Seems like it's still not theirs until a judge signs off on it.
That sale was scuttled by a bankruptcy court. Now, The Onion has re-emerged with a new plan: licensing the website from Gregory Milligan, the court-appointed manager of the site.
On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
The licensing deal has been agreed to by The Onion and the court-appointed administrator. But it is not effective until Judge Gamble approves it, and Mr. Jones could appeal any ruling. That means the fate of Infowars remains in limbo until the court rules, probably sometime in the next two weeks. Mr. Jones continues to operate Infowars.com and host its weekday program, “The Alex Jones Show.”
I saw OP and went to infowars dot com to have a look. I scrolled a bit, clicked some links, looked at the store, had a good laugh at the comedy of this ironic site.
Now you’re telling me the site is not a joke from The Onion? Reality is stranger than fiction.
I appreciate this story appears to be all about the rage-bate headlines, but I don't believe that either six-week old babies say "Mama" (with purpose) or that a baby that age would be capable of responding in the way described to an adult saying "there is no Mama". It doesn't work like that at that age.
Edit: but it is likely the baby is older than 6 weeks in that video - this seems to be the source of confusion:
In December, when Texson was 6 weeks old, he shared a video with the text overlay “6 week old homophobic baby,” which was viewed more than 36 million times. In that video, Texson smiles in response to being told he has a sister, a brother and puppies but frowns when McAnally says that he has two dads. In the most recent video McAnally has shared, Texson laughs and says the sound “ma ma ma,” when asked if he wants “dada or pop.” Later on, in the video, he cries and looks frustrated." - https://www.newsweek.com/entertainment/shane-mcanally-video-...
Of course, getting stuck on if they got the age of the baby wrong is throwing out the baby with the bathwater - the main thrust of the story is true.
"6-Week-Old" babies don't have the muscle strength to hold their heads horizontally like that (and IMHO it would be foolhardy to wave them around like that)...
Pronounced social smiling (as in the video) already by six weeks would also pretty unusual.
- The video of the baby has been widely circulated on social media. The same couple also posted a video of them saying the baby looked at them in a "homophobic" way. People in the comments said they should "Just throw the baby away."
This new clause would disapply existing criminal law related to the accessing or provision of abortion care from women acting in relation to their own pregnancy at any gestation, ensuring no woman would be liable for a prison sentence as a result of seeking to end her own pregnancy. It would not change any law regarding the provision of abortion services within a healthcare setting, including but not limited to the time limit, the grounds for abortion, or the requirement for two doctors’ approval.
- The video of the Nigerian has also been making the rounds on social media and has not been debunked as an ai generated fake. There are both images and video of the incident.
Not really sure why you would post this sarcastically when all you had to do was a ten second google search to confirm none of these are cringe worthy, tinfoil hat conspiracies.
They are indeed cringe worthy. Even my four year old cries when his spoon is the wrong kind of spoon. This does not make him spoon-phobic. It means he is a kid who has no control of his emotions.
A baby has even less understanding.
Everyone who is debating the homophobia of the baby is projecting.
Do you think learning that 3/3 stories they thought were so ridiculous they were obviously fake, were in fact real, will cause them to reconsider their view of the world in any way?
Previously, they were trying to buy the assets outright. That got into the "one group of families is owned $1.4 billion and another is owned $50 million" and the "how do you maximize the returns from Alex Jones assets to satisfy those claims?"
This is using a different structure.
> On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
They're not buying it - they're licensing it from the victims families instead.
Consider the fact this is a satirical news website; a fictional CEO; an imaginary corporation; and it literally proposes a vision of "Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object [...] A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery"
I think it's a good PR move. "Hey, look at how reasonable we've been in spite of the legal craziness. We've put money on the table and are moving forward with a plan that benefits everyone." Now anyone who blocks the plan will be seen as the problem.
Misinformation is funny now! This is all part of the joke- they were a funny fake news site that bought an unfunny fake news site, now their fake news doesn't need to be funny and that's what makes it funny.
> Tim Heidecker, one of the comedians behind “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, has been hired to serve as “creative director of Infowars.” He said he initially plans to parody Mr. Jones’s “whole modus operandi.”
> Mr. Heidecker has been working on his impression of Mr. Jones. But eventually, when that joke gets old, Mr. Heidecker said that he hoped to turn Infowars into a destination for independent and experimental comedy.
> “I just thought it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity,” Mr. Heidecker said in an interview.
I think it's better if they keep all the URLs as they are right now, but then add misinformation into each page and put a big banner saying that this site is parody. Then search and AI will index this and then it will another lawsuit from Alex Jones to get the information removed from those alternate sources.
My favorite recent thing from Tim Heidecker was him interviewing Fred Armisen in the style of Bill Maher. The parody is uncanny. I could see him doing a really good Alex Jones.
His brand of comedy is very hit-or-miss for me (the best way I can describe it is "smug"), but context drives me to wish him luck in his presumed efforts to turn InfoWars into a literal joke instead of just a figurative one.
So they are now setting the content on infowars.com? Honestly, I can't tell since everything on that site looks so fake it isn't believable. The onion transition may be hard to detect.
Assuming that the announcement video Ben Collins posted represents the new logo, it's a delightfully pride rainbow-colored InfoWars logo with an onion in place of the 'o'.
I visited with my family in rural Missouri recently. Alex Jones and InfoWars is gospel to them. I was amazed at how many times cited him as an authority on various topics. I thought they were joking, but apparently, Obama made a promise with his father before his passing that he would destroy the United States. Oh, and of course, Obama is Satan, and Trump was sent by God to protect us all. Of course.
Despite the article, infowars.com at least doesn't really seem to be run by The Onion yet? But I'm looking at that site for the first time so I have no idea.
Can someone put me to speed on it?
Who is the onion? Who is info wars? What is happening?
I can't comprehend but it feels that I cannot really Google for it
I looked it up and was not surprised to see the rabid ramblings of a tech bro psychopath (but I repeat myself) with a drug addiction who gleefully admitted to wanting to hunt down Palantir's detractors with AI drones used to spray them with fentanyl-laced urine.
> “The goal for the families we represent has always been to prevent Alex Jones from being able to cause harm at scale, the way he did against them,” said Chris Mattei, the lawyer who argued the Connecticut families’ case in court. The deal with The Onion promises “to significantly degrade his power to do that.”
> The Onion also plans to sell merchandise and share the proceeds with the Sandy Hook families.
It was barely funny when I read the headline a few years ago. Really weird story, I guess I just don't understand the humor at all. I'd rather stop hearing about InfoWars entirely.
Bear in mind buying it to ruin it is a very real public service. Alex Jones was hoping a conservative ally would buy it and then just continue to let him do what he wants.
Jokes aside, The Onion is basically spending a giant pile of money to burn the website down.
I remember when The KLF burned a million quid. They were being internally consistent. It was artistically relevant.
Most people thought they were insane. Bill Drummond wrote about how it strained his relationship with his kids. You can tell that he regrets it.
Personally I think a million bucks to lease a domain name for a year is a really terrible business decision. You might be able to argue that it's going to victims but you could almost certainly just park that money into an interest-bearing account and do better for those victims.
But it's also been obvious from the beginning (starting with Jones' own comments) that nobody really gives a shit about these families and they're just props in other peoples' theater show.
The cost seems really high. On the other hand I thought bringing the Onion back as a print comedy newspaper was insane too, so possibly they know things I don’t. There is a business plan here, even if it’s a dumb one.
