Mike English
@MoCoMikeE
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Housing. Liberal. YIMBY. Supply, Stability, Subsidy. Steering Committee, occasional GGWash contributor, views my own. he/him.
Silver Spring, MD
Joined October 2020
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1/x There will always be some tension between advocates that primarily focus on the need for more housing and those that focus on tenant protections. Still, as someone in both spaces, we could all benefit from remembering we’re all fighting for tenants to have more leverage
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Cool fun fact, saying a vacant lot is better than “renters” sure as shit makes you sound classist against renters
@Johnbrown1860
The neighbors would say yes. The lot is better than a 100 plus unit building of renters who don’t always treat long term and older residents well.
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Having heard people complain 2-3 years into a 3 year general plan outreach process that the whole thing was “rushed” and that they “hadn’t been listened to” when this was like the 3rd meeting I heard them say there had been “no chance for input” in really sealed this for me.
After every project gets derailed by angry NIMBYs, the takeaway seems to be to go slower and do more "public outreach."
It's like saying removing a band-aid slowly was painful, so you should go more slowly next time.
No! You gotta rip off the band-aid!
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Semi friendly regular reminder that demanding your suburban neighborhood never change significantly is not a progressive stance.
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Apartments are homes, and renters are members of the community, this isn’t fucking hard
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NOTICE HOW THERE IS ONLY ONE EVERYBODY?
The actual Silver Spring spring. I kinda think it ought to be a bigger deal.
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Another funny thing about NIMBYism is that it inherently rests on the assumption that people closer to a project should get more and more of a say on it, with that logic stopping at exactly the point where the person actually owns the land, which is a neat little logical fallacy
Friendly reminder that if you think “one size fits all” housing policies are bad then you should actually oppose the status quo, which dictates that only one type of home in most places be allowed, a house with yard, and support the “one size fits all” changes that allow options
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Given what our tax rates are, this puts her house at roughly a million dollars in value, so… yeah. That’s what happens when we let the cost of housing get out of control. The high value is the issue, not being taxed at a fairly modest rate for your wealth.
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I can’t get this sentence out of my brain
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Do better
@7NewsDC
Hundreds of teardowns already happen a year under current zoning, this would just allow some of them to be smaller, cheaper homes instead.
No one is coming in the night to tear down someone’s home/ change their neighborhood overnight
This is alarmist drivel
Under a new proposal, almost every single family home in Montgomery County could be torn down and replaced with a duplex, a triplex, four townhomes, or in some cases a small apartment building.
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Look, I get it. There is not *nothing* to this point, but if the first solution you think of is telling all pedestrians to walk around like a glow in the dark sticker I feel like that’s a telling bias.
WTF should a car be going 60 mph anywhere near pedestrians for anyway?
Studies show that pedestrians walking in dark colored clothing at night are first seen at approximately 55 feet giving a driver traveling at 60 mph LESS than one second reaction time.
Lighten up. Brighten up. Dress to be seen.
#BeSafe
#BeSeen
@VisionZeroMC
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The casual othering of renters as not “real” members of the community will always be weird and shitty and please don’t do it
@HousingSpock
@djw172
@AGRobBonta
They’re renting, not buying and what I mean is there is no planning on the best location to build. No thought on the impact of traffic. Our electric grid fails too often as is. We’re constantly being told there’s no water, etc … it won’t help to build without proper planning.
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In their fucking house
CM Mendelsohn: You say "equitable" but where is the equity for those who desire single family only zoning.
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I really, really don’t miss Larry Hogan
Every once in a while a bill moves through the General Assembly that doesn’t just keep our communities moving, but fundamentally alters the trajectory of our state, makes history, and changes lives.
The Trans Health Equity Act is one of those bills.
And I intend to sign it.
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Semi-friendly regular reminder that someone probably wasn’t too happy when your home was built, probably by a developer, either.
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Friendly reminder that prefacing public comment with how long you’ve lived in a place is unhelpful gatekeeping, and there is always someone who has lived there long enough that they will call you a carpetbagger too
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@KristinMink_
Thank you for being there. Hopefully this makes people see that all the hateful rhetoric isn’t harmless.
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Not to bury the lede here but the implicit declaration that apartments aren’t homes is pretty gross.
Attention: Apartment dwellers, stay away from my single family parking. We don't appreciate "You People" taking up our parking. It's your fault you live in apartments.
