Mailbag: Remembering Kevin Drum

Plus rising anti-semitism and likely rising nuclear proliferation

Before we get to today’s piece, I wanted to mention the Mahmoud Khalil case. I have very little sympathy for Khalil’s substantive views, which I think are quite a bit more radical than some liberals realize. But for the reasons FIRE lays out here, it’s an incredibly disturbing situation from the standpoint of free speech. I also recommend actual lawyer Scott Greenfield’s piece. The Trump administration is using Khalil as a test case precisely because it’s “politically bad” for Democrats and exacerbates intra-party rifts on Israel-Palestine. But principled defense of free speech is important, and groups like FIRE that do this work are extremely valuable.

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Kevin Drum, one of the original titans of blogging, passed away this week after a long and difficult battle with cancer.

The first time I met him, I was in Orange County for an event at the Nixon Library. I was still very young, living in dingy accommodations in a sketchy neighborhood in DC, but we’d internet-known each other for years because we were both blogging early adopters. I forget who emailed whom about the fact that I was coming to his neck of the woods, but he picked me up from the event in a Porsche 911 — I was apparently not the only longtime reader who was surprised he drove one — and then took me to dinner at Chili’s.

Now don’t get me wrong, I actually really like Chili’s and used to go to the Mount Auburn Street Chili’s all the time in college. But I’m also someone who likes nice restaurants and the Porsche raised my expectations.

Kevin was really a great guy. Unfailingly kind and helpful to younger writers and, in a pretty unique way, utterly devoid of ambition. Journalism was a second career for him after he made money in the first tech boom (hence the Porsche), but his tastes weren’t generally expensive. After his death, Ben Dreyfuss shared that while Drum was at Mother Jones, he refused any salary above $85,000, even though he was driving tons of revenue, always telling the magazine’s leadership to put the money into the fellowship program for young writers. Those young staffers ultimately forced him out in 2020 because of his “problematic” takes.

I was amazed by the story when Ben told it, but ultimately not that surprised. Kevin’s distinctive quality among successful bloggers was a total lack of evident ego. He was extremely committed to his writing, but uninterested in marketing or monetization or anything other than posting things that he thought were true. It gave his work unparalleled integrity in terms of level-headedness and commitment to following the facts and logic where he thought they lay. I remember when he got himself in hot water for chiding people in 2016 over what he characterized as a “fad” for throwing around the term “white supremacy” and thinking why does he want this fight? What’s the point? Of course I’m sure he didn’t want a fight. He was just speaking his mind, and he was basically right.

But back to the Chilis.

I’m actually a huge weirdo, an out-of-touch freak, born and raised in Greenwich Village into a family of artists and academics. I enjoy Chilis ironically. What made Kevin such a unique voice was his combination of fearlessness and deep normie-dom. He set the internet ablaze with his take that he doesn’t like to watch movies with subtitles, an opinion that is obviously shared by the vast majority of people but that is anathema to cinemaphiles and will get you universally dragged online while everyone who agrees just stands by idly. This combination of qualities is why I always thought he was the only anti-YIMBY ever worth arguing with. He liked his suburban neighborhood, didn’t particularly want it to change, didn’t want to see more traffic anywhere near his house. He sympathized with the fact that whatever any individual person’s neighborhood is like, it’s probably populated by people who like it the way it is, and he just didn’t buy that housing scarcity was that big of a deal worth upsetting everyone over.

This is obviously a mainstream sentiment about housing policy in the United States and the thing that makes land use reform difficult. Yet it’s a viewpoint almost nobody will stand up for or argue with! Instead, we have eighty million rounds of arguments with galaxy brain leftist theories and bizarre conspiracies about RealPage. I wish I could have convinced him that he was underestimating the scale of the economic losses involved here. But I also wish more people were willing to articulate genuine views in his typical calm, level-headed, non-trolly way. I don’t think there’s anyone else like him on the internet today and I don’t know that we’ll ever see his kind again.

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Matt S: RE: Gavin Newsom's podcast on trans participation in sports, I've noticed that people have a tendency to be specific about which rights they don't support while being vague about which rights they do support. Is there a way for politicians to articulate a specific but limited pro-trans agenda that's broadly popular? Is anyone doing this well?

I don’t love this framing, because I think the specifics of the sports debate are less about limiting the rights of trans people and more about the nature and purpose of women’s sports teams.

That said, I think we had a great illustration of the affirmative agenda last week when Representative Keith Self (R-TX) insisted on referring to his colleague Representative Sarah McBride (D-DE) as “Mr. McBride” throughout a hearing, eventually leading to its adjournment. Questions about who is a “Mr.” and who is a “Ms.” (or a “Miss” or a “Mrs.”) are linguistic conventions about politeness, and it does absolutely no harm to anyone to use people’s preferred appellations when addressing them.

Same with pronouns. In real life, you judge whether to call someone “he” or “she” based entirely on their gender presentation and not some deep dive into their chromosomes or sex organs. It’s good sense to extend this same courtesy to trans people and to people with nonbinary identities. Benjamin Ryan, who has often clashed with activists over some scientific issues, wrote a good post about this recently. I know that there are people who have truly convinced themselves that they have to stand firm on names, pronouns, and courtesy titles or else the entire fabric of reality will somehow collapse. But this is not true or logical. And in most cases, the people out there acting like Self are just being assholes. Human beings, unfortunately, have a weakness for cruelty, especially when they can rationalize that cruelty as being in pursuit of some higher good.

I also think we shouldn’t scant the importance of the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which held that the longstanding legal prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex extended to prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity. At the time of the ruling, conservatives didn’t push back on it very much so it didn’t get much attention. But it was a 6-3 case, and one of the justices in the majority has since passed away and been replaced by a conservative. If Justice Sotomayor’s health doesn’t hold up, you could imagine it being reversed 5-4 by a future court.

Conservatives have made a lot of political hay out of the sports issue, and I think it’s emboldened them to come after everything else. But polling shows that the public generally supports the progressive position on non-discrimination in employment and public accommodation, and I think Democrats should stand up for those important legal rights, as well as for basic politeness and kind treatment in interpersonal interactions and these others questions that make up the bulk of daily life.

Dan Rosen: You’re a Jew, I’m a Jew, we are both on Twitter a lot how concerned should I actually be about the normalizing of anti-Semitism and Jew centered conspiracy theories both on Twitter and on the biggest podcasts. Conceptually I know that Jews still have a lot of wealth and power in America, and the political power holders seem to be actively (sometimes weirdly) philo-Semitic/pro Israel, but still feels quite bad and disconcerting to see how prevalent and growing the anti-semitism is. And unlike in Europe where there seems to be actual safety concerns for Jews, I tend to eye roll at some of the American Jews who act like we are on the precipice of pogroms. Is Twitter real life?

I think it’s important to try to be rigorous and just literally accurate in terms of what we say about this: