The Onion Buys Alex Jones’ Infowars, Demonstrating the Importance of Independent Media

By Jacob Weindling  |  November 14, 2024 | 11:20am
Photo by Jaredlholt, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Media the onion
The Onion Buys Alex Jones’ Infowars, Demonstrating the Importance of Independent Media

This is not The Onion, well, it is The Onion, but this is real news regarding The Onion. After joining us at Splinter, Jezebel, and AV Club in escaping the clutches of G/O Media, the famed satirical magazine began to rebuild its brand earlier this year, launching a print edition subscribers could get delivered to their homes. Now, they have made their splashiest move yet, acquiring Alex Jones’ insane conspiracy site, InfoWars.

Yes, they really did this. The Onion‘s got a bunch of fucking legends over there.

This comes as a result of Alex Jones’ bankruptcy auction. The right-wing lunatic who helped set the stage for unhinged GOP politics in the digital age finally had his reputation as one of the worst humans alive catch up to him. He was the preeminent conspiracy theorist eschewing any kind of human decency or humanity to question whether 20 children and six adults were murdered at the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. The parents of these children filed lawsuits in Connecticut and Texas alleging that Jones defamed them and inflicted emotional distress, and juries found Jones liable, awarding the families nearly $1.5 billion in total.

Jones filed for bankruptcy in late 2022, and a judge has allowed him to liquidate his assets in a bankruptcy auction to help pay off the verdict. Sandy Hook families who helped deliver the justice that Jones has earned backed The Onion’s purchase of InfoWars, as Chris Mattei, attorney for the Connecticut families said in a statement, “Our clients knew that true accountability meant an end to InfoWars and an end to Jones’ ability to spread lies, pain and fear at scale. By divesting Jones of InfoWars’ assets, the families and the team at The Onion have done a public service and will meaningfully hinder Jones’ ability to do more harm.”

Alex Jones posted a video to Twitter right after the decision, and you can see how his spirit just has been crushed. If you only read the transcript to this video, you’d gloss over it as just more Alex Jones-brained nonsense, but watching it is instructive, as the energy behind his typical “the globalist elite are shutting me down!” rhetoric just isn’t there. This is what a man who knows he has been defeated sounds like.

I cannot wait for this. There is no better owner for InfoWars than The Onion. The absolute unhinged, lead-based supplement-laden conspiracy theory site is an unwitting parody of itself at heart, and Alex Jones stayed true to its general cluelessness to the very end.

I am hearing word that Alex Jones, in true Alex Jones fashion, is reading the press release from our fictitious CEO as fact.

— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) November 14, 2024 at 7:32 AM

Ben Collins, The Onion’s CEO, said “part of the reason we bought InfoWars is because people on Bluesky told us it would be funny to buy InfoWars. And those people were right. This is the funniest thing that has ever happened.”

This is so damn funny, but it’s also a serious example of the value of independent media. The owners of mainstream media outlets would never do something like this. They’re likelier to publish an op-ed from Alex Jones than to back a parody of him. Satire is one of the best weapons against disinformation agents, authoritarians and aspiring autocrats, as it pierces the self-serious veil of these revanchist assholes in a way they are wholly unequipped to combat.

Taking Alex Jones’ inherent absurdity and placing it in the hands of talented writers and content creators will provide an entertaining counterweight to the entire GOP media ecosystem that is fundamentally no different from Alex Jones’ InfoWars at this point. How effective it will be in actually revealing its absurdities to InfoWars’s longtime audience is unknown, but going forward, The Onion’s InfoWars will serve as a beacon of hope that we both can defeat the unhinged right-wing drowning America in lies, while also relentlessly making fun of them.

 
Join the discussion...