His brother, the conservative writer Ben Howe, passed along the email he had received from Garthwaite cutting him loose. The email suggests that the cuts were made for financial reasons. “Unfortunately, we have reached the conclusion that we can no longer support the entire current roster of writers,” Garthwaite wrote. “Therefore, effective today, we are terminating our independent contractor agreement with you with your writing responsibilities ending immediately. This is a 30-day notice of the end of our compensation payments to you. You will be paid for April 2018 in the normal manner. At the end of May, we will tabulate the total page views that accumulated during May for content written prior to April 28th and you will be paid for May 2018 page views based upon those reports.” (Garthwaite did not respond to a request for comment.)

But sources I spoke with were skeptical of that explanation. “I think the ones who were shitcanned—and this is just my opinion—could probably be easily defined as the loudest and most vocal Trump critics,” Ben Howe said.

“There’s a clear pattern that the people who were let go were all critics of Donald Trump,” said Patrick Frey, a lawyer who blogs as Patterico and whose contract was also terminated on Friday.

“It was a complete surprise,” Frey said. “There’d been rumors of contract changes but being fired was a complete surprise.”

Jay Caruso, a former RedState editor, now works for The Dallas Morning News but maintained a contract with the site until Friday morning. “When you look at he names across the board, the people that were let go had a clear bias against President Trump,” he said.

Caleb Howe pointed out that RedState is keeping some Trump-critical writers. But he emphasized that one of those fired was Susan Wright, an anti-Trump writer who, he said, had consistently been one of the highest-trafficked writers on the site.

“The most Trump-critical people, the most vocally critical were on the list, especially Susan Wright,” he said. “Susan also happens to be the number one traffic draw at RedState, so it’s sort of weird if it’s a monetary decision.”

“Over the last two years I’ve been working for them, I’ve consistently been one of their top three writers,” Wright told me. “More often than not their top writer … They can’t say it’s a money issue.” She tried to file a piece on Friday morning, and found herself locked out of the system. She then received an email from Garthwaite nearly identical to the one Ben Howe received.

In the modern conservative media, is there an audience for RedState’s mix of views? Or is it bad for business to not choose a side?

“If nothing else, this shows you how deep, how solid that wall is down through the Republican Party, the conservative movement, what happened when Trump got introduced into the bloodstream,” Wright said. “Partisans on one side, conservatives on the other side.”