I get the impression that beyond the money from the sale, the victims would very much like Alex Jones control of InfoWars to end. This accomplishes both of those things. I don't generally find The Onion that funny, and probably will never visit the new InfoWars, but I'm eternally grateful that they were willing to step in and do this. Because someone had to. A "good business decision" is to let Alex run his show if you buy the brand, but that's still a win for him.
Not only would another owner likely allow Alex Jones to continue to operate, but The Onion can truly salt the earth around Alex Jones' business. If they own the InfoWars trademarks... if they own The Alex Jones Show as a trademark? They can potentially shut down Alex Jones' future works if they violate InfoWars' trademarks and intellectual property. They can sue him if he says something defamatory about the new InfoWars. One of the perks here is that The Onion is well-versed in free speech rights, intellectual property rights, and trademark law. They already have lawyers good at this stuff.
The Onion can be a truly significant thorn in Jones' side, the way most other outcomes for this could not. I'm guessing the new site won't be that funny, but thankfully I don't really care about the "art".
Woo hoo, sounds like some of their jokes landed and you just couldn't take it. Do you only appreciate humor if it's punching down?
Do you have any funny jokes about the children who were "killed" at Sandy Hook or the crisis actors who pretended to be their parents and mourn for them that you want to share with the class?
>With this new InfoWars, we will democratize psychological torture, welcoming brutal and sadistic ideas from everyone, even the very stupidest among us. It will be like the Manhattan Project, only instead of a bomb, we will be building a website.
Please can someone correct my opinion on this because I'm sure I'm missing something.
I find it crazy that in the US you can't take an opinion on something without risking being bankrupted because that thing you said is later proven untrue and that it hurt someone's feelings – feeling which in the US have a monetary value of billions apparently.
I agree that the media should be evidence based and it's bad when the media is presenting things which are clearly false, but I also think that sometimes the evidence is misleading and speculation can be useful to get to the truth.
Surely cases like this show that it's simply far too dangerous to report on something in the US which might both upset people and could later proven to be false?
We have a similar issue in the UK where even when it's widely understood that someone is abusing kids, if they're famous our media basically can't say anything because they'll risk being sued. While our law is well intentioned, it seems that it really just suppresses the free exchange of information which has repeatedly led to harms against children. The speculation while often harmful is sometimes useful.
I just feel like there's a middle ground here. Maybe you can sue, but perhaps your feelings are only worth a few hundred thousand pounds? I get the US is much richer than the UK but being sued for billions for being wrong and hurting peoples feelings just seems insane. And I agree Jones was completely wrong to have said what he said.
Why am I wrong on this? I hate holding this opinion and would like it changed.
Yes, your understanding is not aligned with the facts of the case. This was not close to an unfair abridgement of Mr. Jones's rights.
Timeline:
1. Alex Jones hosts guests on his show questioning if a mass school shooting was a falsified event.
2. The controversy drove a massive increase in traffic to his videos.
3. This encouraged Mr. Jones to host additional guests who made direct claims that parents of the slain children were actors hired by the US government.
4. Those parents received intense harassment and death threats. Many had to move away from their homes.
5. The parents sent many requests to the Infowars show asking Mr. Jones to stop claiming they were actors; Infowars did not stop.
6. The parents sued.
7. Infowars failed to comply with standard evidence discovery requests.
8. After many attempts by the court to achieve compliance, the defense moved for a default judgement. The court agreed.
9. At the award hearing, plaintiffs provided evidence that Mr. Jones moved assets out of Infowars to a company owned by his parents specifically to evade paying the judgment.
10. The jury at the award hearing awarded the plaintiffs about $1B in damages. Rationale was to discourage Mr. Jones from continuing to libel family members impacted by mass shootings.
An opinion would be something like "I think it's good that those kids were shot".
You could say that all day and people would not like you, but no one could do anything about it.
What Alex Jones did was deny reality. He suggested that the victims did not exist. He suggested the event did not happen and the grieving parents were government-hired actors. He riled up his listeners and effectively sent them after people. He did this in spite of knowing what he was saying on his show was not true. That was a large part of things, that Alex Jones was aware he was spreading misinformation.
Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion".
There are some folks really upset about us not platforming a maniac. If you feel like stopping Alex Jones from being actively harmful is a slippery slope directly to something you might say, boy, I would want to take a minute and think that through.
Don't read too much into it, it's just a joke, I'm very happy with Jones losing his platform. I thought I could add to the Onion's satire with a bit of my own, but forgot how hard it is sometimes to tell apart humor from Fox News-induced mental illness. Sorry about that.
Do you think there is an acceptable third option between "the globalists winning" and "it is OK for a single media outlet to wage a war on the grieving parents of the victims of a mass murder"?
My comment was just a silly joke, reusing some of Jones phrasing. I never fully grasped who "the globalists" were in his mind, and why they were seemingly behind everything he dislikes, but I always found if funny. I'm just happy he lost his platform, and I find the Onion's piece rather amusing.
I thought I could add to it with this dumb joke but I forgot about the fact that Jones still has a sizeable following, and it's sometimes hard to tell if someone is just kidding or an insane lunatic. I'm in the former camp (I hope).
The insane size of the judgement against Jones for Sandy Hook just shows they were looking to make someone pay for the dead kids and with the killer dead, the guy defaming the dead kids (and by proxy of that, as the legal argument goes, their parents, since obviously the parents were rightly claiming otherwise) was the nearest asshole in sight.
Probably the most notorious lesson that when an asshole does a terrible thing and nothing can be extracted from him, you shouldn't go out of your way to do something dumb enough that everyone who already had their pitchforks out justifies you being the scapegoat instead.
It is not clear to me what you are saying or what you are defending/ decrying. Ridiculing Alex Jones and the mindset that has run through a couple of centuries of American cranks is about all there is to do to draw some of the venom out. You make it sound like Alex Jones was simply a victim of being wrong about a fact.
The amount of the judgment seems reasonable for years of harassment against a bunch of people, all done for a profit, plus a bunch of egregious misbehavior in court.
Reasonable by what metric? I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people. Is it reasonable because Alex Jones can afford it (hint: he can't, not even if he wasn't hiding his money)?
This judgement ends up being more akin to punishing him by forcing him off of his platform, which is actually unconstitutional even for a shitbag like him.
Yes, by definition, you do. It is not illegal to slander anyone. The police cannot arrest you for this, you can't be convicted and sentenced to anything.
Those people won a tort (in theory), because he caused them damages that he was responsible for making remedying.
When corporations are sued, they tend to take the lawsuits seriously, which is probably a big factor in why their outcomes are so different than Jones'.
I mean, yeah, but the subtext of the preceding comment was that corporations have done stuff like Bhopal, which while not as luridly evil as what Jones did was still objectively worse as a civil offense cognizable to a court of law.
But when a corporation does something like Bhopal, you can generally count on them hyperprofessionally attending to every detail of the ensuring tort case. Unlike Jones, who at literally every step of the legal process thumbed his nose at the court, including, at one point, attempting to boycott the process outright.
> Unlike Jones, who at literally every step of the legal process thumbed his nose at the court, including, at one point, attempting to boycott the process outright.
In a criminal case, if you refuse to cooperate, ignore warrants, etc, the state can and will send in the police to arrest you and continue their investigation while you sit in jail.
