I dunno, I wouldn’t dismiss your feelings as nonsensical, racially corrupted by whiteness or not.
I did think of the whole dynamic in that way though 'cause white people are not just the most willing to, I guess, be collaborators and minimize the meaning of ideology, they also really have the most to gain from doing so.
At the end of the day, everyone has a price. Perhaps I’m generalizing here, but certainly a lot of “thinktanks” aren’t really actually places where discourse and philosophy and ideological struggle is happening. A lot of them are really just, like, the thinly veiled pseudo-intellectual propaganda mills of various lobbying groups, oil & gas or fundamentalist Christians or defense or techbros or crypto, and it’s where they purchase a facade of ideological legitimacy. Yes, of course, some thinktanks are not like that, but, well, I do think it’s fair to say that the more right wing one is, it’s really the whole point of it all.
By which I mean to say, if you’re a person who wants to write opinion pieces or sit on committees for a living, or at least if given an opportunity you wouldn’t turn it down, that’s where the money is. Good parallel there also with tech and finding ways to get the defense spending hose sprayed in your direction… and videogames are not an exception there.
Within the imperial core and even if we’re not too far into the periphery of it, we all participate in and benefit from things that can be traced back to harmful industries and other such things, but it makes a big difference when the connection to harmful things isn’t very abstracted. Like, I would bet that, if you’re the girl reading this, your price for doing something so actively harmful and disingenuous as writing nonsense articles for a “thinktank” in order to undermine environmentalist arguments against fracking or dismantle trans rights would make what Salome asked for look like the USA’s federal minimum wage (for server’s).
But it seems that, for your cousin, the price to write some bullshit that she is (maybe) not necessarily ideologically in line with–or to marry a guy who does that, and as someone with respect for the importance of life partnership if not necessarily marriage as an institution, I don’t really think there’s a huge difference between doing it and marrying someone who does it–is a lot lower. It could be pretty high, too, though. Like, how big is the wedding so far? What kinda venue is it at? Is it lookin’ like an upper middle class kinda wedding? Did they take out a mortgage for the house they live in? I’d be surprised if they didn’t.
Realizing with horror that I might be doing the White Lotus podcast thing you mentioned, but, I’ll maybe attempt to justify it instead of just assuming your cousin has been tempted to give up their convictions for a paycheque, substantial as it may be. I mean my analysis is still based on income but not just as a corrupting influence. Perhaps as leftists, who do, in one way or another, scrutinize what it is that represents value in our society, economically and otherwise, we tend to underestimate that to most people, the idea that a lot of money being involved in something does in fact legitimize it in a meaningful way. Like, if you can critique even the first thing about capitalism and capital, it becomes immediately obvious that there’s nothing coincidental in right wing thinktanks, media companies, thought leaders, et. al, all having financial ties to oil & gas, defense, etc., but to be a little bit fair to someone like your cousin, there is a legitimizing air in there being a well paying stable job in it. We know, as leftists, that a person’s worth to society and humanity is not positively correlated to their income, or their net worth, but I think the dominant ideology here reinforces that very strongly. It’s not often so direct as thinking because someone is wealthy that they are competent or worthwhile, but it seems to kinda end up meaning that through a few abstractions… look no further than the perception of Donald Trump himself, I guess.
Perhaps then it’s the idea that there is money involved in something, makes liberals kind of let down their critical thinking guard (…what little they have of it) and rationalize why someone would pay anyone a salary for anything that didn’t have some kind of legitimacy or worth in our society. Then it’s kind of almost like a slippery slope of rationalizations and unearned assumptions of good faith to thinking, well, maybe there is some legitimate reason why our fellow Americans on the other side of the House of Commons don’t want people to get abortions, or want to keep trans people out of certain bathrooms. And, of course, there are plenty of mainstream right wing people who have those legitimate sounding limbo dance weasel word kinds of justifications for those kinds of positions, and maybe even someone who is ostensibly on the blue team will even notice that that kind of shit isn’t so rarely coming out of the mouths of moderate Democrats either, and if you’re already this invested into that narrowing of the political spectrum you probably start to notice that plenty of Democrats act like the moderate wing of the party is the most virtuous part of it.
Just all speculation and offhand analysis, though. Does make me think of how we often have to point out that when one scratches a liberal, a fascist bleeds.
At any rate, I wouldn’t blame you if you just didn’t go to this dude’s wedding at all.