Do lefties fall in love and marry like normal people do?
Well, not hip, elite lefties, the kind who start NGOs or who might party with guys like Ezra Klein.
The New York Times put out this elaborate wedding story, about what happens when the leftist elites fall in "love" and marry each other:
When Rachel Kelly Atcheson and Sean Adrian McElwee first met at a West Village coffee shop in June 2022, it was too tense to be a meet-cute. Ms. Atcheson — at the time, the senior assistant to Mayor Eric Adams — was planning to chew out Mr. McElwee, a pollster with whom she shared a mutual friend.
Mr. McElwee was conducting polling on behalf of Protect Our Future super PAC, which was backed by Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto billionaire later convicted of fraud. She was angry about political spending in general, including the more than $11 million that Protect Our Future put toward Carrick Flynn, a long-shot congressional candidate in Oregon.
As a proponent of effective altruism, Ms. Atcheson felt strongly that the money could have gone to charity.
Had enough? She likes to tell other people how they should spend their money. And for that matter, what they should eat.
Ms. Atcheson, 33, is a food policy wonk who became deputy director in Mr. Adams’s office of food policy. She left the administration at the end of 2024 to start a nonprofit, Food Policy Pathways, for which she is executive director. She was raised in Washington, D.C., and graduated with a bachelor’s in philosophy from Boston University.
Naturally, she's been a vegan since high school. And you can bet she made him a vegan, too, as the story delicately puts it.
The pair shacked up together for a while and then had a city hall wedding, with her wearing what looked like a thrown-together wedding dress. The guest list at the event that followed is about what you would expect:
Two days later, they held a celebration at Tamerlaine Sanctuary & Preserve in Montague, N.J. The 202 guests — including plant-based nonprofit employees, hedge fund managers, alternative-protein-focused venture capitalists and political consultants — were invited to participate in “community-building breakout sessions,” as they called them, which included salsa lessons, improv, a storytelling workshop and board games.
What on earth is a "plant-based nonprofit"?
I googled for one, and got something called "The Good Food Institute." They're a group that focuses on promoting "alternate" proteins, meaning soy meat, or, as long as we are in the category, probably bug meat. At the bottom of the 'about' page, it featured a blurb by JournoList columnist Ezra Klein, who once coordinated talking points between journalists and White House operatives and is considered a "thought leader" of the trendy Obama left. Klein is now a columnist at the New York Times.
It figures. It wouldn't be surprising if someone from that institute ended up at that wedding. It makes one wonder where the Times writers found this strange couple.
What the couple considered love and sharing their love, though, is where it got really weird.
Tom Wolfe-level weird.
At their wedding event following the non-religious city hall affair (you didn't think God might figure in this, did you?), they expressed their love this way:
... were invited to participate in “community-building breakout sessions,” as they called them, which included salsa lessons, improv, a storytelling workshop and board games.The drizzly weather cleared in time for the ceremony portion of what they called “a learning wedding.” After a guided meditation and a pause for Ms. Atcheson’s introductory speech, the couple exchanged their vows. Mr. McElwee promised to “keep building together” and made several references to the bride’s preternatural ability to connect others.
Guests were instructed to fill out a questionnaire before the wedding and were sent a spreadsheet listing the other guests and their LinkedIn profiles. A plant-based catering company, Jam Cakery Events, provided food for the BYOB reception, and in place of gifts, the couple requested that every guest write them a one-page letter in advance. The letters were compiled into a notebook to be read and enjoyed on their honeymoon.
“I’ve never been to a wedding like this,” said Stanley Wang, a regular at the McElwee-Atcheson poker nights.
Spreadsheets? LinkedIn pages? Breakout sessions?
How romantic.
Yes, Wang was right that these two were different from the rest of us.
Even the corporate/NGO experience, not one's innate character, is linked to being "a better person," as the blushing bride said of the groom.
These people, for all their bizarre beliefs about love and marriage, are really about careers, money, and status.
And while that is fine and dandy for them, it's completely at odds with most normal values.
As Samuel Butler once reportedly wrote: "It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four."
I'm glad they found each other.
Yet these very people are at the closest circles of Democrat power as Sam Bankman-Fried associates (Sam, recall, was a top Democrat donor) and greenie food scolds who live their lives telling other people how to live theirs, telling them what's good for them, even to the point of what they should eat.
Values like that from people of no perceptible Judeo-Christian mien are what Democrats of the Obama hipster stripe are trying to sell the voters. No wonder it leads nowhere good, as we have learned in the last administration, yet they are still out there, they still persist.
The Times reports this as a wedding announcement, completely oblivious to how weird it is.
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