In a civil case, that power doesn't exist; opposing council cannot order your arrest or send the police in to break down your door and execute a subpoena. This presents an obvious question: if there is no way to compel cooperation in a civil trial, why would anyone play along if they were guilty? To provide an incentive to do so, civil trials have sanctions, penalties issued by the judge to the offending party, which ratchet up in accordance with the severity of the misconduct displayed in the proceedings.
Alex Jones/Free Speech Systems/Infowars repeatedly withheld and spoliated evidence, ignored subpoenas, and sent woefully unprepared corporate representatives to depositions in direct defiance of court orders. Their conduct was so egregious that two judges independently handed down default judgements: for refusing to cooperate at every step of the way, they lost the right to argue their case in front of a jury, so the juries would just decide how much Jones et al owed in restitution.
If the juries felt Jones et al had been wronged and there was no real merit to the case, they would have awarded the Sandy Hook families $1 judgements (look up nominal damages, there is lots of precedence for this), but in both cases, the juries felt Jones' conduct was so egregious that they gave large judgements to the Sandy Hook families.
In both trials, the judges went out of their way to go along with all the dumb arguments FSS's council was putting forth to ensure no appeal could ever succeed on the merits. All Jones had to do was give the appearance of cooperation and then he would have been allowed to argue to the jury that he was innocent, but he couldn't reign in his worst impulses, fired every competent attorney he had, and was left with Norm Pattis and Andino Reynal, attorneys who have no qualms catering to a client in ways that might jeopardize their law licenses.
Defamation law is full of absolute snakes, attorneys laser-focused on money with no morals who will happily do things like put rape victims on the stand to interrogate them on every detail and turn innocent misrecollections into wins for the rapist. That Alex couldn't keep one of those around speaks volumes.
Alex sacrificed his right to a trial to determine his innocence. He then declared bankruptcy because he knew he would never be able to pay for the consequences of his actions, and when you declare chapter 7 bankruptcy (personal and corporate), everything is for sale, including the news outlet he was the majority owner of.
Alex isn't being silenced (and even if he were it's not the government doing it so the constitution doesn't play a role here). His Twitter account has been ruled not an asset that can be auctioned, and he's been working to shift his audience over there so he can continue his grift, with his merch now being peddled by a company owned by one of his friends, Bigly, which will likely be untouchable by the bankruptcy court, so he's not going to end up on the streets.
I'm curious why you'd bring up those corporate crimes and not think that the obvious response would be that corporate crimes obviously need greater liability, Rather than Jones needing less.
It's not the court's problem that Jones won't be able to afford to broadcast his messages so broadly after this judgment. I guess he'll have to use the same tools as the rest of us now.
> I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people. Is it reasonable because Alex Jones can afford it (hint: he can't, not even if he wasn't hiding his money)?
If there is one thing courts do not like, it is people thinking they are above the law and defy the courts. Jones was dumb enough to do so multiple times. FAFO.
As for the high monetary amount: that was dealt by a jury, not a judge - the system the US (for whatever long gone reason) still seems to prefer over career professionals. Juries are even worse to piss off, and juries have been known to bring the hammer down on parties showing egregiously bad conduct - see e.g. the McDonald's hot coffee case, which partially ended up being (for the time) pretty expensive because McDonald's claimed utter BS in court that they knew was wrong. Jones' conduct was similar: he kept blathering stuff he knew was untrue and, on top of that, his army of suckers kept terrorizing people with Jones knowing about that and doing not even lip service to rein the suckers in.
I was a juror once for a civil case that lead to some fairly significant harm. It was a very odd experience to have to put a dollar to it at the end. The plaintiff attorney gave us numbers for the damages but the defense at the end just basically said "if you decide against my client, just be reasonable" which means we had to just kind of put a dollar value to everything. Some of it like estimates of labor lost were easy, but having to put a dollar value to the pain of a severe injury wasn't something any of us really felt prepared for.
I think this one was high because alex jones harassed parents of murdered children to the point where they had to move out of the town their children were buried in. These people were harassed to the point of being afraid to visit the graves of their children. Sometimes examples need to be set in egregious cases.
Alex Jones did not, as far as the evidence we have seen, harass the parents. Alex Jones did not direct anyone to harass the parents.
Some of his viewers used Jones' statements as justification for harassments.
Interestingly, as far as I know, nothing was pursued against the people harassing the parents. They went after the rich guy saying lies they didn't like, then depended on the fact no one besides the defense wants to side with someone who says such shockingly vicious lies about the facts surrounding dead kids.
That's understating things rather substantially. He ignored court orders. He continued to defame the plaintiffs during the trial, including a statement on air that one of the plaintiff's death by suicide was actually a murder and part of the conspiracy.
If you were sued and your objective was to lose as badly as possible and get as harsh a judgment as possible, it would look a lot like what Jones did here.
That might have been his objective really. All that talk about the govt being after us for years, and now he can point to them forcing him to sell everything off, while he still maintains the same fanbase. But what can they do, he really deserved the judgement.
Jones wasnt telling or encouraging his listeners to harass the Sandy Hook families. That's internet nut jobs. Jones didnt even come up with the theory, he just talked about it on his show.
This is basically a free speech issue akin to the JFK shooting theories.
But Jones did profit from the traffic and thus ad revenue that controversy stirred up, this case is about that* not about Jones right to have an opinion, but how Jones weilded it at the expense of others, no less*.
> Such is the InfoWars I envision: An infinite virtual surface teeming with ads. Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object, free radical misinformation, sentences and images so poorly thought out that they are unhealthy even to view for just a few seconds.
In any age where Polymarket didn't already exist, we'd have called this satire.
It's still not as bad as the actual InfoWars, which if I recall was selling "Alex Jones Natural" supplements, which were mostly just stuff like regular iodine tablets with a massive market and a cool name like "Survival Shield X-2."
If we were judging sites on misinformation/conspiracies and the people that are hurt by it, BlueSky would be shutdown immediately and liquidated. so would most of the mainstream news sites.
The only reason Alex Jones was targeted is because he helped get Trump elected.
It's also very odd that the military basically took over the town after Sandy Hook and it was bulldozed less than a year after the mass shooting:
The Onion and Mr Beast are the highbrow and lowbrow versions of the same niche: absurdism, spectacle and indifference without staying power. Since there's such low retention, the content must be weighted to constant new conversions and new reconversions.
Edit: if you have the time, watch their youtube series Sex House, Helcomb County Municipal Lake Dredge Appraisals and Dr. Good (approx 75 minutes each). There's no nudity, gore or cursing, just some very clever themes about the parallels between television and hell that are still relevant right now, if not more so.
This is likely because The Onion was purchased by Univision in 2016 and then bounced around in a couple more acquisitions over the next decade. Ben Collins got the helm in 2024 and has been doing, in my opinion, a fantastic job with the brand.
When I worked at an ISP we had a lot of landline phone customers too and I'm sure they will continue to for a long time.
At least as long as their current customers keep breathing.
You can run a business off inertia/nostalgia for quite a long time.
People are confused about what I said. Success and Relevance are not the same thing. National Lampoon still has a business too, but I doubt that any of you have seen a new movie of theirs since Van Wilder/Repli-Kate came out in 2002.
A million dollars a year for a domain name is quite a lot. And I know what was paid for the sales of some big (in the keyword marketing/leadgen space) domain names...Sale, not lease.
> You can run a business off inertia/nostalgia for quite a long time.
