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Merleyn Bell

@merleyn

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Mother, writer, iconoclast, and downright silly goose.

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The revolution is coming, and it begins in the HomeGoods parking lot in 15 minutes. Who’s with me? by @merleyn

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a month ago

by @merleyn

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5 days ago

Denver brings out the best in me. by @merleyn

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6 days ago

It’s Virgo season AND the start of my best year yet. ♍️🎂🥳 by @merleyn

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2 months ago

Men like Graham Platner are allowed in the Democratic Party. Allowed. They’re not sneaking in under the radar, they are let right in the front door with the rest is us. We need to stop pretending that our party is any better than the one that continues to prop up the predator-in-chief and start holding our leaders accountable for their complicity.

#grahamplatner by @merleyn

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3 months ago

Chait says the DSA is illiberal. I want to know what that word means first, because it means three different things in American politics and his essay depends on you not noticing which one he’s using at any given moment.

I wrote about all of it. The vote counts he cites as evidence of capture (which are, notably, evidence of voting). The parliamentary system proposal everyone’s calling authoritarianism, which is just how Germany works. The board vote I genuinely can’t defend. And why building a case against a hundred thousand people out of one Twitch streamer’s worst quotes is the least liberal move in the whole piece.

Link in bio. by @merleyn

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3 months ago

We spent a decade calling MAGA a cult. We weren’t wrong. Then we decided to borrow its playbook, and we copied the wrong half.

A cult runs on two machines. Coercion: secrecy, gatekeeping, the leader you can’t question. And cohesion: a simple creed, belonging, a story about who we are. One is dangerous. The other built the civil rights movement.

Guess which one we rebuilt.

I went looking for a party with a strong foundation and found a room full of people fighting over scraps. All the discipline, none of the joy.

New essay on what we forgot, and the question I don’t have a clean answer to yet. Link in bio.

#maga #democrats #cult by @merleyn

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4 months ago

I used to lie awake rearranging myself. More agreeable, more aligned, more of a team player, less of whatever it was that kept making people reach for those words.

I don’t anymore.

“Sour grapes” has never once engaged a single thing I actually said. Neither has “not a team player.” That isn’t a flaw in the insult, it’s the whole job of it. When they can’t answer the dissent, they discredit the dissenter.

New essay on why dissent isn’t a character defect (it’s the immune system of every healthy organization), what Aesop’s fox actually teaches, and why I wear “not a team player” like a badge now instead of a wound.

Link in bio.

#dissent #principleddisagreement #groupthink #leadership #yourewelcome by @merleyn

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4 months ago

Company’s coming.

Nonpartisans are the biggest bloc of voters in Nevada now, and we locked them out of the primary entirely. Come November, we can’t win without them, and here’s the thing: you can’t fake a welcome. You don’t invite people into a house that’s a wreck and expect them to want to stay.

So I wrote about what tidying up actually looks like for the Democratic Party. Air out the closets. Open the gate. Set the table. And for the love of everything, leave the light on past November.
Full essay on Substack, link in bio.

#nevadapolitics #Nonpartisan #IndependentVoters #Democrats by @merleyn

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4 months ago

Not to mention having to do it with these nails 💅#politics #candidate #runforoffice by @merleyn

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4 months ago

Everyone’s busy arguing about whether Graham Platner is a good person. I think that’s a branch. The root is that the party handed voters one viable name and now expects them to live with it.

Back in 2020, Sara Gideon raised 48 million dollars to take on Collins and lost by nine. Money was never the thing that wins this seat. Trust is. And trust is exactly what the party keeps failing to build, because it keeps recruiting for the wrong things.

The good news? It’s fixable. I broke down exactly how in my latest piece.

🔗 Link in bio.

#maine #grahamplatner #platner by @merleyn

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4 months ago

A DC think tank flew to Vegas to tell Nevada Democrats to keep running moderates. The people who invited them just lost the state for the first time since 2004.

You can’t aim for the center of a map that’s been redrawn.

New essay, link in bio.

#nevada #nvdems #thirdway by @merleyn

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4 months ago