Satirical news outlet The Onion has inked another deal for InfoWars, the website founded by right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones who was sued into bankruptcy several years ago by families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre.
The Onion wants to convert the site into a parody of itself and has the support of some of the families, who secured a record $1.4 billion defamation verdict in a Connecticut court. Jones had claimed that the 2012 massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax and staged and his followers subjected the families to years of harassment and death threats.
The initial sale didn’t fly with the bankruptcy judge. The new agreement is structured differently and would see The Onion licensing the InfoWars website from the court-appointed manager of the site, Gregory Milligan.
On Monday, Milligan asked a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court, which is overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve the deal, according to The New York Times, which first reported the news.
It calls for The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, to pay $81k a month to license Infowars.com and associated intellectual property for six months, with an option to renew for another six. Judge Maya Guerra Gamble must approve the deal and Jones has the right to appeal, the NYT said. Meanwhile, he continues to operate Infowars.com and host The Alex Jones Show.
Global Tetrahedron, run by CEO Ben Collins, acquired The Onion in 2024. In a post today, spoof CEO Bryce P. Tetraeder wrote: “Today I can finally say the sweetest nine or 10 words in the English language: Global Tetrahedron has completed its plan to control InfoWars.com.”
“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.”
“The InfoWars of tomorrow will converge into a swirling vortex of content about content, talent acquiring talent, rings of concentric media mergers processing all human artistry into one endlessly digestible slurry. This will be a dank, sunless place, one where panic and capital feed on each other like twins in the womb of a hulking, unknowable monster—a monster known by many names, but which I like to call modern-day America.”
“All of this is to say that I believe in us. I believe that with the new InfoWars, we can alchemize the pioneering spirit of amateur inquiry, the profit-maximizing drive of corporations, and the cold mental clarity that comes only with disciplined daily ingestion of mind- and body-altering chemicals. If we can do that, what other great things can we do together?” the post reads.
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