In the best possible scenario that could be generated by the AI simulation we’re all living in these days, all the assets of Alex Jones’s conspiracy theory and disinformation factory InfoWars and its parent company “Free Speech Systems” have been purchased by the satirical website The Onion in a bankruptcy auction.
The proceeds of the auction, held Wednesday, will go toward the $1.5 billion judgment in two lawsuits against Jones, in Connecticut and Texas, for defaming the families of the children and teachers murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. For years, Jones claimed the mass shooting was fake and the families all “crisis actors” in a conspiracy to take away all of America’s precious, precious guns. Idiots who believed the lies subjected the families to endless harassment and threats, forcing some to move from their homes and go into hiding.
In an especially sweet bit of justice, the lawyers for the Sandy Hook families in the Connecticut case worked with The Onion in preparing its successful bid. The purchase price was not disclosed. The New York Times reports that The Onion plans to shutter the InfoWars site and bring it back online in January
as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements, Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in an interview. […]
“We thought this would be a hilarious joke,” Mr. Collins said. “This is going to be our answer to this no-guardrails world where there are no gatekeepers and everything’s kind of insane.”
God (or the Simulation’s version of God) bless you, Ben Collins.
The relaunched Onion-InfoWars will have as its sole “advertiser” the gun control nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety, which was founded by families of Sandy Hook victims. Everytown President John Feinblatt said in a statement that he hopes the arrangement will “reach new audiences ready to hold the gun industry accountable for contributing to our nation’s gun violence epidemic.”
The Onion has long been an outlet for the frustration Americans feel about our insane politics of guns, where the National Rifle Association can seemingly kill even the most timid efforts to prevent the obscene amount of blood shed on the altar of the Second Amendment. That’s what led The Onion in 2014 to create its painfully evergreen headline “’No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” which was first published in response to the Isla Vista killings, in which a creepy incel murdered six people and wounded 14 others. The headline has been published entirely too often since, culminating in The Onion filling its entire front page with reprints of all 21 previous iterations the day after the Robb Elementary massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022.
So yes, this is a good thing. It’s especially relevant because Collins, who became Onion CEO in April, had up to then been an NBC News reporter focusing on online disinformation and rightwing conspiracy theories, a post where he frequently reported on Jones. Heck, you could say he was almost an InfoWars intern, albeit without being so close to the product that it could infect him.
Alex Jones got on video this morning and whined about how cruel this was, and that the site would be shut down “even without a court order,” which isn’t necessary because the whole goddamned auction was the result of the bankruptcy case that Jones sought to avoid paying his victims. It’s like complaining that I flushed my toilet this morning without an addendum to my lease agreement. Very much like that.
In a beautiful fake editorial today, the fictional “publisher” of The Onion, “Bryce P. Tetraeder,” offered this explanation of why InfoWars fits perfectly into the Onion’s “family”:
Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.
Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.
The editorial dismissed the previous owner of InfoWars as “a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name” and noted that Jones’s vitamin business would not continue under the new regime (true) because such miraculous longevity and virility pills were too good to waste on the masses, and will instead be boiled down into “a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal” (truth undetermined).
It is a great day for satire, capped by Collins acknowledging on Bluesky that yes indeed, real media organizations have contacted The Onion requesting interviews with the imaginary Bryce Tetraeder, who Collins explained was unavailable because he’s “on his superyacht on his way to do a quality control check at one of 43,000 global puppy mills.”
We can now only look forward to Republicans demanding an audit of Tetraeder for his unconstitutional suppression of Jones’s First Amendment rights, not to mention The Onion’s support of Planned Parenthood’s luxurious Abortionplex.
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