After the Sandy School Elementary School shooting in 2012, where six adults and 20 young children were murdered by a lone gunman, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones began speculating that the deaths were staged and describing the tragedy as “a giant hoax” orchestrated as part of a plot to seize people’s guns. These false claims – which he later retracted – led to years of harassment for victims’ grieving families, several of whom successfully sued Jones for defamation and walked away with a $1.5 billion payout.
Now however, with the help of satirical news site The Onion, the families have used some of that money to buy out InfoWars – Jones’ hard-right media platform – at a court-ordered auction.
Rather than shutting InfoWars down, The Onion’s CEO Ben Collins has announced plans to relaunch it as a “very funny, very stupid website”, which will feature contributions from established writers at both The Onion and its sister site Clickhole. In a post on BlueSky, he explained that the company had bought the site partly because “people on Bluesky told us it would be funny to buy InfoWars” and “those people were right”.
The Onion also posted a satirical article – titled “Here’s Why I Decided to Buy ‘InfoWars’” which purports to be from Bryce P Tetraeder, the fictional CEO of the site’s fictional parent company. “InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses,” Tetrader writes. “With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal.”
Alex Jones himself is not quite so amused by the situation. In a video message posted earlier today (November 14), he described the buy-out as a “total attack on free speech”, railed against “the tyranny of the New World Order, desperate to silence the American people, the mandate of Trump against all the lawfare – they don’t care,” and promised to remain at InfoWars until they “come in and turn the lights off.”
Although he’s now bankrupt, Jones isn’t going to disappear entirely – he still has a huge audience and has vowed to continue publishing on a different platform. But past a certain level of wealth and influence, it’s rare for someone to experience any consequences whatsoever for the harm they inflict upon other people, so his comeuppance is still something to celebrate. Elon Musk next, please.
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- Source of information and images “dazeddigital”“
