R.I.P. Kevin Drum
Your memory is a blessing, my friend...
Your memory is a blessing, my friend...
I have felt too sad and do not have the heard to write an obituary for my late friend Kevin Drum. But here is a good one from Ben Dreyfuss.
Excerpted from Calm Ben Down <https://www.calmdownben.com/>:
Ben Dreyfuss: Kevin Drum was forced out of Mother Jones by people who didn't know about a secret thing he did for them: ‘Kevin Drum has passed away…. I did get to know him somewhat…. I got a DM from the editor in chief of Mother Jones…. A few days after… suddenly, I wanted an excuse to live in San Francisco. And so I looked at my phone and thought about it and remembered something else I knew about Mother Jones that had eluded me the first time around: Kevin Drum had moved his blog there a few years earlier. That was the sign. Kevin was one of the five bloggers I had been reading since college, and if he had been there, it wouldn’t have been all bad….
I discovered that Kevin had basically nothing to do with the rest of the magazine…. He just blogged….. Most people at Mother Jones never interacted with him. I was told not to interact with him unless it was necessary. This was not enough for me, so I found a reason to email him almost instantly….
I came up with a strategy to triple Mother Jones’ readership and it involved, in part, surfacing Kevin’s blog posts (that he just did with no editorial input) and optimizing their packaging for social media… recognizing a good steak and selling the sizzle…. By 2020, I was the editorial director of Mother Jones and no longer did much of anything directly except oversee the newsletters AND occasionally act as Kevin’s protector…. He was regularly the main character on Twitter, which wasn’t fair, and internally that spilled over to the point where the Mother Jones union was constantly complaining about him. All these staffers that didn’t know him would go on Twitter and get into a lather about how he was the devil and complain….
One day in 2019… go out to an Irish bar in Philadelphia. The union leader is one of two black people in the editorial department…. She was a very good reporter…. In the bar that night we’re all drunk and she starts to complain about Kevin. About how he is an embarrassment for the magazine. Now, I have been hearing this shit from woke kids at this magazine for awhile and am trying to be delicate in my defenese, but I am defending him because I know Kevin and they don’t. But the CFO, who is also quite young and does know Kevin, has less experience with this. And he responds by saying what I felt, “Kevin is not a racist. That’s dumb.”
This sets off an increasingly uncomfortable fight where the union leader is accusing the CFO of defending other white men and “explaining racism to a black woman” and I am trying to cool it down while also being like “Kevin is from a different era but it’s true he’s obviously not a racist.” Again, everyone is also very drunk so it’s basically an incoherent tear-strewn fight…. The CFO. He feels terrible! He has never interacted with the reporters like this and has certainly not meant to antagonize them, but he knows Kevin because of contracts and stuff and knows he’s not a racist. How could he not say something? He thought it was a friendly discussion until it wasn’t….
In June of 2020 the union starts making clear they want heads to roll… explicitly called Kevin Drum out for racism: “When our only opinion blogger repeatedly peddled ideas we found racist and offensive , our institution largely kept quiet, allowing him to operate without safeguards—until we had to account for a compromising piece, not on race, but about his thoughts on Tara Reade's sexual assault claims, with no reporting to back its assertions…”. The entire text of the post was taken down and replaced. Kevin was told he needed to start sending any drafts on—as Clara explained it in an all-staff email—”subjects that are fraught or not in his wheelhouse” to this one very woke SF editor…. Kevin’s haters used this win to increase the expectation on him needing to apologize for other shit. Obviously, Kevin was totally right that Tara Reade was a full of shit lunatic…. A few months later, in the end of 2020, I went on book leave. That January, Kevin parted ways with Mother Jones. When I was ready to return to work in April of 2021, I was told I wasn’t welcome because I had “lost the staff”….
Now here is where I am going to turn the knife on lots of Mother Jones staffers…. Something… I knew that I wanted to say but never did because Kevin had asked me not to. Kevin Drum was responsible for a third of our traffic when I arrived. That proportion climbed as our overall traffic skyrocketed…. Kevin brought in revenue through ads. like a boss. A grinder. (And he was no slouch with donations.) And do you know what he did for the entire time I was at that company (and apparently the years before I arrived)? He turned down every raise, including COL, and explicitly had them redirected to the fellows. At any other company in America, he would have been paid fairly half a million to $750k a year. He brought in many times more revenue than that.. But he never made more than $85k. He asked every single year that they take the money and put it into paying the fellows more and giving them a better stipend or lower premium for healthcare….
One time I DM’d him and started to bring up a lot of the problems I have with our former friends in the leadership of Mother Jones. Even then, he wasn’t as petty as me. “They have to do what they have to do,” he said. RIP Kevin Drum. Mother Jones didn’t deserve you… <https://www.calmdownben.com/p/kevin-drum-was-forced-out-of-mother>
This <https://www.motherjones.com/media/2025/03/kevin-drum-remembrance/> does seem rather cowardly from Clara Jeffery, I must say…
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I didn't expect anyone to always *agree* with Drum; FWIW, I don't think anybody should *always* agree with anybody.
But one of my litmus tests was, "if you are *mad* at Kevin Drum, you are wrong". I would re-write the "Krugman Laws" as follows:
1. Kevin Drum was honest, polite, intelligent, and good.
2. If you think Kevin Drum was dishonest, impolite, stupid, or malevolent, see 1.
Regarding his old school leanings and perspectives getting misunderstood at MJ:
Even his own loyal readership frequently expressed considerable grievances against some of his posts on his site. Too even-handed (or not left enough) for them (and of course, maybe sometimes he was just wrong).
I have been reading him for probably more than 20 years (back to the CalPundit days), and I always found his perspectives and his careful research and iconic charts very valuable. Even when I disagreed, I welcomed the challenge to re-examine my views, and sometimes did change them upon further consideration.
Although I knew about his health problems and how they were worsening in this new crisis, hearing about his passing was an emotional blow to the gut. He was certainly a blessing to me personally, and to so many others. RIP, Mr. Drum.