They only reintroduced print editions in 2024 after an 11 year break. Those 65,000 print subscribers are all people who decided they wanted to start paying money for The Onion in the last 2 years.
If "people are confused" I think it's because you are rejecting empirical evidence that The Onion is relevant without offering any counter-evidence of your own. Is it possible it's just no longer relevant to you personally? (I myself am a proud print subscriber...)
Inertia doesn't really seem like it would lead to 300% YoY growth...
OTOH, National Lampoon hasn't put out a magazine since 1998 or a film since 2015 (and that was a retrospective on the magazine).
I guess I'd agree that, in absolute terms, The Onion might be less of a cultural force than it was in 2005 (say), but part of that has to be that culture is a lot more long-tailed: music, movies, and TV aren't dominated by a handful of works either.
You say "without staying power" but I still remember and frequently cite these ancient Onion article headlines:
- Drugs now legal if user is gainfully employed
- Top 10 Genocides of the 20th Century (Infographic)
- Cycle of Abuse Running Smoothly
I mean sure, it's a satirical news site and it's got a constant stream of new content, much of which is forgettable. But that's true of every other news site too. The gems make it stick.
No offense, but the humor of it has gone right over your head. Building an InfoWars clone isn't nearly as funny as acquiring the real one just to mock it.
I guess.. But renting a 4th reich site seems far darker than they might be used to and likely to make them the butt of the joke when Hitler's testtube clone gets elected from it in 35 years.
Exactly. Buying would at least mean you aren't revamping the value of the site for some next renter in a deeply cynical age where making fun of the orange pedo at a press club ball could cause WWIII.
Maybe it's just me but I don't see much humor in this. His brand and assets may have been liquidated, but he's still doing his show and it remains popular. The only people who really won in this saga are, as usual, the lawyers.
The reason InfoWars is being sold is because of the bankruptcy proceedings. This is money owed to Sandy Hook families [1], who were the target of the harmful conspiracy theories that caused them further pain and suffering.
It is growing and containing its messaging that has been going on for over a decade about gun violence.
From the article:
> But on the topic of gun control and gun violence, it is a political issue that Onion staffers clearly, perhaps even deeply, care about.
> Joe Garden, a former Onion writer and features editor who started working at the publication in the ’90s and left in 2012, told The Daily Beast that while most of the editorial staff tended to lean reliably liberal, their political satire was governed by being “against things that we thought were stupid.”
> And as mass shootings increasingly became a tragic and appalling feature of the Obama era, it also became a subject that The Onion could not avoid covering all too routinely.
“As more and more shootings happened, it became something that—as an organization that comments on the news—we couldn’t not write stories about…and it kept on growing and growing and growing to the point where [the problem of gun violence] just seemed overwhelming.”
> “Any mass shooting is horrible, but when they just start happening just a few months [apart], it’s mind-boggling,” Garden continued. “And it’s terrifying that so little has been done about it.”
This is very much in continuing that messaging and mission in the way that they know how.
Seems like it's still not theirs until a judge signs off on it.
That sale was scuttled by a bankruptcy court. Now, The Onion has re-emerged with a new plan: licensing the website from Gregory Milligan, the court-appointed manager of the site.
On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
The licensing deal has been agreed to by The Onion and the court-appointed administrator. But it is not effective until Judge Gamble approves it, and Mr. Jones could appeal any ruling. That means the fate of Infowars remains in limbo until the court rules, probably sometime in the next two weeks. Mr. Jones continues to operate Infowars.com and host its weekday program, “The Alex Jones Show.”
The Onion Has a New Plan to Take Over Infowars https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/business/infowars-alex-jo...
I can’t believe this.
I saw OP and went to infowars dot com to have a look. I scrolled a bit, clicked some links, looked at the store, had a good laugh at the comedy of this ironic site.
Now you’re telling me the site is not a joke from The Onion? Reality is stranger than fiction.
My favorite headlines:
"Video: ‘Homophobic’ 6-Week-Old Baby Cries After Gay Dad Tells Him ‘There Is No Mama’"
"UK Approves Bills To Remove Criminal Penalties For Women Who Commit Their Own Abortions"
"Nigerian Photographed Killing Cat And Trying To Cook It In Front Of Children’s Playground In Italy"
> 6-Week-Old Baby
I appreciate this story appears to be all about the rage-bate headlines, but I don't believe that either six-week old babies say "Mama" (with purpose) or that a baby that age would be capable of responding in the way described to an adult saying "there is no Mama". It doesn't work like that at that age.
[Source: have three kids]
Source: the video: https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/2045335697893269640
Edit: but it is likely the baby is older than 6 weeks in that video - this seems to be the source of confusion:
In December, when Texson was 6 weeks old, he shared a video with the text overlay “6 week old homophobic baby,” which was viewed more than 36 million times. In that video, Texson smiles in response to being told he has a sister, a brother and puppies but frowns when McAnally says that he has two dads. In the most recent video McAnally has shared, Texson laughs and says the sound “ma ma ma,” when asked if he wants “dada or pop.” Later on, in the video, he cries and looks frustrated." - https://www.newsweek.com/entertainment/shane-mcanally-video-...
Of course, getting stuck on if they got the age of the baby wrong is throwing out the baby with the bathwater - the main thrust of the story is true.
"6-Week-Old" babies don't have the muscle strength to hold their heads horizontally like that (and IMHO it would be foolhardy to wave them around like that)...
Pronounced social smiling (as in the video) already by six weeks would also pretty unusual.
"Afghani Arrested On Suspicion Of Raping Goats In France"
"Trump Anticipates Chinese Leader “Will Give Me A Big, Fat Hug”"
"Photos Of A Cucumber & Ron Paul Playing Baseball Massively Ratio Netanyahu & Mark Levin On X"
- The video of the baby has been widely circulated on social media. The same couple also posted a video of them saying the baby looked at them in a "homophobic" way. People in the comments said they should "Just throw the baby away."
- The UK bill is real: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3511/stages/18040/amendmen...
This new clause would disapply existing criminal law related to the accessing or provision of abortion care from women acting in relation to their own pregnancy at any gestation, ensuring no woman would be liable for a prison sentence as a result of seeking to end her own pregnancy. It would not change any law regarding the provision of abortion services within a healthcare setting, including but not limited to the time limit, the grounds for abortion, or the requirement for two doctors’ approval.
- The video of the Nigerian has also been making the rounds on social media and has not been debunked as an ai generated fake. There are both images and video of the incident.
Not really sure why you would post this sarcastically when all you had to do was a ten second google search to confirm none of these are cringe worthy, tinfoil hat conspiracies.
They are indeed cringe worthy. Even my four year old cries when his spoon is the wrong kind of spoon. This does not make him spoon-phobic. It means he is a kid who has no control of his emotions.
A baby has even less understanding.
Everyone who is debating the homophobia of the baby is projecting.
I believe they call it "humour".
Do you think learning that 3/3 stories they thought were so ridiculous they were obviously fake, were in fact real, will cause them to reconsider their view of the world in any way?
Now, what would you think of a website with such headlines?
I don’t see what’s so funny about them, especially the last one.
I’m surprised they’ve said it so confidently given how it completely collapsed last time…
I believe its because its a different structure.
Previously, they were trying to buy the assets outright. That got into the "one group of families is owned $1.4 billion and another is owned $50 million" and the "how do you maximize the returns from Alex Jones assets to satisfy those claims?"
This is using a different structure.
> On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
They're not buying it - they're licensing it from the victims families instead.