Sincerely,
The Pacifica Neighborhood Character
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New revenue idea. A punitive tax on bands that add an “s” to Silver Spring in ads/announcements/flyers for their shows at the Fillmore
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It is right and good for states to override local zoning laws for an acceptable minimum standard just like it is right and good for the Federal Government to set acceptable minimum standards for states on all sorts of policy.
“Local Control” is not progressive.
This home in Roslyn Heights was purchased for $2.4M+ in 2021.
The owner pays $38K a year in property taxes.
The home happens to be .5 miles from the train station.
Kathy Hochul thinks she should be able to override local zoning laws to build an apartment building next door.
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Semi-friendly reminder that if you “don’t think there is anything wrong with multifamily housing” (including but not limited to affordable housing) but “just don’t want it here” you do, in fact, think there is something wrong with it.
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At the risk of oversimplifying things, more people being able to live in a place you love is good, not bad.
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When people say they aren’t transphobic and are just “protecting kids”, they are lying, to us, themselves, or both.
🚨🚨 Oklahoma's House has PASSED (80-18) HB2177 which will ESSENTIALLY BAN all gender affirming care INCLUDING ADULTS in the State of Oklahoma.
This bill now goes to the Senate.
This is the first time we've had a bill that will ban adult healthcare pass a chamber.
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Increasingly unfriendly reminder that a developer almost surely built your home too and someone probably wasn’t happy about it being built either.
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Better Headline “Free-riding Neighborhood Tone-Deafly Touts Restrictive Land Use Near Transit And Other Amenities As Positive While Oblivious to Impact on Price and Inability of Others to Move In.”
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A lot of religious institutions do a lot of good work, including on housing, so it’s disappointing to see
I have to say it is deeply disappointing to see a member of the clergy at
@saa_catholic
weigh in and try to scare parishioners into opposing the more housing
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Semi-friendly regular reminder that even the most progressive laws and attitudes in the world are less helpful if only the relatively well off can afford to live here.
Your neighborhood might need to change to prevent that from happening.
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@YIMBYLAND
Yeah I’m fat and walk everywhere and haven’t owned a car since 2009 so whatever.
That said I’m not sure the original post isn’t bait.
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There is no change modest enough to placate a fundamental fear of change
If you aren't following, NIMBY groups in Arlington are fundraising thousands to sue Arlington County to stop implementation of our popular and UNANIMOUSLY APPROVED modest Expanded Housing Options ordinance which legalized only 58 missing middle permits per year
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Again, if you want to make homes less viable as a means for speculation, build more of them.
The Austin, TX Housing Market is turning into a bloodbath.
Home Values already down -16% from their peak in mid-2022. 📉
Warning signal to rest of US Housing Market. Once inventory rises, all bets are off.
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Yuuuuuuuuup. It’s easier to blame a nefarious other than to confront that the norms we have grown used to themselves are a huge part of the problem.
Despite being in it for years, it’s always surprising how badly people want the housing crisis to be a story about a few immoral bad actors as opposed to one about the utter failure of jurisdictions to adopt basic housing and planning policy.
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Severely limiting how much housing can be built overall is not “smart growth” contrary to the assertions of the bill sponsor.
Anti-sprawl measures are one thing but this is a housing ban/cap dressed up in pretty language and will worsen the housing crisis
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What gets lost in the vacant homes discourse is that just like having more job openings than job seekers helps people looking for a job having more homes available than home seekers helps people looking for a home.
The more you have to compete for either the more it hurts
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This sounds like an amazing project with a lot of homes at a pretty solid affordability threshold (60% of area median income)
Please for the love of god nobody oppose this.
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@TakomaTorch
To anyone seeing this, I don’t think you all know the money Eric raises for charity, the shelter (and kidney) he has given people, and just his all around solidness as a guy. No one deserves this, but especially not him
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1/25 Sharing this both to help me process it and because others
might benefit from having a face on this that fits some stereotypes while contradicting others
TL;DR I was recently diagnosed as austisic and want to talk about that journey and what it does/doesn’t mean.
🧵
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Not linking to the full Post comptroller endorsement, cause it’s bad, but, the idea that we “need” a statewide republican is not in and of itself a reason to endorse, and yet again treating Larry Hogan as more moderate than he is shows the faulty logic.
Vote for
@BrookeELierman
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@Marc_Elrich
I honestly think it’s very telling that your go to when people disagree with you about housing and zoning is to give your canned response of “you don’t understand zoning.”
It’s dismissive to think that you are the only one that gets this.
