Parody news site the Onion says it has a new plan to acquire conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars website, something it has been trying to do since the site first came up for sale two years ago.
“We’re taking something that caused real harm and turning it into something much funnier, and ideally, more useful,” Ben Collins, CEO of the Onion’s parent company Global Tetrahedron, said in a statement provided to CBC News.
Jones declared bankruptcy in 2022 and was forced to liquidate his assets to pay more than $1.4 billion US in legal judgments to the families of 20 students and six staff members who were fatally shot in the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Under a proposal submitted Monday to a state judge in Texas, the Onion would be granted an exclusive, temporary licence to the intellectual property of Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, allowing the outlet to put its own content on the Infowars website and social media accounts.
Collins told the Associated Press the deal could be in place around April 30, if approved by Judge Maya Guerra Gamble in Austin.
He said the Onion plans to turn Infowars into a “comedy network” that parodies the old site, and that Sandy Hook families would receive profits from the site.
He said the Onion has already hired people including Tim Heidecker, one-half of the comedy duo Tim and Eric also known for his work on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim shows.
A former NBC News reporter, Collins said Tuesday on the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out that the Onion has “taken over the InfoWars studio and the IP address and the website and all that stuff.”
He said the Onion had to go ahead with the purchase because no one else was going to.
“There is a moment in your life where you see a bunch of evil shit happening, and you have a chance to stop something that is particularly egregious. And if you walk away from it, I just don’t know why you’re alive,” he said.
A lawyer for the Sandy Hook families who sued Jones in Connecticut said they support the Onion’s plan.
Victims’ families faced harassment
Jones had long claimed the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax staged by the government in an effort to take away people’s guns, and falsely stated the deaths were faked. Many relatives of the victims, along with an FBI agent who responded to the shooting, sued Jones and his company for defamation and infliction of emotional distress.
Relatives testified in court that people they called followers of Jones subjected them to death and rape threats, in-person harassment and abusive comments on social media over the hoax claims.
A jury and judge awarded the families and the FBI agent more than $1.4 billion US in damages. In a similar lawsuit in Texas, the parents of a child killed at Sandy Hook were awarded nearly $50 million US.
Jones appealed both awards. He lost his challenges to the Connecticut judgment, while his appeal of the Texas award is still pending.
InfoWars was put up for auction in November 2024. The Onion bid and won, but Jones and First American United Companies, the Jones-affiliated company, had argued the sale process was tainted because The Onion received too much credit for having the support of families that won large court verdicts against Jones.
On Monday, Global Tetrahedron applied to a Texas court to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property for a monthly fee of $81,000 US. The deal would be for six months, with the right to renew it for another six months.
It still needs to be approved by the court, and Jones would also have the option to appeal.
“I am now in charge of Infowars,” Heidecker said in a video posted to BlueSky that starts with him doing an impression of Jones.
The site plans to parody, among other things, Jones’s penchant for selling dubious health products. Jones brings in millions of dollars annually selling products including dietary supplements and clothing. In 2020, New York State’s Attorney General ordered him to stop selling “fake coronavirus treatments.”
Playing on this, Heidecker said the new site owners are working with a company “that will enable you to turn your urine into into gold.”
Deal ‘won’t stop’ Jones
Jones, meanwhile, has rebranded as The Alex Jones Show.
On his Monday episode, he vowed to fight the licensing proposal in court but acknowledged he could be kicked out of the building on April 30 if it gets approved.
He said he will continue his shows in another studio, and they would air on his X account and other new social media accounts and websites, as well as dozens of radio stations. He will also continue selling merchandise.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
Carmen Celestini, a religious studies lecturer at Waterloo University who studies extremism and conspiracy theories, told CBC News that the deal is “definitely a victory for the parents” of the shooting victims, saying they “haven’t received a single cent” of the money Jones owes them.”
But she says many of Jones’s followers have stuck with him and continued to believe he’s being unfairly targeted, even though Jones himself acknowledged in court that he lied about Sandy Hook.
“It won’t stop Alex Jones,” she said.