The Onion buys conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’
Satirical news outlet purchases media platform run by Alex Jones at a court-ordered auction
The Guardian, UK/November 14, 2024
By Anna Betts
The satirical news outlet the Onion has purchased Infowars, the rightwing media platform run by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, at a court-ordered auction.
The news was confirmed on Thursday morning in a video by Jones himself, as well as the head of the Onion’s parent company.
“I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the US trustee over our bankruptcy this morning, and they said they are shutting us down even without a court order this morning,” Jones said in a video shared on X. “The Connecticut Democrats with the Onion newspaper bought us.”
The Onion plans to rebuild the website and feature well-known internet humor writers and content creators.
CEO Ben Collins confirmed this in a post on Bluesky on Thursday, writing: “The Onion, with the help of the Sandy Hook families, has purchased InfoWars. We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website. We have retained the services of some Onion and Clickhole Hall of Famers to pull this off.
“I can’t wait to show you what we have cooked up,” Collins added.
In another post on Bluesky, Collins said that “part of the reason we did bought [sic] InfoWars is because people on Bluesky told us it would be funny to buy InfoWars” adding that “those people were right” this “is the funniest thing that has ever happened”.
The purchase includes the acquisition of Jones’s company’s intellectual property, such as its website, customer lists, inventory and certain social media accounts, and the production equipment, according to CNN. The amount of the bid has not been disclosed.
In the immediate aftermath of the news breaking publicly, Jones started streaming live on X, lambasting the sale of his site. Railing against the Onion, among others, Jones told viewers that it’s “a distinct honor to be here in defiance of the tyrants”. He emphasized that no one told him he couldn’t go live.
Jones also began to ramble about the upcoming Donald Trump administration, telling viewers things like: “This is the fight. If you think the deep state has given up, think again … America is awake now.”
As of Thursday afternoon, InfoWars.com had turned into a white screen with a single sentence emblazoned across the screen: “Site unavailable till further notice.”
The sale follows a judge’s order earlier this year for Jones to liquidate his personal assets, to help him to pay off the $1.4bn he was ordered to pay the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting that killed 20 first-graders and six educators when they took him to court for defamation after he falsely claimed that the shooting was a hoax, and that they were actors who staged the shooting as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns.
Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022.
In order to make the bid work, a lawyer representing the families told CNN that the families “agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of the Onion’s bid, enabling its success”.
“After surviving unimaginable loss with courage and integrity, they rejected Jones’s hollow offers for allegedly more money if they would only let him stay on the air because doing so would have put other families in harm’s way,” said Chris Mattei, an attorney for the families.
In a post on social media earlier this week, Mattei added that “the breakup of Infowars this week is just the start of Alex Jones’s lesson in accountability” and that the families “will go after his future income and any new Infowars owner acting as a vehicle for Jones’s continued control of the business”.
