Satirical information publication The Onion has purchased Infowars, the media organisation headed by right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, for an undisclosed value at a court-ordered public sale.
The Onion stated that the bid was secured with the backing of households of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School capturing, who received a $1.5bn (£1.18bn) defamation lawsuit in opposition to Jones for spreading false rumours concerning the bloodbath.
A choose in Texas ordered the public sale in September, and numerous teams – each Jones’s allies and detractors – had recommended they might bid for the corporate.
Jones based Infowars in 1999. He has vowed to proceed broadcasting utilizing a unique platform.
In a rambling video message posted on Thursday morning, Jones referred to as 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 stated. “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 web site and have well-known web humour writers and content material creators.
“We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website,” stated Ben Collins, a former NBC News journalist who’s chief govt of The Onion’s dad or mum firm, in a press release.
The web site additionally 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”.
A lawyer for families of eight of the Sandy Hook victims said the bid had their support.
“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,” lawyer Chris Mattei stated in a press release.
Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie died in the Sandy Hook attack, said: “The world needs to see that having a platform does not mean you are above accountability – the dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for.”
Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control not-for-profit organisation, said it had reached an agreement to advertise on the new site.
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, 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 Jones called the attack “a giant hoax” and in 2015 he said: “Sandy Hook is an artificial, utterly pretend with actors, for my part, manufactured… I knew that they had actors there clearly, however I believed they killed some actual children, and it simply reveals how daring they’re, 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.
He declared chapter in 2022 because the Sandy Hook case made its approach to courtroom, and in June 2024, a choose ordered the liquidation of Jones’s private belongings. This included a multimillion-dollar ranch, different properties, automobiles, boats and weapons, in all totalling round $8.6m based on a courtroom submitting.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c30p1p0j0ddo