Whoever said truth is stranger than fiction had it right! For those of you unfamiliar with the Onion, it's my go to place for sports news.
The Onion Is Buying Alex Jones’s Infowars Site
The satirical website joins with families who lost children in the Sandy Hook massacre to acquire Infowars
By Alexander Gladstone, Joseph De Avila and Akiko Matsuda, WSJ
Updated Nov. 14, 2024
The Onion, a satirical news publication, said it is buying the right-wing conspiracy website Infowars.
The Onion said Thursday that its winning bid has the support of families who lost children in the Sandy Hook massacre, who secured a $1.4 billion defamation verdict in Connecticut against Infowars founder Alex Jones. A sale price wasn’t disclosed.
“We hope the Sandy Hook families will be able to marvel at the cosmic joke we will soon make of InfoWars.com,” said Ben Collins, the Onion’s CEO and a former journalist.
The Onion said it expects to launch a new platform for Infowars in January. Collins said the new management team is likely to remove the existing Infowars content from the site and archive it in a less public place.
Jones confirmed the sale in a video on X Thursday morning. “Infowars is being shut down!” Jones wrote in the caption.
He indicated during the video that an injunction would be filed. “I’m going to be here until they come and turn the lights off,” he said. Lawyers for Jones didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The far-right media host and provocateur placed Infowars’s parent company into bankruptcy and later filed for personal bankruptcy in 2022 following years of costly litigation with the families of Sandy Hook victims. Jones had been ordered to pay $965 million in damages for repeatedly claiming on Infowars that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a government hoax. He was later ordered to pay an additional $473 million in punitive damages.
Eight families of those who died and a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent sued over false statements Jones made about the massacre, in which a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school.
Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun-control group in the country, said it has signed a multiyear advertising agreement with the Onion and will serve as the exclusive advertiser during the site’s relaunch. Everytown said it would use Infowars to raise awareness about gun violence prevention and other public safety initiatives.
“It’s fitting that a platform once used to profit off of tragedy will be a tool of education,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety.
The Onion was sold by G/O Media in April to a group called Global Tetrahedron, backed by tech entrepreneur Jeff Lawson. Lawson has majority control of the Onion, while CEO Collins, a former reporter for NBC News who covered misinformation and extremism, and executives Danielle Strle and Leila Brillson are also owners, a spokesman said. The new management has relaunched a print version of the Onion for subscribers.
In an interview, Collins said the acquisition included a large stockpile of dietary supplements, the sale of which brought in most of Infowars’ revenue. The Onion is figuring out what to do with the supplements, Collins said.
The trustee administering the auction of the assets of Infowars’s parent company, Free Speech Systems, designated the joint bid by Global Tetrahedron along with the Connecticut families, as the winning bidder, according to a Thursday court document in Jones’s individual bankruptcy case. The trustee intends to close the sale before Nov. 30.
First United American Companies, a runner-up bidder associated with Jones’s new online store, ShopAlexJones.com, disputed the sale process, alleging defects including changing procedures, a lack of transparency and inaccurate disclosures to interested bidders. A bankruptcy judge on Thursday ordered an evidentiary hearing to review the process and the bids. The sale can’t be closed until the court approves it.
The families of eight Sandy Hook victims in Connecticut, along with the FBI agent, said Thursday that the buyout of Infowars will put an “end to the misinformation machine that Jones used to defame the families and victims for years.”
The Connecticut families said they agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of the Onion’s bid, enabling its success.
The families said the Infowars auction was expected to receive bids from Jones’s associates and other prominent right-wing content creators. “Had any of these parties acquired even a portion of Jones’s assets, it is speculated that Jones could have remained on-air, continuing to broadcast his deeply hateful conspiracy theories and antagonizing the Sandy Hook victims and their families,” they said.
The families had previously rejected Jones’s offer to settle for $55 million over 10 years while allowing him to stay on the air, said Chris Mattei, an attorney for the Connecticut families.
Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, said the dissolution of Jones’s assets and the end of Infowars is the justice the families have fought for.
“We were told this outcome would be nearly impossible, but we are no strangers to impossible fights,” he said. “The world needs to see that having a platform does not mean you are above accountability.”
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