Seems like it's still not theirs until a judge signs off on it.
That sale was scuttled by a bankruptcy court. Now, The Onion has re-emerged with a new plan: licensing the website from Gregory Milligan, the court-appointed manager of the site.
On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
The licensing deal has been agreed to by The Onion and the court-appointed administrator. But it is not effective until Judge Gamble approves it, and Mr. Jones could appeal any ruling. That means the fate of Infowars remains in limbo until the court rules, probably sometime in the next two weeks. Mr. Jones continues to operate Infowars.com and host its weekday program, “The Alex Jones Show.”
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.
I appreciate this story appears to be all about the rage-bate headlines, but I don't believe that either six-week old babies say "Mama" (with purpose) or that a baby that age would be capable of responding in the way described to an adult saying "there is no Mama". It doesn't work like that at that age.
- The video of the baby has been widely circulated on social media. The same couple also posted a video of them saying the baby looked at them in a "homophobic" way. People in the comments said they should "Just throw the baby away."
This new clause would disapply existing criminal law related to the accessing or provision of abortion care from women acting in relation to their own pregnancy at any gestation, ensuring no woman would be liable for a prison sentence as a result of seeking to end her own pregnancy. It would not change any law regarding the provision of abortion services within a healthcare setting, including but not limited to the time limit, the grounds for abortion, or the requirement for two doctors’ approval.
- The video of the Nigerian has also been making the rounds on social media and has not been debunked as an ai generated fake. There are both images and video of the incident.
Not really sure why you would post this sarcastically when all you had to do was a ten second google search to confirm none of these are cringe worthy, tinfoil hat conspiracies.
They are indeed cringe worthy. Even my four year old cries when his spoon is the wrong kind of spoon. This does not make him spoon-phobic. It means he is a kid who has no control of his emotions.
A baby has even less understanding.
Everyone who is debating the homophobia of the baby is projecting.
A quick request to your favorite LLM provider would explain why the abortion bill article is poor journalism of the intentionally misleading sort:
> The headline and the factual spine of the article are correct. The interpretive claim — that this "essentially decriminalizes abortion up until birth, for any reason" — is the misleading part, because it treats decriminalisation-for-the-woman as decriminalisation-in-general, which it isn't. A careful reader who already knows the legal structure can extract the accurate facts from the piece. A reader coming to it cold will likely walk away with a materially wrong picture of what changed.
> What's omitted that would change the picture
> * That medical providers and third parties remain fully criminally liable - This is the whole point of the clause being "narrow" and is why abortion providers (BPAS, MSI, RCOG) backed this version rather than Creasy's broader NC20.
> * That the 24-week limit in the 1967 Act is unchanged.
> * The actual prompting context: a rise in prosecutions of women (the Nicola Packer case, the Carla Foster case) where women were investigated or imprisoned after miscarriages, stillbirths, or self-administered pills — cases the reform was specifically designed to address.
> * That the Creasy amendment, which would have done the broader thing the article implies Clause 208 does, was the rejected alternative.
Previously, they were trying to buy the assets outright. That got into the "one group of families is owned $1.4 billion and another is owned $50 million" and the "how do you maximize the returns from Alex Jones assets to satisfy those claims?"
This is using a different structure.
> On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
They're not buying it - they're licensing it from the victims families instead.
Consider the fact this is a satirical news website; a fictional CEO; an imaginary corporation; and it literally proposes a vision of "Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object [...] A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery"
I think it's a good PR move. "Hey, look at how reasonable we've been in spite of the legal craziness. We've put money on the table and are moving forward with a plan that benefits everyone." Now anyone who blocks the plan will be seen as the problem.
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.
> 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.
If he wants to emulate the modern conservative male mindset, he can start by supporting narcissistic pedophiles and adjudicated rapists who pick fights with the Pope and bomb school children.
My favorite recent thing from Tim Heidecker was him interviewing Fred Armisen in the style of Bill Maher. The parody is uncanny. I could see him doing a really good Alex Jones.
His brand of comedy is very hit-or-miss for me (the best way I can describe it is "smug"), but context drives me to wish him luck in his presumed efforts to turn InfoWars into a literal joke instead of just a figurative one.
So they are now setting the content on infowars.com? Honestly, I can't tell since everything on that site looks so fake it isn't believable. The onion transition may be hard to detect.
