Kevin Drum was forced out of Mother Jones by people who didn't know about a secret thing he did for them.

RIP Kevin.

Kevin Drum has passed away from cancer. I can’t claim to have known Kevin terribly well, or even as well as I wanted, but I did get to know him somewhat and I’d like to share some of my thoughts with you.

In 2013, I got a DM from the editor in chief of Mother Jones. We knew each other vaguely through Twitter. She wanted to know if I could recommend a good engagement editor, essentially a person to do social media. I gave her some names. At the time, I was the social media editor at CNET. I wanted to leave that job because of various uninteresting things, but it didn’t occur to me to suggest myself for the Mother Jones job because, well, why would it? The only things I knew about Mother Jones were that it had been sort of far-left in the past, but now was mostly known for the 47% video, and it was based in San Francisco. Why would I want to leave NYC for that?

A few days after sending that DM, one of my closest friends fell out of a window in San Francisco. I jumped on a plane to be by her bedside for when I assumed, like everyone else, she would die.

To everyone’s great surprise and relief, she didn’t. She lived but with that came a promise of terrible recovery. 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. So I opened Twitter and DM’d Clara and said something like “actually, you should hire me.”

(She appropriately responded, “oh ok, well we’ll interview you but no promises.”)

A few weeks later, I was living in San Francisco and beginning my new job at Mother Jones. I discovered that Kevin had basically nothing to do with the rest of the magazine. He did a few features a year, but for the most part, he just blogged as he always had done, with no editorial supervision.

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 to chat with him about a blog post he had done on iPhones. (I was recently of CNET of course.) He was very kind and took the notes in part, pushing back in other parts. Then I responded and said “by the way, I’ve been a huge fan and it’s such a joy to get to work with you.” He didn’t respond.

Over the next few months, 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. Essentially, I was recognizing a good steak and selling the sizzle. It was great for Mother Jones, but an annoyance for Kevin. He went from having a completely free blog on a back page of a magazine website, to being the most popular and visible columnist for a very quickly growing political website.

Suddenly I began getting more messages from him.

Initially he didn’t like the comment section being overloaded. I always expected him to be mad about the social media anger he’d get, but it was never that. It was always just about the comment section.

I became his defacto blog editor because the only people who normally edited him were the EIC and CEO and they tasked me with doing backreads of his posts. The idea being “use discretion about whether to promote this one and if there is something wrong with it, just message him.” No one messaged him from the normal staff. He lived in Orange County. It’s not like he was in Slack.

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. Because the whole liberal journalism universe had gone crazy at this point. We had spent years hiring all these young kids who hated Kevin. They hated anyone with his politics or his tone. He was a normie white lib in Orange County, you know?

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.

The greatest example of this is the movie Parasite. Kevin wrote a blog post about how he doesn’t like subtitles in the specific context of Parasite. I read it and saw nothing wrong with it. The CEO read it and saw nothing wrong with it. Twitter read it and lost its shit. This spilled over into Slack and people were acting like he was in the KKK. I had to email him and say “Hey, please do me a favor and elaborate on your point about subtitles in a new post because all these idiots are misconstruing you and it’s causing problems for me.” He then did do exactly that.

This sounds insane. Who cares if he likes subtitles or not? I hate subtitles. I actually refuse to watch most foreign films because I hate subtitles and dubbing. But this shit was just par for the course at this time.

One day in 2019, there was a Mother Jones board meeting in Philadelphia. I think it was the last one I ever went to. There aren’t a lot of staffers there, but the masthead goes and middle management like me went to do presentations on growth and our departments and stuff, and the union’s leader goes to represent the staff.