Well, that's an example of exactly the type of media outlet they're trying to create!
Consider the fact this is a satirical news website; a fictional CEO; an imaginary corporation; and it literally proposes a vision of "Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object [...] A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery"
I'm surprised you're surprised.
I think it's a good PR move. "Hey, look at how reasonable we've been in spite of the legal craziness. We've put money on the table and are moving forward with a plan that benefits everyone." Now anyone who blocks the plan will be seen as the problem.
Unlocked link for the NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/business/infowars-alex-jo...
> Nothing can stop us now that we’re in charge of a website.
Somehow I don't think the confidence is meant to be taken at exactly face value.
Misinformation is funny now! This is all part of the joke- they were a funny fake news site that bought an unfunny fake news site, now their fake news doesn't need to be funny and that's what makes it funny.
Maybe you're not highbrow enough for this...
Thank you, Tetrahedron - you are the best possible end for that shit peddling, abusive scum that is AJ.
Oh joy, the old Onion News Network is back! Welcome back, Jim Haggerty! Some beautiful examples below…
—-
Today Now!: Save Money By Taking A Vacation Entirely In Your Mind
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7qYL_KT06-U
Today Now! Host Undergoes Horrifically Painful Surgery Live On Air
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_5yR--35uqA
How To Channel Your Road Rage Into Cold, Calculating Road Revenge
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vuKnR8RvxHY
This is not final and still has to be approved by a judge (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/business/infowars-alex-jo...)
> Tim Heidecker, one of the comedians behind “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, has been hired to serve as “creative director of Infowars.” He said he initially plans to parody Mr. Jones’s “whole modus operandi.”
> Mr. Heidecker has been working on his impression of Mr. Jones. But eventually, when that joke gets old, Mr. Heidecker said that he hoped to turn Infowars into a destination for independent and experimental comedy.
> “I just thought it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity,” Mr. Heidecker said in an interview.
I think it's better if they keep all the URLs as they are right now, but then add misinformation into each page and put a big banner saying that this site is parody. Then search and AI will index this and then it will another lawsuit from Alex Jones to get the information removed from those alternate sources.
heidecker has been honing this persona for years now in the On Cinema universe. looking forward to this quite a bit
He understands the modern conservative male mindset better than anyone, it's amazing
Tim Heidecker... from?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_%26_Eric
From Decker vs. Dracula
Only a real film buff will appreciate this
Of course Hacker News would be full of Greggheads.
My favorite recent thing from Tim Heidecker was him interviewing Fred Armisen in the style of Bill Maher. The parody is uncanny. I could see him doing a really good Alex Jones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ha6D1LQGD4
Birds aren't real 2.0
I love it.
Right up with the crypto scam that followed it. Great.
In case you didn't know, the creators of Birds aren't real rug pulled and stole millions with their crypto coin.
If true, you have to admire their commitment to the bit.
I didn't find anything about this though.
You want to look for Enron - they bought the hostname as part of something
I saw a couple stories about that which suggested it was a parody shitcoin. Even if not, the name Enron should've been an obvious clue.
I was unaware of that, disappointing.
His brand of comedy is very hit-or-miss for me (the best way I can describe it is "smug"), but context drives me to wish him luck in his presumed efforts to turn InfoWars into a literal joke instead of just a figurative one.
I would describe it as absurdism.
> Nothing can stop us now that we’re in charge of a website.
I love that. Like a familiar smell, it triggered in me a long lost memory of the old hacker ethos.
So they are now setting the content on infowars.com? Honestly, I can't tell since everything on that site looks so fake it isn't believable. The onion transition may be hard to detect.
Seems like there will be a new logo with an onion on it, judging from the tote bag merch shown in the article. That's when we'll know, I suppose.
Assuming that the announcement video Ben Collins posted represents the new logo, it's a delightfully pride rainbow-colored InfoWars logo with an onion in place of the 'o'.
https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3mjwx7i...
I visited with my family in rural Missouri recently. Alex Jones and InfoWars is gospel to them. I was amazed at how many times cited him as an authority on various topics. I thought they were joking, but apparently, Obama made a promise with his father before his passing that he would destroy the United States. Oh, and of course, Obama is Satan, and Trump was sent by God to protect us all. Of course.
Grew up in Springfield, posting this from California. There's a reason for that.
It’s the weather, right? Not a big fan of west coast politics compared to back home but I’ll tolerate it in exchange for the sun :)
The winters ain't bad either.
As of even more recently, Jones believes Trump is under demonic influences.
Maybe that explains the video Trump posted
Despite the article, infowars.com at least doesn't really seem to be run by The Onion yet? But I'm looking at that site for the first time so I have no idea.
True. Still needs a judge to sign off, which I kind of doubt will happen.
Can someone put me to speed on it? Who is the onion? Who is info wars? What is happening? I can't comprehend but it feels that I cannot really Google for it
Nothing else matters in the world today
"Tu Stultus Es"
"Drugs Win Drug War"
"History Sighs, Repeats Itself"
and of course...
"SICKOS"
It's called Global Tetrahedron but it has a dodecahedron as a logo/emblem (guessing intentional)
This is a very impressive satire on the Palantir manifesto.
Accidental and ironic, but still impressive.
I looked it up and was not surprised to see the rabid ramblings of a tech bro psychopath (but I repeat myself) with a drug addiction who gleefully admitted to wanting to hunt down Palantir's detractors with AI drones used to spray them with fentanyl-laced urine.
Alex Jones is live right now discussing this
https://banned.video/channel/the-alex-jones-show
https://x.com/AJNlive
I thought the entire point of all of this was that I no longer needed to care what Alex Jones thinks about literally anything.
You're always free to not click on things you don't want to watch.
Does it seem like he has a plan to fight the acquisition again this time?
Alex Jones is a professional liar and is adjudicated as such. What he has to say should rightly be disregarded.
Worth highlighting:
> “The goal for the families we represent has always been to prevent Alex Jones from being able to cause harm at scale, the way he did against them,” said Chris Mattei, the lawyer who argued the Connecticut families’ case in court. The deal with The Onion promises “to significantly degrade his power to do that.”
> The Onion also plans to sell merchandise and share the proceeds with the Sandy Hook families.
Great work by all on this effort.
Finally, competition for Clickhole.
The Onion also owns Clickhole
Like Scientology suing and taking over The Cult Awareness network.
It was barely funny when I read the headline a few years ago. Really weird story, I guess I just don't understand the humor at all. I'd rather stop hearing about InfoWars entirely.
Bear in mind buying it to ruin it is a very real public service. Alex Jones was hoping a conservative ally would buy it and then just continue to let him do what he wants.
Jokes aside, The Onion is basically spending a giant pile of money to burn the website down.
I remember when The KLF burned a million quid. They were being internally consistent. It was artistically relevant.
Most people thought they were insane. Bill Drummond wrote about how it strained his relationship with his kids. You can tell that he regrets it.
Personally I think a million bucks to lease a domain name for a year is a really terrible business decision. You might be able to argue that it's going to victims but you could almost certainly just park that money into an interest-bearing account and do better for those victims.
But it's also been obvious from the beginning (starting with Jones' own comments) that nobody really gives a shit about these families and they're just props in other peoples' theater show.
The cost seems really high. On the other hand I thought bringing the Onion back as a print comedy newspaper was insane too, so possibly they know things I don’t. There is a business plan here, even if it’s a dumb one.