Assuming that the announcement video Ben Collins posted represents the new logo, it's a delightfully pride rainbow-colored InfoWars logo with an onion in place of the 'o'.
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.
Despite the article, infowars.com at least doesn't really seem to be run by The Onion yet? But I'm looking at that site for the first time so I have no idea.
> “The goal for the families we represent has always been to prevent Alex Jones from being able to cause harm at scale, the way he did against them,” said Chris Mattei, the lawyer who argued the Connecticut families’ case in court. The deal with The Onion promises “to significantly degrade his power to do that.”
> The Onion also plans to sell merchandise and share the proceeds with the Sandy Hook families.
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.
Maybe it's just me but I don't see much humor in this. His brand and assets may have been liquidated, but he's still doing his show and it remains popular. The only people who really won in this saga are, as usual, the lawyers.
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.
>With this new InfoWars, we will democratize psychological torture, welcoming brutal and sadistic ideas from everyone, even the very stupidest among us. It will be like the Manhattan Project, only instead of a bomb, we will be building a website.
It was barely funny when I read the headline a few years ago. Really weird story, I guess I just don't understand the humor at all. I'd rather stop hearing about InfoWars entirely.
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.
I remember when The KLF burned a million quid. They were being internally consistent. It was artistically relevant.
Most people thought they were insane. Bill Drummond wrote about how it strained his relationship with his kids. You can tell that he regrets it.
Personally I think a million bucks to lease a domain name for a year is a really terrible business decision. You might be able to argue that it's going to victims but you could almost certainly just park that money into an interest-bearing account and do better for those victims.
But it's also been obvious from the beginning (starting with Jones' own comments) that nobody really gives a shit about these families and they're just props in other peoples' theater show.
Woo hoo, sounds like some of their jokes landed and you just couldn't take it. Do you only appreciate humor if it's punching down?
Do you have any funny jokes about the children who were "killed" at Sandy Hook or the crisis actors who pretended to be their parents and mourn for them that you want to share with the class?
The insane size of the judgement against Jones for Sandy Hook just shows they were looking to make someone pay for the dead kids and with the killer dead, the guy defaming the dead kids (and by proxy of that, as the legal argument goes, their parents, since obviously the parents were rightly claiming otherwise) was the nearest asshole in sight.
Probably the most notorious lesson that when an asshole does a terrible thing and nothing can be extracted from him, you shouldn't go out of your way to do something dumb enough that everyone who already had their pitchforks out justifies you being the scapegoat instead.
It is not clear to me what you are saying or what you are defending/ decrying. Ridiculing Alex Jones and the mindset that has run through a couple of centuries of American cranks is about all there is to do to draw some of the venom out. You make it sound like Alex Jones was simply a victim of being wrong about a fact.
I'm guessing the larger question is simply this: With thousands of insane conspiracies circulating from thousands of people with microphones, why was Alex Jones singled out for financial ruin?
Why are the families of 9/11 victims not compensated by 9/11 Truthers? Why are the families of Apollo astronauts not compensated by Moon Landing Hoaxers, why are the families of airline employees not compensated by Chemtrail theorists? Etcetera.
There seems to be something unique to Alex Jones himself, or Sandy Hook itself, that warrants an exception to First Amendment protections.
The amount of the judgment seems reasonable for years of harassment against a bunch of people, all done for a profit, plus a bunch of egregious misbehavior in court.
Reasonable by what metric? I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people. Is it reasonable because Alex Jones can afford it (hint: he can't, not even if he wasn't hiding his money)?
This judgement ends up being more akin to punishing him by forcing him off of his platform, which is actually unconstitutional even for a shitbag like him.
When corporations are sued, they tend to take the lawsuits seriously, which is probably a big factor in why their outcomes are so different than Jones'.
I'm curious why you'd bring up those corporate crimes and not think that the obvious response would be that corporate crimes obviously need greater liability, Rather than Jones needing less.
It's not the court's problem that Jones won't be able to afford to broadcast his messages so broadly after this judgment. I guess he'll have to use the same tools as the rest of us now.
I think this one was high because alex jones harassed parents of murdered children to the point where they had to move out of the town their children were buried in. These people were harassed to the point of being afraid to visit the graves of their children. Sometimes examples need to be set in egregious cases.
Alex Jones did not, as far as the evidence we have seen, harass the parents. Alex Jones did not direct anyone to harass the parents.
