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 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.
"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"
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]
I don't see how that's a laughing matter.
> Trump Responds To Controversial Image Of Himself As Jesus, Says It Actually Depicted Him As A Doctor & Slams “Fake News” For The Misinterpretation
Had I not already heard this story via the mainstream media on this side of the Atlantic, this could easily be another satirical headline. With Trump as President, Poe’s law now covers reporting on facts – not just expressions of opinion.
"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"
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.
I'm surprised you're surprised.
Somehow I don't think the confidence is meant to be taken at exactly face value.
Does that mean their use of the branding and claims of ownership could be illegal or would it be covered under the first ammendment?
Maybe you're not highbrow enough for this...
> 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 love it.
In case you didn't know, the creators of Birds aren't real rug pulled and stole millions with their crypto coin.
As opposed to the current factual information?
—-
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
I love that. Like a familiar smell, it triggered in me a long lost memory of the old hacker ethos.
https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3mjwx7i...
When they ask about it, throw a bunch of breathless praise on Stallman hacking the laser printer, building an OS from scratch, predicting DRM, fighting against cellphone surveillance, etc.
Tell them you'll send them a link. Then link them to the Alex Jones interview with Richard Stallman. (It's a pretty good interview, btw.)
It's like hiding broccoli in a chocolate bar they were going to eat anyway.
In any age where Polymarket didn't already exist, we'd have called this satire.
"Drugs Win Drug War"
"History Sighs, Repeats Itself"
and of course...
"SICKOS"
> “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.
This is hilarious.
Accidental and ironic, but still impressive.
Jokes aside, The Onion is basically spending a giant pile of money to burn the website down.
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.
If the victims don't benefit from the money now, they can bear their own interest. Time-value, etc.
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".
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?
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.
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 plaintiffs moved for a default judgement. The court accepted.
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.
The award hearing was exceptionally dramatic and theatrical. The defense was repeatedly caught in lies and accidentally sent evidence to the plaintiff's lawyer, revealing Mr. Jones's perjury.
The prosecution even told them that they had completely fucked up and did they intend to send everything, and the defense said "Yes". Then when these messages were brought up in court, the defense tried to say that they couldn't be allowed because they were private correspondence between them and their client. To which the prosecution supplied their conversation with the defense showing that tried to make them aware and gave them a chance to correct their error.
It was a monumental fuck up.
To quote Jones:
“We’ve clearly got people where it’s actors playing different parts of different people. I’ve looked at it and undoubtedly there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it.”
That isn’t even phrased as a “what if” — it’s asserting that Sandy Hook was staged. It’s framed as a truth, not a possibility, and the jury found that Alex Jones knew it wasn’t true when he was saying it.
Why so large? A few reasons. First, this was for 26 families, so a substantial number of people. Second, we’re not just talking emotional damages — we’re talking harassment that these folks received as a result of Jones’ lies. Third, a big chunk of the damages were punitive. Alex Jones has a history of lying to expand his audience, recklessly ignoring the effects of those lies. A judge decided that the verdict needed to be big enough to discourage Jones from continuing to lie.
(Arguably that didn’t work.)
I think the deliberate maliciousness of it should bare more punishment, but I still think $1B is extremely unreasonable.
It's also absurd to me that a judge should have the right to make up an arbitrarily big number as a means to inflect a secondary punishment. $1 million is discouragement, $1 billion is an attempt to destroy the business and his life. While I have no sympathy for Jones, I still find this problematic if what you're saying is true.
They have the ability to determine punitive damages within guidelines (many states have caps, for example), and if the defendant feels the damages are unreasonable they have every right to appeal to a higher court. Eventually the Supreme Court may make an unappealable decision, but the appeals process has to stop somewhere.
And at some point society needs a way to tell people who ignore lesser consequences that they don't get to participate in that society any more. In this case I think Alex Jones crossed enough malicious lines to deserve it; he's in bad shape because he's the kind of person who accuses school shooting survivors of fraud even though he knew he wasn't true! He had every chance in the world to back off and apologize, but he didn't. He tried to avoid facing judgement by hiding behind bankruptcy. He is a very bad human being.
Now, is that always the case for this kind of judgement? Nope, sometimes the system fails. Some people would say Gawker is an example of that failure. I am not totally sure about that one, but even if it is... I'm reluctant to toss out an entire system unless it's a systemic problem. And Alex Jones experiencing consequences for lying for profit does not seem, to me, to be evidence of a systemic problem.
Remember when BBC edited someone's speech to call citizens to storm and riot at a certain building?
This is the part where it becomes impossible to have an honest discussion.
True though, you could be held liable if you used what you thought was real evidence to ruin someone's reputation, only to find out that it's false. I think it's on you to be careful of that.
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".
> Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion".
I agree. I'm disagreeing purely on whether $1 billion is a reasonable fine for deliberately lying. Not on whether he is guilty.
It's dangerous to say false things and have a lot of money. People in power will use it as an excuse to take your money away, unless you're allied with them, of course.
Between this takeover, and Trump’s BRUTAL takedown of AJ a few days ago, karma seems to be catching up with that shit peddling, abusive bottom-feeder scum that is AJ.
Here is to them eating each other, and choking on it.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/knowledge-fight/id1192...
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.
Couldn't resist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...
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.
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.
It's like saying that National Lampoon is still relevant.
- Drugs now legal if user is gainfully employed
- Top 10 Genocides of the 20th Century (Infographic)
- Cycle of Abuse Running Smoothly