If benefitting the victims is a goal, then clearly sending them money now is more valuable than sending them interest-borne money later.
If the victims don't benefit from the money now, they can bear their own interest. Time-value, etc.
I get the impression that beyond the money from the sale, the victims would very much like Alex Jones control of InfoWars to end. This accomplishes both of those things. I don't generally find The Onion that funny, and probably will never visit the new InfoWars, but I'm eternally grateful that they were willing to step in and do this. Because someone had to. A "good business decision" is to let Alex run his show if you buy the brand, but that's still a win for him.
Not only would another owner likely allow Alex Jones to continue to operate, but The Onion can truly salt the earth around Alex Jones' business. If they own the InfoWars trademarks... if they own The Alex Jones Show as a trademark? They can potentially shut down Alex Jones' future works if they violate InfoWars' trademarks and intellectual property. They can sue him if he says something defamatory about the new InfoWars. One of the perks here is that The Onion is well-versed in free speech rights, intellectual property rights, and trademark law. They already have lawyers good at this stuff.
The Onion can be a truly significant thorn in Jones' side, the way most other outcomes for this could not. I'm guessing the new site won't be that funny, but thankfully I don't really care about the "art".
The original goal was to put money in the hands of the Sandy Hook victims without the website continuing on to another set of deplorable owners.
The Onion's humor is like that drawing of the angry crying guy wearing a laughing face mask. It's only "funny" if you're pissed off about something.
Who isn’t pissed off about something in 2026?
Yeah people are, and they do make fun of some things I'm pissed off about too, but that doesn't make it funny. It's an "only-if" relationship.
Finally, wojak invocation on HN
Proud to be part of this historic moment, took until 2026 but better late than never
Woo hoo, sounds like some of their jokes landed and you just couldn't take it. Do you only appreciate humor if it's punching down?
Do you have any funny jokes about the children who were "killed" at Sandy Hook or the crisis actors who pretended to be their parents and mourn for them that you want to share with the class?
That's the thing, their jokes don't land. Idk what the Sandy Hook shooting has to do with this, the Onion has been around for much longer.
> Idk what the Sandy Hook shooting has to do with this, the Onion has been around for much longer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
> 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
They've reprinted / reposted that article 39 times since 2014 (Sandy Hook was in 2012)
Gun violence is something that the editorial board of The Onion feels strongly about.
Ok so they feel strongly about gun violence, where's the humorous part here?
No actually the thing is that their jokes landed well enough to make you dislike them, because the joke's on you.
What joke is on me? Three people and counting are miffed by what I said, maybe the joke is on them.
>With this new InfoWars, we will democratize psychological torture, welcoming brutal and sadistic ideas from everyone, even the very stupidest among us. It will be like the Manhattan Project, only instead of a bomb, we will be building a website.
This is hilarious.
Please can someone correct my opinion on this because I'm sure I'm missing something.
I find it crazy that in the US you can't take an opinion on something without risking being bankrupted because that thing you said is later proven untrue and that it hurt someone's feelings – feeling which in the US have a monetary value of billions apparently.
I agree that the media should be evidence based and it's bad when the media is presenting things which are clearly false, but I also think that sometimes the evidence is misleading and speculation can be useful to get to the truth.
Surely cases like this show that it's simply far too dangerous to report on something in the US which might both upset people and could later proven to be false?
We have a similar issue in the UK where even when it's widely understood that someone is abusing kids, if they're famous our media basically can't say anything because they'll risk being sued. While our law is well intentioned, it seems that it really just suppresses the free exchange of information which has repeatedly led to harms against children. The speculation while often harmful is sometimes useful.
I just feel like there's a middle ground here. Maybe you can sue, but perhaps your feelings are only worth a few hundred thousand pounds? I get the US is much richer than the UK but being sued for billions for being wrong and hurting peoples feelings just seems insane. And I agree Jones was completely wrong to have said what he said.
Why am I wrong on this? I hate holding this opinion and would like it changed.
Yes, your understanding is not aligned with the facts of the case. This was not close to an unfair abridgement of Mr. Jones's rights.
Timeline: 1. Alex Jones hosts guests on his show questioning if a mass school shooting was a falsified event. 2. The controversy drove a massive increase in traffic to his videos. 3. This encouraged Mr. Jones to host additional guests who made direct claims that parents of the slain children were actors hired by the US government. 4. Those parents received intense harassment and death threats. Many had to move away from their homes. 5. The parents sent many requests to the Infowars show asking Mr. Jones to stop claiming they were actors; Infowars did not stop. 6. The parents sued. 7. Infowars failed to comply with standard evidence discovery requests. 8. After many attempts by the court to achieve compliance, the defense moved for a default judgement. The court agreed. 9. At the award hearing, plaintiffs provided evidence that Mr. Jones moved assets out of Infowars to a company owned by his parents specifically to evade paying the judgment. 10. The jury at the award hearing awarded the plaintiffs about $1B in damages. Rationale was to discourage Mr. Jones from continuing to libel family members impacted by mass shootings.
An opinion would be something like "I think it's good that those kids were shot".
You could say that all day and people would not like you, but no one could do anything about it.
What Alex Jones did was deny reality. He suggested that the victims did not exist. He suggested the event did not happen and the grieving parents were government-hired actors. He riled up his listeners and effectively sent them after people. He did this in spite of knowing what he was saying on his show was not true. That was a large part of things, that Alex Jones was aware he was spreading misinformation.
Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion".
The globalists won, Hallelujah!
There are some folks really upset about us not platforming a maniac. If you feel like stopping Alex Jones from being actively harmful is a slippery slope directly to something you might say, boy, I would want to take a minute and think that through.
Don't read too much into it, it's just a joke, I'm very happy with Jones losing his platform. I thought I could add to the Onion's satire with a bit of my own, but forgot how hard it is sometimes to tell apart humor from Fox News-induced mental illness. Sorry about that.
Do you think there is an acceptable third option between "the globalists winning" and "it is OK for a single media outlet to wage a war on the grieving parents of the victims of a mass murder"?
My comment was just a silly joke, reusing some of Jones phrasing. I never fully grasped who "the globalists" were in his mind, and why they were seemingly behind everything he dislikes, but I always found if funny. I'm just happy he lost his platform, and I find the Onion's piece rather amusing.
I thought I could add to it with this dumb joke but I forgot about the fact that Jones still has a sizeable following, and it's sometimes hard to tell if someone is just kidding or an insane lunatic. I'm in the former camp (I hope).
Poe's Law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
The insane size of the judgement against Jones for Sandy Hook just shows they were looking to make someone pay for the dead kids and with the killer dead, the guy defaming the dead kids (and by proxy of that, as the legal argument goes, their parents, since obviously the parents were rightly claiming otherwise) was the nearest asshole in sight.
Probably the most notorious lesson that when an asshole does a terrible thing and nothing can be extracted from him, you shouldn't go out of your way to do something dumb enough that everyone who already had their pitchforks out justifies you being the scapegoat instead.
It is not clear to me what you are saying or what you are defending/ decrying. Ridiculing Alex Jones and the mindset that has run through a couple of centuries of American cranks is about all there is to do to draw some of the venom out. You make it sound like Alex Jones was simply a victim of being wrong about a fact.
The amount of the judgment seems reasonable for years of harassment against a bunch of people, all done for a profit, plus a bunch of egregious misbehavior in court.
Reasonable by what metric? I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people. Is it reasonable because Alex Jones can afford it (hint: he can't, not even if he wasn't hiding his money)?