Some of his viewers used Jones' statements as justification for harassments.
Interestingly, as far as I know, nothing was pursued against the people harassing the parents. They went after the rich guy saying lies they didn't like, then depended on the fact no one besides the defense wants to side with someone who says such shockingly vicious lies about the facts surrounding dead kids.
That's understating things rather substantially. He ignored court orders. He continued to defame the plaintiffs during the trial, including a statement on air that one of the plaintiff's death by suicide was actually a murder and part of the conspiracy.
If you were sued and your objective was to lose as badly as possible and get as harsh a judgment as possible, it would look a lot like what Jones did here.
> I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people. Is it reasonable because Alex Jones can afford it (hint: he can't, not even if he wasn't hiding his money)?
If there is one thing courts do not like, it is people thinking they are above the law and defy the courts. Jones was dumb enough to do so multiple times. FAFO.
As for the high monetary amount: that was dealt by a jury, not a judge - the system the US (for whatever long gone reason) still seems to prefer over career professionals. Juries are even worse to piss off, and juries have been known to bring the hammer down on parties showing egregiously bad conduct - see e.g. the McDonald's hot coffee case, which partially ended up being (for the time) pretty expensive because McDonald's claimed utter BS in court that they knew was wrong. Jones' conduct was similar: he kept blathering stuff he knew was untrue and, on top of that, his army of suckers kept terrorizing people with Jones knowing about that and doing not even lip service to rein the suckers in.
Jones wasnt telling or encouraging his listeners to harass the Sandy Hook families. That's internet nut jobs. Jones didnt even come up with the theory, he just talked about it on his show.
This is basically a free speech issue akin to the JFK shooting theories.
There are some folks really upset about us not platforming a maniac. If you feel like stopping Alex Jones from being actively harmful is a slippery slope directly to something you might say, boy, I would want to take a minute and think that through.
Don't read too much into it, it's just a joke, I'm very happy with Jones losing his platform. I thought I could add to the Onion's satire with a bit of my own, but forgot how hard it is sometimes to tell apart humor from Fox News-induced mental illness. Sorry about that.
Do you think there is an acceptable third option between "the globalists winning" and "it is OK for a single media outlet to wage a war on the grieving parents of the victims of a mass murder"?
My comment was just a silly joke, reusing some of Jones phrasing. I never fully grasped who "the globalists" were in his mind, and why they were seemingly behind everything he dislikes, but I always found if funny. I'm just happy he lost his platform, and I find the Onion's piece rather amusing.
I thought I could add to it with this dumb joke but I forgot about the fact that Jones still has a sizeable following, and it's sometimes hard to tell if someone is just kidding or an insane lunatic. I'm in the former camp (I hope).
> Such is the InfoWars I envision: An infinite virtual surface teeming with ads. Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object, free radical misinformation, sentences and images so poorly thought out that they are unhealthy even to view for just a few seconds.
In any age where Polymarket didn't already exist, we'd have called this satire.
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."
If we were judging sites on misinformation/conspiracies and the people that are hurt by it, BlueSky would be shutdown immediately and liquidated. so would most of the mainstream news sites.
The only reason Alex Jones was targeted is because he helped get Trump elected.
It's also very odd that the military basically took over the town after Sandy Hook and it was bulldozed less than a year after the mass shooting:
I wouldn't say he's more popular than ever, I think his peak popularity was during his youtube time. What is true is he was replaced by people who are decisively worse. I'm not sure Alex was really that bad, he was a performative comedian who complained about big government projects. There are a lot of properly racist people who are finding large audiences on tiktok/instagram/X with young people and seem to be strictly worse
Genuinely held by him? I remember seeing this guy 10+ years ago on YT and laughing that he's very obviously trying to scare people into buying his water filters.
> Rupert Murdoch does not own The Onion. The satirical publication was acquired in April 2024 by Jeff Lawson, the co-founder of Twilio. The Onion was previously owned by Univision Communications (later Fusion Media Group), not the Murdoch-controlled News Corp or Fox Corporation
This is simply untrue. Rupert Murdoch has never had an ownership stake in The Onion. It is currently held privately by Twilio cofounder and former CEO Jeff Lawson and former NBC News reporter Ben Collins.
It was sold though it sure as hell wasn't to Rupert Murdoch. In 2016, Univision Communications bought a controlling stake in The Onion (during the election season) and later sold to private equity company Great Hill Partners in 2019.
