Chris Hughes, the owner of The New Republic, and new CEO Guy Vidra apparently don’t care nothing for the history and style of their magazine or the people who have worked for it most recently. Both men are relatively new to the organization. Last Friday, the two arrived at the Washington office, having previously announced its closure and moving to New York, and were greeted by the mice and a few orphans.

I’m joking only a little. Ten contributing editors resigned over the firing of leading editors Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier. Foer had been given repeated assurance that his job was secure until the day he read in Gawker.com that he had been replaced.

According to multiple sources, Hughes came to think of his writers and editors as “spoiled brats,” and especially disliked the flamboyant, feud-prone, white-maned Wieseltier, who was more than twice his age. Much of Hughes’s distaste was telegraphed in his body language; he strikes many TNR staffers as passive-aggressive and averse to confrontation.

The friction escalated with the arrival of Vidra, who is said to have complained to Foer that the magazine was boring and that he couldn’t bring himself to read past the first 500 words of an article. According to witnesses, Vidra did little to hide his disrespect for TNR’s tradition of long-form storytelling and rigorous, if occasionally dense, intellectual and political analysis—to say nothing of his lack of interest in the magazine’s distinguished history—at an all-hands meeting in early October.

Vidra said to someone in the room, “Your brain is as dry as the remainder biscuit after voyage.” To which that someone replied, “There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune.” They saw the writing on the wall at that point but did not leave until last week.

Hughes has been described as “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.” I didn’t get any sources for these quotations. In fact, you could say I made them up, but let’s keep it nice, thou cream-faced loon.