Kevin Drum, who gave up his day job in software marketing to write online about politics, policy and his cats, quickly becoming a key figure in the vanguard of center-left bloggers during the genre’s heyday in the early 2000s, died on March 7. He was 66.

His wife, Marian Drum, announced the death on his website but did not say where he died or cite a cause.

Mr. Drum, who lived in Irvine, Calif., had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2014 and had recently developed pneumonia. He blogged about those personal challenges openly and with the same insight that he brought to issues like health care policy and urban planning.

He spent most of his life in Orange County, Calif., which distinguished him from the majority of early big-name bloggers, many of whom hailed from the Washington-Boston corridor or from academic enclaves.

Mr. Drum began blogging in 2002 and quickly developed a large nationwide following. He helped shape what became known as the liberal blogosphere, populated by a broad amalgam of left-of-center thinkers who emphasized policy debates over political horse races.

His curiosity was broad, and he wrote on a variety of subjects from a variety of perspectives — sometimes casually observational, sometimes rigorously analytical — in a way that set him apart from the assorted camps that defined the blogosphere, including academics, politicos and ideologues.

Brian Delong quoting Ben Dreyfuss:

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.

So, in a sense, Kevin was forced out of Mother Jones, because he was an older white guy, who was not in tune with the radical Neo-Left. Sounds about right to me.  I too, basically, left my Left of Center position, because it seemed to me, that white people like me; were not longer welcomed in that party and political spectrum anymore.

Rest in peace, Kevin. Your moderate liberal voice will be missed.

Others: New Republic