This judgement ends up being more akin to punishing him by forcing him off of his platform, which is actually unconstitutional even for a shitbag like him.
To be clear, you don't actually have a constitutional right to slander people.
Yes, by definition, you do. It is not illegal to slander anyone. The police cannot arrest you for this, you can't be convicted and sentenced to anything.
Those people won a tort (in theory), because he caused them damages that he was responsible for making remedying.
When corporations are sued, they tend to take the lawsuits seriously, which is probably a big factor in why their outcomes are so different than Jones'.
Also idk what corporation has gone out of its way to slander innocent families
I mean, yeah, but the subtext of the preceding comment was that corporations have done stuff like Bhopal, which while not as luridly evil as what Jones did was still objectively worse as a civil offense cognizable to a court of law.
But when a corporation does something like Bhopal, you can generally count on them hyperprofessionally attending to every detail of the ensuring tort case. Unlike Jones, who at literally every step of the legal process thumbed his nose at the court, including, at one point, attempting to boycott the process outright.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
> Unlike Jones, who at literally every step of the legal process thumbed his nose at the court, including, at one point, attempting to boycott the process outright.
Legal Eagle and the commentary on the cell phone evidence (3 years ago) https://youtu.be/x-QcbOphxYs
In a criminal case, if you refuse to cooperate, ignore warrants, etc, the state can and will send in the police to arrest you and continue their investigation while you sit in jail.
In a civil case, that power doesn't exist; opposing council cannot order your arrest or send the police in to break down your door and execute a subpoena. This presents an obvious question: if there is no way to compel cooperation in a civil trial, why would anyone play along if they were guilty? To provide an incentive to do so, civil trials have sanctions, penalties issued by the judge to the offending party, which ratchet up in accordance with the severity of the misconduct displayed in the proceedings.
Alex Jones/Free Speech Systems/Infowars repeatedly withheld and spoliated evidence, ignored subpoenas, and sent woefully unprepared corporate representatives to depositions in direct defiance of court orders. Their conduct was so egregious that two judges independently handed down default judgements: for refusing to cooperate at every step of the way, they lost the right to argue their case in front of a jury, so the juries would just decide how much Jones et al owed in restitution.
If the juries felt Jones et al had been wronged and there was no real merit to the case, they would have awarded the Sandy Hook families $1 judgements (look up nominal damages, there is lots of precedence for this), but in both cases, the juries felt Jones' conduct was so egregious that they gave large judgements to the Sandy Hook families.
In both trials, the judges went out of their way to go along with all the dumb arguments FSS's council was putting forth to ensure no appeal could ever succeed on the merits. All Jones had to do was give the appearance of cooperation and then he would have been allowed to argue to the jury that he was innocent, but he couldn't reign in his worst impulses, fired every competent attorney he had, and was left with Norm Pattis and Andino Reynal, attorneys who have no qualms catering to a client in ways that might jeopardize their law licenses.
Defamation law is full of absolute snakes, attorneys laser-focused on money with no morals who will happily do things like put rape victims on the stand to interrogate them on every detail and turn innocent misrecollections into wins for the rapist. That Alex couldn't keep one of those around speaks volumes.
Alex sacrificed his right to a trial to determine his innocence. He then declared bankruptcy because he knew he would never be able to pay for the consequences of his actions, and when you declare chapter 7 bankruptcy (personal and corporate), everything is for sale, including the news outlet he was the majority owner of.
Alex isn't being silenced (and even if he were it's not the government doing it so the constitution doesn't play a role here). His Twitter account has been ruled not an asset that can be auctioned, and he's been working to shift his audience over there so he can continue his grift, with his merch now being peddled by a company owned by one of his friends, Bigly, which will likely be untouchable by the bankruptcy court, so he's not going to end up on the streets.
I'm curious why you'd bring up those corporate crimes and not think that the obvious response would be that corporate crimes obviously need greater liability, Rather than Jones needing less.
It's not the court's problem that Jones won't be able to afford to broadcast his messages so broadly after this judgment. I guess he'll have to use the same tools as the rest of us now.
> I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people. Is it reasonable because Alex Jones can afford it (hint: he can't, not even if he wasn't hiding his money)?
If there is one thing courts do not like, it is people thinking they are above the law and defy the courts. Jones was dumb enough to do so multiple times. FAFO.
As for the high monetary amount: that was dealt by a jury, not a judge - the system the US (for whatever long gone reason) still seems to prefer over career professionals. Juries are even worse to piss off, and juries have been known to bring the hammer down on parties showing egregiously bad conduct - see e.g. the McDonald's hot coffee case, which partially ended up being (for the time) pretty expensive because McDonald's claimed utter BS in court that they knew was wrong. Jones' conduct was similar: he kept blathering stuff he knew was untrue and, on top of that, his army of suckers kept terrorizing people with Jones knowing about that and doing not even lip service to rein the suckers in.
I was a juror once for a civil case that lead to some fairly significant harm. It was a very odd experience to have to put a dollar to it at the end. The plaintiff attorney gave us numbers for the damages but the defense at the end just basically said "if you decide against my client, just be reasonable" which means we had to just kind of put a dollar value to everything. Some of it like estimates of labor lost were easy, but having to put a dollar value to the pain of a severe injury wasn't something any of us really felt prepared for.
those judgements should be higher too
I think this one was high because alex jones harassed parents of murdered children to the point where they had to move out of the town their children were buried in. These people were harassed to the point of being afraid to visit the graves of their children. Sometimes examples need to be set in egregious cases.
Alex Jones did not, as far as the evidence we have seen, harass the parents. Alex Jones did not direct anyone to harass the parents.
Some of his viewers used Jones' statements as justification for harassments.
Interestingly, as far as I know, nothing was pursued against the people harassing the parents. They went after the rich guy saying lies they didn't like, then depended on the fact no one besides the defense wants to side with someone who says such shockingly vicious lies about the facts surrounding dead kids.
The defense - including Jones himself - also did a very poor job, so it's debatable whether anyone at all wanted a different outcome.
That's understating things rather substantially. He ignored court orders. He continued to defame the plaintiffs during the trial, including a statement on air that one of the plaintiff's death by suicide was actually a murder and part of the conspiracy.
If you were sued and your objective was to lose as badly as possible and get as harsh a judgment as possible, it would look a lot like what Jones did here.
That might have been his objective really. All that talk about the govt being after us for years, and now he can point to them forcing him to sell everything off, while he still maintains the same fanbase. But what can they do, he really deserved the judgement.
the lies they didn't like lead to the harassment, it's not at all complicated
free speech doesn't absolve you of responsibility for the damages your words cause, despite not causing them directly
Jones wasnt telling or encouraging his listeners to harass the Sandy Hook families. That's internet nut jobs. Jones didnt even come up with the theory, he just talked about it on his show.
This is basically a free speech issue akin to the JFK shooting theories.
But Jones did profit from the traffic and thus ad revenue that controversy stirred up, this case is about that* not about Jones right to have an opinion, but how Jones weilded it at the expense of others, no less*.
He didn't just talk about it, he claimed it. "Yeah, so, Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured" - Alex Jones
Edit: Someone else posted a doc with a bunch of quotes on this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47839299
Some more here: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alex_Jones
> Such is the InfoWars I envision: An infinite virtual surface teeming with ads. Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object, free radical misinformation, sentences and images so poorly thought out that they are unhealthy even to view for just a few seconds.
