Satirical news publication The Onion has bought Infowars, the media organisation headed by right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, for an undisclosed price at a court-ordered auction.
The Onion said that the bid was secured with the backing of families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who won a $1.5b (£1.18b) defamation lawsuit against Jones for spreading false rumours about the massacre.
A judge in Texas ordered the auction in September, and various groups – both Jones’s allies and detractors – had suggested they would bid for the company.
Jones founded Infowars in 1999. He has vowed to continue broadcasting using a different platform.
In a rambling video message posted on Thursday morning, Jones called the takeover a “total attack on free speech”.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen but I’m going to be here until they come in and turn the lights off,” he said. “This is the tyranny of the New World Order, desperate to silence the American people, the mandate of Trump against all the lawfare – they don’t care.”
The Onion plans to rebuild the website and feature well-known internet humour writers and content creators.
“We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website,” said Ben Collins, a former NBC News journalist who is chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, in a statement.
The website also posted a jokey article, saying that Infowars “has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society”.
The article went on to say that the satirical publication “has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars” and “forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars”.
Jones was a fringe figure broadcasting in Austin, Texas in the 1990s and later built an audience of millions with a mix of opinion, speculation and outright fabrication. The company makes most of its money through an online shop selling vitamins and other products.
Over time Infowars was increasingly embraced by Donald Trump’s allies and his supporters. During his first run for president, Trump appeared on Infowars and told Jones: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”
The company’s – and Jones’s – financial difficulties stem from broadcasts made after the December 2012 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Twenty young children and six school staff were killed in the attack.
After the killings, Mr Jones and guests on his broadcasts repeatedly called into question whether the massacre actually occurred, floating conspiracy theories about whether the murders were faked or carried out by government agents.
At one point Mr Jones called the attack “a giant hoax” and in 2015 he said: “Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured… I knew they had actors there clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids, and it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors.”
Believers in the web of conspiracy theories that Jones spun harassed the families of the Sandy Hook victims, in some cases sending them pictures of their dead children or of gravestones and posting their personal information online.
Some travelled to Newtown to “investigate”, and several people have been arrested in connection with harassment of the victims.
Jones later acknowledged that the killings were real and insisted his statements were covered by US free speech protections.
But relatives of the victims won defamation judgements against Jones and his company over his false statements.
Jones declared bankruptcy in 2022 as the Sandy Hook case made its way to court, and in June 2024, a judge ordered the liquidation of Jones’s personal assets – including a multimillion-dollar ranch, other properties, cars, boats and guns, in all totalling around $8.6m (£6.7m) according to a court filing.
By BBC News
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