The influential conservative website RedState fired a handful of prominent writers on Friday in a move that appeared motivated, at least in part, by purging the outlet of anti-Trump voices. 
 
 The Daily Beast confirmed that among those laid off by RedState and its parent company Townhall Media were top editors and writers Caleb Howe, Jay Caruso, Ben Howe, Patrick Frey (who writes under the pseudonym Patterico), Neil Stevens, and Susan Wright—all of whom are often critical of the president. 
 
 Fired staffers learned about their dismissal either through their email accounts being locked or via a memo from Townhall general manager and vice president Jonathan Garthwaite. “[W]e are having to make changes to RedState effective today,” the memo read. “Unfortunately, we have reached the conclusion that we can no longer support the entire current roster of writers.” 
 
 RedState was founded in 2004, and soon after conservative pundit Erick Erickson was hired as its editor in chief. The site quickly grew into an influential blog among both Republican lawmakers and conservative activists. But the shedding of staffers on Friday marks a new chapter in its history and for some of those let go, it is a reflection of the drift that the conservative movement has taken during the Trump era. 
 
 “There was a time that Republican politicians were terrified if [RedState] excoriated them from the front page,” fired contributor Ben Howe lamented to The Daily Beast. “But the modern conservative movement seems to have grown tired of accountability. ‘Liberal tears’ is the new operating principle. Unless you’re causing those tears to flow you aren’t being a team player.” 
 
 Garthwaite and Townhall Media did not respond to The Daily Beast’s requests for comment. 
 
 Erickson, who no longer operates the website, lamented the latest development in a tweet on Friday morning and suggested to The Daily Beast that the motivations for the layoffs were “two-fold”—relating to both financial and political concerns. 
 
 He said he had spoken with roughly a dozen RedState writers on Friday, as the layoff notices went out. 
 
 “A number of those fired had older contracts making more money-per-click,” he explained. “But [RedState] kept all the pro-Trump ones. Of those they fired making the lower amount per-click, the ones who were regularly critical of Trump were fired—even if they generated solid traffic.” 
 
 Several vocal Trump critics—including Sarah Rumpf and Joe Cunningham—remain with the site. But Friday’s dismissals have been interpreted by those on staff, and those let go, as a purge of anti-Trump writers. 
 
 “Any opinion site that fires people en masse because of a particular point of view is sending a message,“ fired columnist Patterico wrote on Twitter. “The message is: this point of view will no longer be tolerated at this Web site. Any operator of a Web site is entitled to decide that a particular message will no longer be tolerated. When the message that will no longer be tolerated is criticism of the sitting President, that creates all kinds of problems for the site.” 
 
 Another fired staffer, who requested anonymity to speak freely, said the layoffs “definitely” had political motivations. “They canned someone who brought in 700k to 800k page views per month,” the writer told The Daily Beast. “Lately that would be around 10 percent of monthly traffic.” 
 
 Indeed, the website’s highest-trafficked writer, Susan Wright, has been openly critical of not just President Trump—routinely decrying his various scandals, “desperate” behavior, and self-contradictions—but of the unabashed pro-Trump sycophants in conservative media, such as Fox News’ Sean Hannity. 
 
 Wright makes “significantly less” than other, more pro-Trump writers who remain with the site and generate less traffic, a source noted to The Daily Beast. 
 
 RedState is one of many conservative opinion sites in the Townhall Media roster, alongside Townhall, HotAir, Twitchy, and Human Events. As CNN noted on Friday, their parent company, Salem Media Group—which also owns radio networks and book publishers—has previously been criticized for its treatment of radio hosts who criticized Trump during the election. 
 
 Other laid-off staffers suggested the firings reflect the Trump-era incentive for conservative outlets to protect the Republican president at all costs. One of those staffers was Ben Howe, who has been one of the right’s most vocal Trump critics. He was early adopter of the “Never Trump” tag during the election, declaring that he planned to work against Trump’s candidacy, even if that meant helping Hillary Clinton. At one point during the election he declared that a regrettably “status-quo” candidate like Clinton would be better than having “maniac” Trump in the White House. 
 
