I can’t believe this.

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.

Unlocked link for the NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/business/infowars-alex-jo...

I’m surprised they’ve said it so confidently given how it completely collapsed last time…

> Nothing can stop us now that we’re in charge of a website.

Somehow I don't think the confidence is meant to be taken at exactly face value.

> Seems like it's still not theirs until a judge signs off on it.

Does that mean their use of the branding and claims of ownership could be illegal or would it be covered under the first ammendment?

Misinformation is funny now! This is all part of the joke- they were a funny fake news site that bought an unfunny fake news site, now their fake news doesn't need to be funny and that's what makes it funny.

Maybe you're not highbrow enough for this...

> Tim Heidecker, one of the comedians behind “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, has been hired to serve as “creative director of Infowars.” He said he initially plans to parody Mr. Jones’s “whole modus operandi.”

> 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.

My favorite that I post every May 5th is Hurricane Ashley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWQN5-Top6g

Seems like there will be a new logo with an onion on it, judging from the tote bag merch shown in the article. That's when we'll know, I suppose.

I visited with my family in rural Missouri recently. Alex Jones and InfoWars is gospel to them. I was amazed at how many times cited him as an authority on various topics. I thought they were joking, but apparently, Obama made a promise with his father before his passing that he would destroy the United States. Oh, and of course, Obama is Satan, and Trump was sent by God to protect us all. Of course.

to be honest I doubt anyone will notice that much of a difference, infowars is so nuts that any sane person would think it parody

True. Still needs a judge to sign off, which I kind of doubt will happen.

I reallyyyyy want a gay frogs t-shirt, I would wear the hell out of that. That entire rant and meme it spawned is the only good thing to come out of that man

I looked it up and was not surprised to see the rabid ramblings of a tech bro psychopath (but I repeat myself) with a drug addiction who gleefully admitted to wanting to hunt down Palantir's detractors with AI drones used to spray them with fentanyl-laced urine.

The Onion also owns Clickhole

Bear in mind buying it to ruin it is a very real public service. Alex Jones was hoping a conservative ally would buy it and then just continue to let him do what he wants.

Jokes aside, The Onion is basically spending a giant pile of money to burn the website down.

The original goal was to put money in the hands of the Sandy Hook victims without the website continuing on to another set of deplorable owners.

Alex Jones lives rent free in peoples heads. They mistake a phyrric victory for a real victory.

The Onion's humor is like that drawing of the angry crying guy wearing a laughing face mask. It's only "funny" if you're pissed off about something.

The Onion is a long standing satirical news site. They run crazy stories intended to make readers laugh. Infowars was a disinformation/conspiracy site that ran crazy headlines to outrage their audience. The owner of Infowars was sued into oblivion for saying the Sandy Hook school shooting was faked as a pretense to pass gun control. So now crazy conspiracy site is sold to satire site to help pay off the massive judgment against them. Basically a merger of the two fakest news sites on the Internet except now we can all just laugh.

The Onion used to be a humorous satire news site before wokenites took over.

It's still not as bad as the actual InfoWars, which if I recall was selling "Alex Jones Natural" supplements, which were mostly just stuff like regular iodine tablets with a massive market and a cool name like "Survival Shield X-2."

Yes, your understanding is not aligned with the facts of the case. This was not close to an unfair abridgement of Mr. Jones's rights.

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 key element you’re missing is that the lawsuit accused Alex Jones of knowing that he was lying. I.e., it’s not that he was speculating — it’s that he knew he wasn’t telling the truth.

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.)

> and that it hurt someone's feelings

This is the part where it becomes impossible to have an honest discussion.

Depp v. Heard is another famous US libel case, but more controversial. They ruled that Heard made false claims (not just speculation) that harmed Depp's career, and she intended for it to hurt his reputation. Alex Jones met similar criteria except much worse.

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.

An opinion would be something like "I think it's good that those kids were shot".

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".

I think with Alex Jones in particular it's that people knew he had money, and so they wanted a piece of it. If you're a nobody and you say false things no one cares really. Look at all the randos on X spouting nonsense without repercussions. It didn't help that these people in power don't like him.

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.

Alex Jones is much more entertaining if you imagine he's just really into Warhammer 40K lore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZuYt1QlzMw

alex, apparently, has set up a fall back channel. He's gotta keep hocking those dr. jones naturals boner pills to the boomers.

It may be helpful context to understand that The Onion is a satirical publication, and that them taking over InfoWars may itself be part of the joke.

Stopping the current owner of infowars from continuing is a valid "why". What happens after doesn't matter.

The Onion and Mr Beast are the highbrow and lowbrow versions of the same niche: absurdism, spectacle and indifference without staying power. Since there's such low retention, the content must be weighted to constant new conversions and new reconversions.

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.

That's the joke.

No offense, but the humor of it has gone right over your head. Building an InfoWars clone isn't nearly as funny as acquiring the real one just to mock it.

they should make a clone with a cooler theme and call it KnowledgeBattles.org

They’re taking advantage of the name recognition to raise money for the families victimized by the horrible people who used to own and run the site.

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

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.

The Onion is owned by the billionaire founder of Twilio, there is no board of directors.

Yes, it is!

The reason InfoWars is being sold is because of the bankruptcy proceedings. This is money owed to Sandy Hook families [1], who were the target of the harmful conspiracy theories that caused them further pain and suffering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...