Seems like a good time to share when
@Marc_Elrich
said, responding to my question about if he thinks market rate housing is part of the solution to the housing crisis, “there is little demand for market housing” and I “Don’t understand zoning”
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In your regular reminder that “luxury” housing is a meaningless marketing term, here it is applied to the project mentioned below, which is a 100% affordable LIHTC development going up just outside of Downtown Silver Spring
I’m not livetweeting the whole thing, but there is a wonderful proposed 100% affordable housing building just outside DTSS with a mix of bedroom and income targets (all the way down to 30% AMI with 15 3BR units) and yes, people are worried about traffic and parking.
Cool
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A lot of long time homeowners here arguing against allowing apartments and condos and such would be well served to look up their home price, plug it into a mortgage calculator, and see if they could afford their home today. Even before interest rates went up, probably not .
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1) A thousand times this
2) Whatever your thoughts on the particular solution to housing costs, this is another reason why the housing crisis here is harmful. We can’t protect the people who can’t afford to live here, and this is sincerely a large part of my motivation.
“The parents got together & consulted a map of the country that shows states that have LGBTQ-friendly policies. They picked Maryland, & they are moving there in early July.” Proud they chose Maryland. We will always be welcoming to everyone.
#loveislove
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Not content to merely encourage people to violate fair housing law, Alan seems to enjoy breaking traffic laws too, which is neat for a crime “watchdog”
That's me driving the white Crown Vic on Blagden Ave at Allison St NW. DC has fined me $200. Should I pay or contest it?
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“I couldn’t afford my house today, so you should only tax me on what I bought it for” is just peak MoCo NIMBY, and among the most Chevy Chasian privilege oblivious things I’ve ever heard in my entire life
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Friendly reminder that detached single family houses are fine, just not the rules that disallow everything else.
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Thank you to
@MoCoCouncilMD
for passing this initial, needed step in making this county more welcoming and affordable, now begins the hard work of implementation.
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You know if we had more dense, walkable cities, people would feel more natural moving on their feet and we might be better at this game.
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If you are want to solve “astronomical housing prices” but are against “cramming more high density housing near the metro” you are trying to have your cake and eat it too.
You don’t have to like something for it to be a necessary part of the solution.
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Not breaking any news here but god the statue outside NOAA goes so freaking hard
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Friendly regular reminder that things don’t have to be “for you” to be a valid, even vital part of the community.
Be they housing, stores, restaurants, or whatever, they shouldn’t need your approval or your patronage to exist.
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Friendly reminder that downtown Silver Spring is more of a “city” than most of DC.
Both are great! But people who deride us for living “all the way out there” don’t know what they are missing.
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I mean it when I say that most people that oppose new housing near them aren’t bad people but uhhh, there are exceptions
@ad_mastro
Amazingly toxic cheerleading from DCUM as usual (in this case they appear to be upset that Brown v Board of Ed integrated schools and are happy that this will, in their estimation, work against that, and … yikes.
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Update, once again confused if we YIMBYs are corporate sellouts or left wing extremists
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Way too many people have an ethos on housing that more or less comes down to hazing
This thread is such a perfect encapsulation of the "lead paint caucus" mindset: "When I was young, I had to choose between living in a lead paint filled shithole, moving to a sprawlburg, or uprooting my life and relocating to another city. And so should you!"
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Want to thank everyone on
@MoCoCouncilMD
for unanimously reaffirming
@james4rockville
to the planning board.
The swift agreement, including from those who initially supported someone else, shows a strong ability to come together when needed for the good of the county.
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Just absolutely wild how some people, fed by scanner obsessed feeds, social media, and Fox News big city fearmongering, believe crap like this about Silver Spring and areas like it
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Your regular friendly reminder that when it comes to housing, “luxury” is a marketing term with no real meaning and often is used to describe anything new.
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This is a 100% affordable building and you wouldn’t know it if I didn’t tell you.
People need to stop being afraid of shit that isn’t scary.
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Isn’t it great when one of the “leading” local crime fearmongers cheers on breaking the law?
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This article is long, I know, but please read every word of it. It’s the most in depth and comprehensive piece I’ve seen in this topic.
Amazing work
@allyschweitzer
Montgomery County has a severe housing shortage. But its own residents may stand in the way of fixing it.
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At the risk of being even blunter than usual, if you are (correctly) horrified by this decision, but have spent time in local meetings opposing housing near you, you are part of the problem, and you need to feel bad about it and change.
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Again, neighborhoods are primarily for people to live in, not for people to look at.
