required a number of people
17:46
to be involved
17:47
that’s also on their computers at home
17:49
or the office or wherever these things
17:50
were done
17:51
and cloud information like that gets
17:53
shared and is stored in a lot of
17:54
different places so
17:56
to target one individual place thinking
17:57
that’s cloud storage that’s got you know
18:00
x y and z that proves something bad
18:02
about us
18:03
i think that’s stretching i mean it’s
18:06
it’s certainly theoretical
18:07
theoretically possible but like i said
18:10
the
18:10
urban areas are not these places where
18:14
huge data banks are i with you know i’m
18:17
i as you know i live just outside of dc
18:20
and in the area where i’m at there’s
18:22
probably 15 of these
18:24
huge storage places and i just i’ve got
18:27
to say i mean
18:28
i drive by them all the time these are
18:29
enormous places that are say
18:32
two or three city blocks long with
18:34
enormous buildings there
18:35
that are kind of these non-descript big
18:37
cement buildings with
18:39
a lot of electricity going into them
18:41
they just go back and on and on and on
18:42
these are enormous facilities and
18:46
uh this urban environment is not a place
18:49
where they would have had space they
18:51
would have had to have several you know
18:53
like at least
18:54
one square city block to put all of this
18:57
stuff in order to have the storage
18:59
capacity to be a serious you know cloud
19:02
data bank place now it may have been a
19:03
smaller one
19:04
linking up to other stuff i mean i’m i’m
19:06
certainly saying that’s possible but to
19:08
be some sort of mega data storage place
19:11
that that’s just not how that works so
19:14
that that doesn’t exist so
19:16
uh it just doesn’t make sense that this
19:18
is to take out and cover up information
19:21
uh now the not taking credit for it
19:23
that’s an excellent and interesting
19:24
point as well
19:26
but that also is kind of uh uh
19:29
you know is is fits in
19:32
to what we see as the methodology of
19:35
antifa
19:36
because a lot of the stuff that they do
19:39
you don’t see them taking
19:41
specific credit for the no-go zones in
19:43
portland or seattle
19:45
but yeah they’re the ones doing it now
19:46
they’re working in conjunction with
19:47
black lives matter and other groups and
19:49
stuff
19:49
but they’re the ones doing it and we
19:51
have lots of reporting and photographs
19:53
and things like that of them actually
19:54
patrolling these areas now
19:56
with armed guards now that’s antifa but
19:59
they’re not
20:00
publicly taking credit for it so again
20:03
it fits the methodology all the pieces
20:05
actually go together well
20:06
i it in this particular case it’s just
20:09
it’s consistent with what their goals
20:11
are their goals
20:12
are they want chaos and destruction in
20:14
the streets
20:16
because out of those actions they will
20:18
rise to power
20:19
that’s their theory of of how this is
20:21
all going to work
20:22
so all this makes sense if you wanted to
20:25
sow
20:25
chaos and destruction this is a perfect
20:28
example of that
20:30
for the like cloud destruction to cover
20:32
up some sort of illegal activity
20:34
it just i you know that’s that’s a very
20:36
weak theory it doesn’t really
20:38
it’s not really strong enough to be
20:39
taking that that seriously it’s
20:41
certainly possible like i’m saying i
20:43
don’t want to
20:43
say that it’s absolutely false but it
20:45
just doesn’t make that much sense in the
20:46
scheme of things
20:48
we’re having this be kind of a not not a
20:52
you know a proof-of-concept attack
20:55
by antifa so that they can prove that
20:58
they’re able to disrupt
20:59
multi-state communications that fits
21:02
with their
21:03
with their criteria their goals and
21:05
their methodology
21:06
and to not take credit whip for it that
21:08
fits again with their methodology that’s
21:10
how they’re doing it
21:11
you know you’ll see antifa signs and
21:13
stuff around but they’re not out
21:15
publicly saying you know
21:16
we’re standing up for the people in
21:17
portland and seattle and taking over
21:19
these no zones
21:20
no go zones we’re going to expand to the
21:21
rest united states you know they’re not
21:23
they’re not publicly making statements
21:25
of that nature but privately they do and
21:27
that of course is what they’re up to and
21:29
if you
21:29
look at their website and see what
21:31
they’re doing and see the signs that
21:32
they put up and stuff it’s all
21:33
consistent so
21:35
i i think it’s not i would say it’s
21:39
there’s certainly no other theory that
21:41
comes close to fitting all the data that
21:43
this
21:44
does i’ll put it that way doesn’t mean
21:46
that there aren’t other things that
21:47
could turn out to be possible
21:49
we’re certainly missing important data
21:50
points still at this point
21:52
as those come up that could certainly
21:53
change the calculation but
21:55
if we have to go with what we have right
21:57
now that’s by far the leader
22:20
[Music]
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[Music]
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you
[/expander_maker]