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.
This is likely because The Onion was purchased by Univision in 2016 and then bounced around in a couple more acquisitions over the next decade. Ben Collins got the helm in 2024 and has been doing, in my opinion, a fantastic job with the brand.
When I worked at an ISP we had a lot of landline phone customers too and I'm sure they will continue to for a long time.
At least as long as their current customers keep breathing.
You can run a business off inertia/nostalgia for quite a long time.
People are confused about what I said. Success and Relevance are not the same thing. National Lampoon still has a business too, but I doubt that any of you have seen a new movie of theirs since Van Wilder/Repli-Kate came out in 2002.
A million dollars a year for a domain name is quite a lot. And I know what was paid for the sales of some big (in the keyword marketing/leadgen space) domain names...Sale, not lease.
> You can run a business off inertia/nostalgia for quite a long time.
They only reintroduced print editions in 2024 after an 11 year break. Those 65,000 print subscribers are all people who decided they wanted to start paying money for The Onion in the last 2 years.
Inertia doesn't really seem like it would lead to 300% YoY growth...
OTOH, National Lampoon hasn't put out a magazine since 1998 or a film since 2015 (and that was a retrospective on the magazine).
I guess I'd agree that, in absolute terms, The Onion might be less of a cultural force than it was in 2005 (say), but part of that has to be that culture is a lot more long-tailed: music, movies, and TV aren't dominated by a handful of works either.
If "people are confused" I think it's because you are rejecting empirical evidence that The Onion is relevant without offering any counter-evidence of your own. Is it possible it's just no longer relevant to you personally? (I myself am a proud print subscriber...)
You say "without staying power" but I still remember and frequently cite these ancient Onion article headlines:
- Drugs now legal if user is gainfully employed
- Top 10 Genocides of the 20th Century (Infographic)
- Cycle of Abuse Running Smoothly
I mean sure, it's a satirical news site and it's got a constant stream of new content, much of which is forgettable. But that's true of every other news site too. The gems make it stick.
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.
I guess.. But renting a 4th reich site seems far darker than they might be used to and likely to make them the butt of the joke when Hitler's testtube clone gets elected from it in 35 years.
Exactly. Buying would at least mean you aren't revamping the value of the site for some next renter in a deeply cynical age where making fun of the orange pedo at a press club ball could cause WWIII.
That sale was scuttled by a bankruptcy court. Now, The Onion has re-emerged with a new plan: licensing the website from Gregory Milligan, the court-appointed manager of the site.
On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
The licensing deal has been agreed to by The Onion and the court-appointed administrator. But it is not effective until Judge Gamble approves it, and Mr. Jones could appeal any ruling. That means the fate of Infowars remains in limbo until the court rules, probably sometime in the next two weeks. Mr. Jones continues to operate Infowars.com and host its weekday program, “The Alex Jones Show.”
The Onion Has a New Plan to Take Over Infowars https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/business/infowars-alex-jo...
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.
"Video: ‘Homophobic’ 6-Week-Old Baby Cries After Gay Dad Tells Him ‘There Is No Mama’"
"UK Approves Bills To Remove Criminal Penalties For Women Who Commit Their Own Abortions"
"Nigerian Photographed Killing Cat And Trying To Cook It In Front Of Children’s Playground In Italy"
I appreciate this story appears to be all about the rage-bate headlines, but I don't believe that either six-week old babies say "Mama" (with purpose) or that a baby that age would be capable of responding in the way described to an adult saying "there is no Mama". It doesn't work like that at that age.
[Source: have three kids]
"Trump Anticipates Chinese Leader “Will Give Me A Big, Fat Hug”"
"Photos Of A Cucumber & Ron Paul Playing Baseball Massively Ratio Netanyahu & Mark Levin On X"
- The UK bill is real: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3511/stages/18040/amendmen...
This new clause would disapply existing criminal law related to the accessing or provision of abortion care from women acting in relation to their own pregnancy at any gestation, ensuring no woman would be liable for a prison sentence as a result of seeking to end her own pregnancy. It would not change any law regarding the provision of abortion services within a healthcare setting, including but not limited to the time limit, the grounds for abortion, or the requirement for two doctors’ approval.
- The video of the Nigerian has also been making the rounds on social media and has not been debunked as an ai generated fake. There are both images and video of the incident.