Begging people not to get those priorities backwards
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Remember kids, the most important result of tonight is realizing once again how much Larry Hogan sucks and how much damage he’s done to our state, including not knowing any other results tonight.
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Agreed. What happened yesterday is a tragedy, and crime in downtown Silver Spring needs to be taken seriously, but some are way too eager to pretend this is the typical experience here, and seem gleeful when something bad happens while ignoring all the good, and it’s crap.
When crime happens in predominantly white areas of Montgomery County, residents act shocked this could happen here.
When crime happens in Silver Spring, one of the most diverse places in the country, those same residents stoke fears of a gang-ridden wasteland.
Just stop it.
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It’s good!
450 Apartments Above The Mall: 20-Story Development Pitched Above Silver Spring's Ellsworth Place.
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It will never get old to me now many current and future modes of transit are in this shot.
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People need to realize what they sound like when they say things like this. The message is that anything that isn’t a detached house with a yard isn’t a home, and that people that live in them aren’t full residents.
That’s… pretty gross
"You might as well approve a Jiffy Lube or 7-11," Prominski says.
Also notes the "ills of one-party rule" and division of Democratic party base over the policy.
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So, my friends all know that I never want to run for office, and never will, but they say I’m just saying that and are, and I cannot stress enough, assholes, so this happened. (The saying on the back is what I tell them when they keep up the bit)
My photo represents my feelings
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You can tell this aquatic center is in DTSS cause it has a coffee shop in it
Come on out for the Silver Spring Recreation and Aquatic Center Grand Opening! Dive into fun with family activities, demos, and tours. Ribbon cutting at 10 AM, with the open house from Noon-4 PM.
📷
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@ARLnowDOTcom
And some amazingly toxic people are happy about it
@ad_mastro
Amazingly toxic cheerleading from DCUM as usual (in this case they appear to be upset that Brown v Board of Ed integrated schools and are happy that this will, in their estimation, work against that, and … yikes.
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To ramble off of
@alaina_pitt
’s justified exasperation here, the fact that so many “good progressive people” think of housing as a burden to be imposed and choked down like cough syrup, and not a good, basic thing we should welcome more of, is a huge part of our problem
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One of the local NIMBYs who likes to troll me on Nextdoor just put their house on the market and it’s listed for around $850k and I feel like that says a lot about a lot.
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@7NewsDC
Anyone reading this, please read this actually good and accurate and responsible article too
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It’s fine to argue about the effects of increasing density in neighborhoods,
@justupthepike
said, “But all of the stuff we’re talking about is built on this foundation of racism and exclusion. We can’t escape it.’”
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I’ve also noticed an uptick in pieces claiming that YIMBYs are all libertarian and believe in “trickle down housing” and nothing else, which is neat since I spent the last year helping push for eviction protections, moderate rent control, affordable housing… you get it.
Anyway
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@NimbyPatrol
Or it is used for marketing in a way so broad as to be meaningless
In your regular reminder that “luxury” housing is a meaningless marketing term, here it is applied to the project mentioned below, which is a 100% affordable LIHTC development going up just outside of Downtown Silver Spring
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Periodic reminder that ending single family zoning doesn’t mean ending detached single family *homes*, just ending the rules that don’t allow anything else.
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Congressman Raskin is a great Representative that I’m happy to vote for again and again, but he seriously may be doing even more good by being so open about his pain from the loss of his son and telling others to take depression and mental health seriously.
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Open air? Check
Market? Check
Drugs? Missing, weird.
It’s almost like DTSS isn’t terrifying when you don’t let hyperbole scare you or something.
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@RossBarkan
@mattyglesias
Speaking as a YIMBY that supports social housing and rent stabilization, both of which are happening (though social housing needs to be ramped up much more) where I live and are not hypothetical, the movement is not the caricature you present in this piece
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Since I’m often reminded that things that seem obvious to us on housing twitter aren’t actually obvious to happier people, the point here is that single family homes would be allowed in all zoning, so if you believe the market will prefer them, you need not fear zoning changes
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Incorrect. I don’t give a crap if people like what housing looks like or not. Thats subjective.
I think this looks fine but if I didn’t that shouldn’t matter if it’s homes for people.
We gotta stop building stuff that looks like this
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Oh good. More sarcastic, thinly veiled transphobia from the right wing “Clean Slate”, account.
It’s not a “watchdog”, it’s a hate account masquerading as a voice for the “oppressed”, because privilege can make equality look like oppression.
You don’t want anyone they endorsed
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