Oliver Darcy, reporting at Status (paywalled, alas), on the sudden demise of FiveThirtyEight:

On Wednesday morning, shortly after sending an all-staff memo announcing layoffs at ABC News, network president Almin Karamehmedovic joined a virtual meeting with the FiveThirtyEight team. The 15 staffers at the political analysis site owned by ABC News had learned the previous evening — via a Wall Street Journal report — that they were being let go. Now, they were hearing it from Karamehmedovic himself.

But Karamehmedovic, like other managers carrying out mass layoffs at ABC News that day, had little to say about it. I’m told he appeared to be reading from a script as he delivered the devastating news. He offered no explanation for why the Disney-owned network had decided to shutter FiveThirtyEight, which it acquired in 2018 along with data whiz and then-editor Nate Silver. He took no questions. He simply thanked the employees for their work, told them a human resources staffer would follow up, and ended the meeting. The entire affair, I’m told, lasted about 15 minutes. Soon after, employees had their access to ABC News’ systems shut off and the FiveThirtyEight website was pulled offline. Just like that, it was over.

Business is business, and layoffs and closures are never anything but traumatic. But there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way. And one of the wrong ways is having the staff find out they’re all fired by reading it from The Wall Street Journal. This guy Karamehmedovic sounds like a real Grade-A dickhead.

And what is the deal with these companies that just unceremoniously pull the plug on websites when they close them? Why not keep the FiveThirtyEight site up and running — at least for a while, if not in perpetuity? It costs practically nothing to run a server for a static/archived website. I don’t get it. It betrays a profound level of disrespect for the work that the site hosted. It’s ABC’s business if they want to close FiveThirtyEight as an ongoing concern, but the years of work deserves to remain online, both out of respect for the people who made it and for the audience that might still want to refer to it. Disney didn’t burn the movies from now-closed subsidiary studios like Touchstone Pictures.

There’s a vast gulf between the old world of print and the new world of online publishing. The difference is profound, but largely overlooked, because it’s human nature to just adapt to the nature of different forms of media and quickly accept current media forms as “normal”. With print, issues were largely ephemeral to the audience. You’d get a newspaper every day, and magazines every week or month, and you’d throw them out after you’d finished reading them. If you wanted to look back at what the paper had published about something a year, a month, or even just a few days ago, you were out of luck, in terms of being able to just look it up on the spot. Librarians did the yeoman’s work of archiving newspapers and magazines to microfilm, so nothing was truly gone or forgotten, but it was an enormous hassle to access microfilm archives. You pretty much had to know the dates of the issues you wanted to see, and you had to do the “searching” with your eyeballs, page by page. The ability of anyone, today, to just instantly access week-, month-, year-, and even decades-old stories is a breathtaking advantage of web publications. And for the last 15 years or so, we’ve had the ability to do this from little machines we all carry in our pockets everywhere we go. It’s truly remarkable.

But the standard behavior when closing a web publication is to just pull the plug. When the whole company goes under, that’s one thing. But when there’s a parent company, especially a thriving one, there’s no justification for pulling the plug other than spiteful disregard for the work. From the perspective of a company the size of Disney, it would cost veritable pennies to keep FiveThirtyEight’s website around forever. What a disgrace.

Something remarkable happened in Montana today. As has become routine, anti-trans bills were up for debate—the state has spent more than half of its legislative days this session pushing such bills through committees and the House floor, with Republicans largely voting in lockstep. But something changed.

A week ago, transgender Representative Zooey Zephyr delivered a powerful speech against a bill that would create a separate indecent exposure law for transgender people. Since then, momentum on the House floor slowed. Today, two of the most extreme bills targeting the transgender community came up for a vote. Transgender Representatives Zooey Zephyr and SJ Howell gave impassioned speeches—this time, they broke through. In a stunning turn, 29 Republicans defected, killing both bills. One Republican even took the floor to deliver a scathing rebuke of the bill’s sponsor.

The first bill to reach the House floor was HB 675, a measure that would ban drag performances and Pride parades in Montana. A previous drag ban had already been struck down by the courts after it was enforced against a transgender woman—who was not a drag artist—to prevent her from speaking about public history at a library. In response, the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Caleb Hinkle, introduced HB 675 to circumvent that ruling.

Rather than relying on state enforcement, this bill would grant individuals the private right to sue if a public drag performance took place, making it more difficult to challenge in court. During committee hearings, Hinkle went even further, calling being transgender "a fetish" and arguing that the law was necessary to prevent trans people from dancing in public.

And that’s when transgender Representative Zooey Zephyr took to the floor.

"Here I am again to rise on another bill targeting the LGBTQ+ community," she said, exasperated. "At its very core, drag is art. It is very beautiful art. It has a deep history in this country, and it is important to my community. You know, if you are a woman in this body wearing a suit today, you are in some way challenging gender norms that existed long ago… There were three-article-of-clothing laws 50 years ago that said if you wore three articles of clothing that were indicative of the opposite gender, they could stop you, arrest you… it was those laws that led to the police raiding an LGBTQ+ bar that led to the Stonewall riots, one of the most important civil rights moments in my community’s history," she began.

“When the sponsor closed on this bill, he said, this bill is needed… and I quote his words… ‘because transgenderism is a fetish based on crossdressing.’ And I am here to stand before the body and say that my life is not a fetish. My existence is not a fetish. I was proud within a month ago to have my son up in the gallery here. Many of you on the other side met him. When I go to walk him to school, that’s not a lascivious display. That is not a fetish. That is my family. This is what these bills are trying to come after… not obscene shows in front of children, we have the Miller test for that, we have laws for that. This is a way to target the trans community, and that is in my opinion, and in the speaker’s own words.”

