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Satirical news outlet The Onion has purchased Infowars with the help of the families of Sandy Hook victims – and they are hoping to make it “very funny” and “very stupid”.
Infowars is a right-wing media platform that was run by Alex Jones – a conspiracy theorist who falsely claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut was a hoax staged by crisis actors to spur more gun control.
The shooting killed 20 first-graders and six educators, and following his comments, Jones faced multiple lawsuits from the families of the victims. He was ordered by courts to liquidate his personal assets to help pay off the $1.4billion sum (via AP News).
Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022, and Infowars went to a bankruptcy auction, where it was bought by The Onion. The news of the acquisition was shared this morning (November 14) in both a video by Jones, and in a post from the head of The Onion’s parent company.
According to the update from the latter, The Onion is looking to rebuild the site and have well-known humour writers and content creators feature on it. It has also been confirmed that the sale was made possible with help from the Sandy Hook victims’ families.
Also, part of the reason we did bought InfoWars is because people on Bluesky told us it would be funny to buy InfoWars. And those people were right. This is the funniest thing that has ever happened.
— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) 2024-11-14T14:35:36.006Z
“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,” the update read. “I can’t wait to show you what we have cooked up.”
In a separate post on Bluesky, Ben Collins added: “Part of the reason we did bought InfoWars is because people on Bluesky told us it would be funny to buy InfoWars” adding: “those people were right [this] is the funniest thing that has ever happened”.
As highlighted by The Guardian, the purchase includes the company’s intellectual property, including the website, customer lists, inventory and certain social media accounts, and the production equipment. The amount that The Onion paid in its winning bid has not been publicly disclosed.
Responding to the news of the sale, Jones took to his X/Twitter page for a livestream update, where he criticised the sale of Infowars. Emphasising that he was not told that he couldn’t go live, he said that it was “a distinct honour to be here in defiance of the tyrants”, before discussing Donald Trump’s re-election as US President. “This is the fight. If you think the deep state has given up, think again,” he said.
Reflecting on the sale of Infowars, New York Post shared a quote from Robbie Parker, whose daughter was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting. “The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” he said in a statement provided by his lawyers.
CNN also highlighted that, in order to make the bid work, families of the victims “agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of The Onion’s bid, enabling its success”.
At the time that the lawsuits were filed against Jones, families of the Sandy Hook victims claimed that they were left traumatised by Jones’ conspiracies, and had received threats by his followers.
Jones’ update on X/Twitter comes two years after the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, ruled out any chance of the alt-right figure returning to the site. He and the Infowars account were initially suspended from the platform in September 2018 for violating the platform’s abusive behaviour policy.
When asked by a user whether Jones should be brought back, Musk initially said “no” before he elaborated and said he had lost a child – to sudden infant death syndrome in 2002 – and said Jones used the death of children to push his own agenda.
“My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame,” Musk wrote at the time.
That same year, Jones made more headlines for his controversial interview with Kanye West – in which the rapper shared his praise for Adolf Hitler. The comments came after West faced backlash for making a series of anti-Semitic remarks, wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt, and expressing false claims about the death of George Floyd.
Elsewhere, that same year saw M.I.A. on the receiving end of criticism, after she compared Jones’s falsehoods about the Sandy Hook shooting to celebrities “pushing” COVID-19 vaccines.
Last year, Jones received a response from R.E.M.‘s Mike Mills, after he claimed that all artists asked to “pledge themselves to Lucifer” before signing record deals.