In any age where Polymarket didn't already exist, we'd have called this satire.
It's still not as bad as the actual InfoWars, which if I recall was selling "Alex Jones Natural" supplements, which were mostly just stuff like regular iodine tablets with a massive market and a cool name like "Survival Shield X-2."
Maybe that could help fund The Onion. Why should the rich on the right have a monopoly on swindling the poor on the right with fake supplements?
That assholes are kicking rubes is not a good reason for you to kick rubes.
If we were judging sites on misinformation/conspiracies and the people that are hurt by it, BlueSky would be shutdown immediately and liquidated. so would most of the mainstream news sites.
The only reason Alex Jones was targeted is because he helped get Trump elected.
It's also very odd that the military basically took over the town after Sandy Hook and it was bulldozed less than a year after the mass shooting:
https://www.npr.org/2013/10/25/240242673/newtown-residents-d...
https://infowarslawsuit.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/1-Oct...
The Onion running Infowars sounds objectively less entertaining even if you believe EVERYTHING Alex says is a lie.
You want to be associated with toxic waste IP?
Why? You're not going to attract any of the audience. You likely could have just chose a new name and built whatever you want to do with this.
It may be helpful context to understand that The Onion is a satirical publication, and that them taking over InfoWars may itself be part of the joke.
The Onion and Mr Beast are the highbrow and lowbrow versions of the same niche: absurdism, spectacle and indifference without staying power. Since there's such low retention, the content must be weighted to constant new conversions and new reconversions.
Edit: if you have the time, watch their youtube series Sex House, Helcomb County Municipal Lake Dredge Appraisals and Dr. Good (approx 75 minutes each). There's no nudity, gore or cursing, just some very clever themes about the parallels between television and hell that are still relevant right now, if not more so.
The Onion has been around since 1988, so...decent staying power.
And hasn't had any cultural relevance aside from this stunt for just about the last decade.
It's like saying that National Lampoon is still relevant.
They have a larger audience for their print version than the Boston Globe. It's the 12th largest paper by circulation in the country!
https://www.fastcompany.com/91502944/the-onion-most-innovati...
This is likely because The Onion was purchased by Univision in 2016 and then bounced around in a couple more acquisitions over the next decade. Ben Collins got the helm in 2024 and has been doing, in my opinion, a fantastic job with the brand.
do you have a rubric to share for qualifying for cultural relevance?
65,000 print subscribers (on par with the Boston Globe!) and 300% revenue growth last year suggests they're doing okay.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91502944/the-onion-most-innovati...
When I worked at an ISP we had a lot of landline phone customers too and I'm sure they will continue to for a long time.
At least as long as their current customers keep breathing.
You can run a business off inertia/nostalgia for quite a long time.
People are confused about what I said. Success and Relevance are not the same thing. National Lampoon still has a business too, but I doubt that any of you have seen a new movie of theirs since Van Wilder/Repli-Kate came out in 2002.
A million dollars a year for a domain name is quite a lot. And I know what was paid for the sales of some big (in the keyword marketing/leadgen space) domain names...Sale, not lease.
> You can run a business off inertia/nostalgia for quite a long time.
They only reintroduced print editions in 2024 after an 11 year break. Those 65,000 print subscribers are all people who decided they wanted to start paying money for The Onion in the last 2 years.
If "people are confused" I think it's because you are rejecting empirical evidence that The Onion is relevant without offering any counter-evidence of your own. Is it possible it's just no longer relevant to you personally? (I myself am a proud print subscriber...)
Yeah some people do like feet.
The context for those print subscribers is that this isn't a "had the subscription since the 2010s" They discontinued their print edition in 2013.
Those 65,000 subscriptions are all people who subscribed since 2024 when it was relaunched.
It may be nostalgia, but it is not people who forgot that they had a subscription. It's people who signed up to pay money in the last two years.
Inertia doesn't really seem like it would lead to 300% YoY growth...
OTOH, National Lampoon hasn't put out a magazine since 1998 or a film since 2015 (and that was a retrospective on the magazine).
I guess I'd agree that, in absolute terms, The Onion might be less of a cultural force than it was in 2005 (say), but part of that has to be that culture is a lot more long-tailed: music, movies, and TV aren't dominated by a handful of works either.
> People are confused about what I said.
Because you're saying very confusing things. What does National Lampoon have to do with anything?
> And hasn't had any cultural relevance aside from this stunt for just about the last decade.
You're right! Their own claim is that it's insane they're still around, because they find it hard to match the absurdity of the last 10 years.
You say "without staying power" but I still remember and frequently cite these ancient Onion article headlines:
I mean sure, it's a satirical news site and it's got a constant stream of new content, much of which is forgettable. But that's true of every other news site too. The gems make it stick.Don’t forget the perennial article about gun violence they use after every mass shooting.
Stopping the current owner of infowars from continuing is a valid "why". What happens after doesn't matter.
That's the joke.
No offense, but the humor of it has gone right over your head. Building an InfoWars clone isn't nearly as funny as acquiring the real one just to mock it.
I guess.. But renting a 4th reich site seems far darker than they might be used to and likely to make them the butt of the joke when Hitler's testtube clone gets elected from it in 35 years.
If thats true, seems like it is 10000x more critical they purchase right to the infowars hiltler cloning facilities and features
Exactly. Buying would at least mean you aren't revamping the value of the site for some next renter in a deeply cynical age where making fun of the orange pedo at a press club ball could cause WWIII.
The money goes to Jones's judgment creditors from Sandy Hook. If not The Onion, it would be some actual right wing media organization...
they should make a clone with a cooler theme and call it KnowledgeBattles.org
Knowledge Fight podcast already took the “synonym name” route. https://knowledgefight.com/
They’re taking advantage of the name recognition to raise money for the families victimized by the horrible people who used to own and run the site.
Maybe it's just me but I don't see much humor in this. His brand and assets may have been liquidated, but he's still doing his show and it remains popular. The only people who really won in this saga are, as usual, the lawyers.
The reason InfoWars is being sold is because of the bankruptcy proceedings. This is money owed to Sandy Hook families [1], who were the target of the harmful conspiracy theories that caused them further pain and suffering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...
A half decent Board of Directors at The Onion mothership would have asked the question: Is this what we should be spending time and money on?
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-onion-became-one-of-th... ( https://archive.is/hEJhg )
It is growing and containing its messaging that has been going on for over a decade about gun violence.
From the article:
> But on the topic of gun control and gun violence, it is a political issue that Onion staffers clearly, perhaps even deeply, care about.
> Joe Garden, a former Onion writer and features editor who started working at the publication in the ’90s and left in 2012, told The Daily Beast that while most of the editorial staff tended to lean reliably liberal, their political satire was governed by being “against things that we thought were stupid.”
> And as mass shootings increasingly became a tragic and appalling feature of the Obama era, it also became a subject that The Onion could not avoid covering all too routinely. “As more and more shootings happened, it became something that—as an organization that comments on the news—we couldn’t not write stories about…and it kept on growing and growing and growing to the point where [the problem of gun violence] just seemed overwhelming.”
> “Any mass shooting is horrible, but when they just start happening just a few months [apart], it’s mind-boggling,” Garden continued. “And it’s terrifying that so little has been done about it.”
This is very much in continuing that messaging and mission in the way that they know how.
The Onion is owned by the billionaire founder of Twilio, there is no board of directors.
Yes, it is!