Then something even more remarkable happened: A Republican, Representative Sherry Essman, rose to defend Rep. Zephyr and chastised the bill’s sponsor. “I’m speaking as a parent and a grandmother. And I’m very emotional because I know the representative in seat 20 is also a parent. No matter what you think of that, she is doing her best to raise a child. I did my best to raise my children as I saw fit, and I’m taking it for granted that my children are going to raise my grandchildren as they see fit,” she began.

“Everybody in here talks about how important parental rights are. I want to tell you, in addition to parental rights, parental responsibility is also important. And if you can’t trust a decent parent to decide where and when their kids should see what, then we have a bigger problem,” she turned to parental rights and spoke about how people who claim those rights should vote against the bill.

And then, she closed by chastising the bill’s sponsor for bringing the bill, “Trust the parents to do what’s right, and stop these crazy bills that are a waste of time. They’re a waste of energy. We should be working on property tax relief and not doing this sort of business on the floor of this house and having to even talk about this.”

Following the speeches, 13 Republicans, the most of any anti-trans bill this cycle, flipped and voted against the bill. See it as it happened here:

Were this all that happened, it would have been remarkable enough—such aisle-crossing has become rare in modern politics, and on transgender issues, it is almost unheard of. But Representative Zephyr is not the only transgender lawmaker in Montana. Representative SJ Howell, a powerhouse in their own right, took the floor when an even more extreme bill followed immediately afterwards—HB754, a measure that would remove transgender children from their parents. They had a powerful speech to deliver as well.

Representative Howell opened, "I stand to oppose this bill… When a state intervenes to remove a child from their family, that is one of the most serious and weighty responsibilities that the state has. That is not something to be taken lightly. Every time a child is removed from their family, it’s a tragedy. Sometimes a necessary tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless. This bill does not come close to the seriousness with which those decisions should be contemplated."

They pointed directly to the bill’s language: "On page 1, line 19, any child protective service specialist, peace officer, or county attorney who has reason to believe any child is in immediate danger or harm may immediately remove the child. What we are adding… a child transitioning gender with the support of a parent or guardian is considered in immediate or apparent danger or harm."

Howell then turned to the bill’s vagueness and the dangers it posed to transgender children as well as any child who defies gender norms. "Transitioning gender is not defined in this bill… so what does that mean? Maybe it means, as the sponsor said, surgery or medical treatment. Maybe it means therapy, mental healthcare. Maybe it means a kid who gets a haircut and a new set of clothes. Maybe a name change… a legal name change, or someone who wants to try out a different name… a strict reading of this bill could include all of that."

They urged lawmakers to consider the real consequences. "Put yourself in the shoes of a CPS worker who is confronted with a young person, 15 years old maybe, who is happy… healthy… living in a stable home with loving parents, who is supported and has their needs met? And they are supposed to remove that child from their home and put them in the care of the state? We should absolutely not be doing that."

Then, the bill went to a vote. This time, the Montana Republican Party fully fractured—29 Republicans crossed the aisle to defeat it.

Watch it as it happened here:

Following the vote, Representative Zephyr took to social media to discuss the implications. “These kind of votes are born out of transgender representation in government,” she posted on her bluesky account. “Howell & I have built solid relationships with Republicans and those relationships change hearts, minds, and (eventually) votes. It is painful, grueling work. But it makes a difference.”

At a time when anti-trans bills are sailing through red-state legislatures, many are left wondering how they can be stopped. Some Democrats, like Gavin Newsom, have chosen appeasement—standing alongside anti-trans hate leaders like Charlie Kirk instead of standing up for transgender people. But Representatives Zooey Zephyr and SJ Howell offer a different path. As transgender lawmakers in a Republican-dominated government, they have shown that representation, relationships, and the power of speaking truth in hostile spaces can move hearts and minds. Their success is a reminder that even in the most challenging environments, refusing to back down can make a difference.

Editor’s Note: The writer of this article is happily married to Representative Zooey Zephyr. While I am mindful of disclosing personal relationships in my reporting as a transgender journalist, I also recognize the importance of covering major moments like today’s events in Montana, and so I chose to report on this story with this disclosure. My goal remains delivering critical LGBTQ+ news to my readers with the integrity and urgency it deserves.

When Musk took over Twitter, he launched a payroll audit to root out dead workers getting paid. Now, Musk is launching the same campaign across the federal government.

(Image credit: Andrew Harnik)

John Henry replies on the X posting:

“For those here who care… property around buildings, like the State Department, here, in DC, are federal lands maintained by the federal government. The National Park Service is charged with maintaining most of the parks we have in the District too.”

"I’ve been doing paperwork in Mexico City, signing thing after thing.

However, some doubt arose concerning my identity. The nine-year-old signature on my passport did not match the one I had been putting everywhere, on everything. I had mistakenly assumed we accepted the way a signature degrades over time, how it grows hastier, less sure of itself. The authorities didn’t accept this degradation, no, and requested an in-person appearance to re-sign all the things.

Here you must choose a signature and commit. A señor hovered over me as I tried to perform my name the way I once had—upright, tense, and contained. (Lately it had gone soupy.) He examined my new effort, compared with my nearly expired passport.

He pointed to the t. The horizontal line needed to be longer, so I lengthened it, and was thus recognized, by Mexico, to be myself."