By Daniel Afanasyev
The satirical news outlet The Onion announced Thursday, Nov. 14 that it had won an auction for the news website Infowars, as part of radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ personal bankruptcy case. In its press release, The Onion said that its goal behind the purchase is to “end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor for good.”
The bankruptcy auction of Jones’ assets follows the 2022 decisions of juries in Texas and Connecticut ordering Jones to pay $1.5 billion to the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting victims for spreading conspiracy theories about it being a supposed plot to restrict gun rights.
“The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed in the 2012 shooting in Connecticut, said in a statement provided by his lawyers to the Associated Press.
Jones released his own statement regarding the acquisition on his X account, claiming that he will continue with the platform and called into question the legality of the purchase.
“I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the U.S. Trustee over our bankruptcy this morning, and they said they’re shutting us down even without a court order. The Connecticut Democrats with The Onion newspaper bought us,” Jones said in a video posted to X. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m going to be here until they come in here and turn the lights off.”
The Onion, who bought the Infowars website for an undisclosed amount, said that it had done so with the support of the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, and also signed a “multi-year advertisement agreement” with the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety for the new project, according to its press release.
However, several hours after the announcement was made, Judge Christopher Lopez of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas halted the sale from proceeding until next week in an emergency hearing, citing a lack of transparency in the bidding process.
“We’re all going to an evidentiary hearing and I’m going to figure out exactly what happened,” Lopez said per the Associated Press. “No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction.”
Although it remains to be seen how The Onion’s acquisition of Infowars will be regarded in the evidentiary hearing, The Onion is hopeful in its takeover of the controversial news site.
“We thought it would be a very funny joke if we bought this thing, probably one of the better jokes we’ve ever told,” Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion’s parent company Global Tetrahedron, told the Associated Press. “By the end of the day, it was us or Alex Jones, who could either continue this website unabated, basically unpunished, for what he’s done to these families over the years, or we could make a dumb, stupid website, and we decided to do the second thing.”