 “It had become clear to me over the last couple of years that Jonathan [Garthwaite] was far more interested in making sure his golfing buddies were pleased with the level of GOP line-toeing more than anything,” Howe told The Daily Beast. 
 
 By writing anti-Trump opinions, he said, “you’re certainly making Jonathan’s tee time awkward.” ||||| Salem Media, owner of the influential conservative outlet RedState, froze the site on Friday and dismissed many of its writers. 
 
 Bloggers were locked out of their accounts -- some just temporarily, while the cuts were made, and others permanently. 
 
 Erick Erickson, the site's longtime editor who left in 2015, tweeted about what he called the "mass firing" on Friday morning. 
 
 "Very sad to see, but not really surprising given Salem's direction," he wrote. "And, finally, after all these years, they've turned off my account." 
 
 Multiple sources told CNNMoney that they believed conservative critics of President Trump were the writers targeted for removal. 
 
 "Insufficiently partisan" was the phrase one writer used in a RedState group chat. 
 
 "They fired everybody who was insufficiently supportive of Trump," one of the sources who spoke with CNNMoney said, adding, "how do you define being 'sufficiently supportive' of Trump?" 
 
 But if it was about politics, it was also about money. 
 
 Related: Trump's call to 'Fox and Friends' explains why we don't hear much from him 
 
 RedState writers work on contract and are paid based on the amount of traffic to their posts. 
 
 "Those who had been under a contract with a higher per-click rate were mostly all tossed, only keeping those who were pro-Trump even if their traffic was comparable," another one of the sources said on condition of anonymity. 
 
 "Of those who make less under their contracts, they mostly tossed those who had been openly critical of the president," the source said. "It seems to have been a cost saving measure, but the deciding factor between any two people seems to have been who liked the president and who didn't." 
 
 Salem had no immediate comment. But an internal memo obtained by CNNMoney confirmed the housecleaning. 
 
 "We had to make some tough changes to RedState today," Townhall general manager Jonathan Garthwaite wrote in the memo. "While these changes are painful, they were necessary once we reached the conclusion that we could no longer support the entire roster of writers and editors." 
 
 RedState, a 13-year-old blog that was founded by Erick Erickson, is one of several sites in Townhall Media's portfolio. Townhall, in turn, is owned by Salem Media Group, a conservative media company that also operates radio stations and publishes books. 
 
 Salem has previously been scrutinized for its treatment of radio hosts who weren't toeing a pro-Trump line during the presidential campaign. 
 
 A source with ties to RedState said bloggers had been "wondering if this was going to happen at RedState," meaning "anyone who wasn't a big fan of Trump would be dumped." 
 
 RedState has been reflective of the divides within the GOP and the conservative movement, with a spectrum of writers with varying reactions to Trump's political choices and personality conflicts. 
 
 Garthwaite did not respond to a followup request for comment on Friday. 
 
 His initial email to writers said, "there's no getting around the fact that this is awful news, but I value your contribution to RedState and I hope you will stick with it through this tough period and keep RedState going." 
 
 However, some contributors then received a separate email indicating that they were out. Their accounts were locked, meaning publishing rights were revoked. 
 
 Caleb Howe, one of the site's lead editors, was among those dismissed. 
 
 He cryptically tweeted on Friday, "There is a right way to do something and a f---ed up way." 
 
 His tweet aimed at an unknown person, saying, "You can call me back or you can watch this unfold right here, guy." 
 
 Howe did not respond to requests for comment from CNNMoney. 
 
 s ||||| Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says the National Review is a 'dying paper' and accuses the magazine of trying to get publicity when it published an editorial criticizing him. (Reuters) 
 
 The Republican National Committee has ended a debate partnership with National Review after the venerable conservative magazine devoted its new issue to a "symposium" of reasons why voters should reject Donald Trump's presidential campaign. 
 
 "We expected this was coming," the magazine's publisher Jack Fowler wrote in a blog post late Thursday night, just 90 minutes after the symposium went live. "Small price to pay for speaking the truth about The Donald." 
 
 RNC spokesman Sean Spicer Fowler's account of events, and added in a comment to Buzzfeed's Rosie Gray that "a debate moderator can't have a predisposition." That leaves CNN, Salem Radio, and Telemundo as the co-sponsors of the planned February 25 forum in Houston. 
 
