Satirical website The Onion announced it has purchased Alex Jones’s InfoWars media platform in a bankruptcy auction this week, dealing a final blow to the conspiracy theorist’s business for repeatedly making false claims about the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting.
The news dropped Thursday morning, two months after a federal bankruptcy judge indicated he would set the auction for November 13 in order for Jones’s company and its assets to be liquidated. The Onion said its bid for an undisclosed sum was approved Wednesday.
The satirical outlet plans to relaunch InfoWars in January, turning it into a parody of itself that mocks “weird internet personalities” who propagate conspiracy theories and sell health supplements. The company was reportedly considering a bid for InfoWars this summer.
“We thought this would be a hilarious joke,” Ben Collins, CEO of Global Tetrahedron, which owns The Onion, told the New York Times. “This is going to be our answer to this no-guardrails world where there are no gatekeepers and everything’s kind of insane.”
Relatives of the Sandy Hook shooting victims won a $1.5 billion defamation lawsuit in 2022 against Jones and InfoWars‘ parent company, Free Speech Systems. The radio personality was accused of peddling the false claim that the shooting, in which a gunman killed 20 first-grade students and six teachers twelve years ago, was a massive hoax designed to get federal gun-control legislation enacted.
The families filed lawsuits in Connecticut, where the school is located, and Texas, where InfoWars is based. The plaintiffs alleged Jones defamed them on his show and inflicted emotional distress. As a result, he was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in damages.
However, Jones has been unable to pay the massive sum. After the verdicts, he filed for bankruptcy in late 2022. In June, a judge ordered the liquidation of Jones’s personal assets so he could pay off the damages. That was the same judge who scheduled the November auction date.
Chris Mattei, a lawyer for the families of the Sandy Hook victims, hailed the satirical outlet’s decision to buy InfoWars as a form of accountability for Jones and his media empire.
“By divesting Jones of InfoWars’ assets, the families and the team at The Onion have done a public service and will meaningfully hinder Jones’s ability to do more harm,” Mattei said.
About an hour after he was informed of the prevailing bid, Jones took to social media to explain that InfoWars will officially shut down.
“I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the U.S. trustee over our bankruptcy this morning, and they said they are shutting us down even without a court order this morning,” Jones said in a video. “The Connecticut democrats with The Onion newspaper bought us.”
He said the episode illustrates how the “tyranny of the New World Order” is “desperate to silence the American people,” whom he called the “resistance.” Jones then went on to film what he believes to be the last show in his Austin studio.