 2016 Republican presidential candidates could have twice as many primary debates as their Democratic counterparts. Here's why. (Sarah Parnass, Osman Malik/The Washington Post) 
 
 The idea of bringing conservative media into the debates had actually come from RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, who has repeatedly blamed a loose, easily-exploited approach to the media for a "circus" that hurt eventual 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney. 
 
 "I mean, there's a lot of good people out there that can actually understand the base of the Republican Party, the primary voters," Priebus told Fox News in an August 2013 interview. "There are some people in our party that think that — you know, on immigration, have different views. On the issue of tactics, on the funding of Obamacare — I mean you can very easily parse that out in a way that actually provides some substance to the Republican primary voters and what they actually want to talk about and understand." 
 
 Yet a clash of egos and interest has now stymied several attempts to bring conservative media into the debates. While Salem Radio's Hugh Hewitt, considered one of the best interviewers on the right, has made two appearances as a CNN debate co-panelist, a forum co-hosted by the Washington Times and Liberty University never got past the planning stage. 
 
 In an interview early Friday morning, National Review's editor-in-chief Rich Lowry said that the magazine knew it was risking a debate snub when work on the Trump package began. "We priced it in," he said, describing an editorial process that began shortly after the Christmas holiday. "We wanted to push back against this notion that it was just the establishment that was opposed to Trump, so we assembled this group of people who nobody can accuse of being the establishment. We actually wanted this to be the first issue of the year, but we held it. That timing just turned out to be fortuitous, with the establishment parts of the party suddenly bending his way." 
 
 In a tweet, symposium contributor and Commentary editor-in-chief John Podhoretz confirmed Lowry's account. 
 
 Noteworthy: @NRO knew it was jeopardizing debate participation, which was, I'm sure, something that ate up months of time to set up — John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) January 22, 2016 
 
 National Review, founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley, has frequently policed the conservative movement and warned against the influence of populist movements. In 1962, Buckley devoted 5000 words to the John Birch Society, attempting to write it out of the movement and calling its founder Robert Welch "far removed from common sense." Twenty-nine years later, Buckley wrote 40,000 words — an entire issue of the magazine — to condemn what he saw as anti-Semitism festering on the right, personified in Pat Buchanan, who was then mounting the first of three unsuccessful presidential bids. 
 
 Those essays, if not often read again in full, are often viewed with nostalgia. In 2012, after Romney's defeat, the former RNC research director David Welch bemoaned the lack of strong conservative voices who could police the movement. 
 
 "We need 'the Establishment,'" he wrote in a piece for the New York Times. "We need officials like former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey." 
 
 Trump, who now leads both of those men in primary polls, had praised Buckley as recently as last week. "Conservatives actually do come out of Manhattan — including William F. Buckley," said Trump at the Republican presidential debate in Charleston, after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) derided the "New York values" of liberalism. 
 
 On Thursday night, in a series of characteristically impassioned tweets, Trump suggested that Lowry's National Review had lost the spirit of Buckley. 
 
 National Review is a failing publication that has lost it's way. It's circulation is way down w its influence being at an all time low. Sad! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2016 
 
 The late, great, William F. Buckley would be ashamed of what had happened to his prize, the dying National Review! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2016
– The prominent conservative site RedState is now poised to have a decidedly pro-Trump vibe. Parent company Salem Media on Friday purged a slew of bloggers in a "mass firing," and many of those who lost their jobs were critics of President Trump, reports CNN media writer Brian Stelter. Former editor Erick Erickson, now at the Resurgent, writes that it's not a huge surprise given that Salem similarly got rid of many anti-Trump voices at its radio properties. Both stories point out that the move wasn't entirely political. Salem wanted to cut costs; it's just that those who bore the brunt of the cuts were generally critical of the president. "They fired everybody who was insufficiently supportive of Trump," one source tells CNN. The Daily Beast lists some of those fired writers as Caleb Howe, Jay Caruso, Ben Howe, Patrick Frey (who writes as Patterico), Neil Stevens, and Susan Wright. Caleb Howe, for one, sounded ticked about Friday's events. "There is a right way to do something and a f---ed up way," he tweeted.