Not really sure why you would post this sarcastically when all you had to do was a ten second google search to confirm none of these are cringe worthy, tinfoil hat conspiracies.
A baby has even less understanding.
Everyone who is debating the homophobia of the baby is projecting.
> The headline and the factual spine of the article are correct. The interpretive claim — that this "essentially decriminalizes abortion up until birth, for any reason" — is the misleading part, because it treats decriminalisation-for-the-woman as decriminalisation-in-general, which it isn't. A careful reader who already knows the legal structure can extract the accurate facts from the piece. A reader coming to it cold will likely walk away with a materially wrong picture of what changed.
> What's omitted that would change the picture
> * That medical providers and third parties remain fully criminally liable - This is the whole point of the clause being "narrow" and is why abortion providers (BPAS, MSI, RCOG) backed this version rather than Creasy's broader NC20.
> * That the 24-week limit in the 1967 Act is unchanged.
> * The actual prompting context: a rise in prosecutions of women (the Nicola Packer case, the Carla Foster case) where women were investigated or imprisoned after miscarriages, stillbirths, or self-administered pills — cases the reform was specifically designed to address.
> * That the Creasy amendment, which would have done the broader thing the article implies Clause 208 does, was the rejected alternative.
Previously, they were trying to buy the assets outright. That got into the "one group of families is owned $1.4 billion and another is owned $50 million" and the "how do you maximize the returns from Alex Jones assets to satisfy those claims?"
This is using a different structure.
> On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
They're not buying it - they're licensing it from the victims families instead.
I'm surprised you're surprised.
Maybe you're not highbrow enough for this...
—-
Today Now!: Save Money By Taking A Vacation Entirely In Your Mind
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7qYL_KT06-U
Today Now! Host Undergoes Horrifically Painful Surgery Live On Air
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_5yR--35uqA
How To Channel Your Road Rage Into Cold, Calculating Road Revenge
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vuKnR8RvxHY
> 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ha6D1LQGD4
I love it.
In case you didn't know, the creators of Birds aren't real rug pulled and stole millions with their crypto coin.
I didn't find anything about this though.
I love that. Like a familiar smell, it triggered in me a long lost memory of the old hacker ethos.
https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3mjwx7i...
https://banned.video/channel/the-alex-jones-show
https://x.com/AJNlive
Accidental and ironic, but still impressive.
"Drugs Win Drug War"
"History Sighs, Repeats Itself"
and of course...
"SICKOS"
> “The goal for the families we represent has always been to prevent Alex Jones from being able to cause harm at scale, the way he did against them,” said Chris Mattei, the lawyer who argued the Connecticut families’ case in court. The deal with The Onion promises “to significantly degrade his power to do that.”
> The Onion also plans to sell merchandise and share the proceeds with the Sandy Hook families.
Great work by all on this effort.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...
This is hilarious.
Jokes aside, The Onion is basically spending a giant pile of money to burn the website down.
Most people thought they were insane. Bill Drummond wrote about how it strained his relationship with his kids. You can tell that he regrets it.
Personally I think a million bucks to lease a domain name for a year is a really terrible business decision. You might be able to argue that it's going to victims but you could almost certainly just park that money into an interest-bearing account and do better for those victims.
But it's also been obvious from the beginning (starting with Jones' own comments) that nobody really gives a shit about these families and they're just props in other peoples' theater show.
If the victims don't benefit from the money now, they can bear their own interest. Time-value, etc.
Do you have any funny jokes about the children who were "killed" at Sandy Hook or the crisis actors who pretended to be their parents and mourn for them that you want to share with the class?
Probably the most notorious lesson that when an asshole does a terrible thing and nothing can be extracted from him, you shouldn't go out of your way to do something dumb enough that everyone who already had their pitchforks out justifies you being the scapegoat instead.
Why are the families of 9/11 victims not compensated by 9/11 Truthers? Why are the families of Apollo astronauts not compensated by Moon Landing Hoaxers, why are the families of airline employees not compensated by Chemtrail theorists? Etcetera.
There seems to be something unique to Alex Jones himself, or Sandy Hook itself, that warrants an exception to First Amendment protections.
This judgement ends up being more akin to punishing him by forcing him off of his platform, which is actually unconstitutional even for a shitbag like him.
It's not the court's problem that Jones won't be able to afford to broadcast his messages so broadly after this judgment. I guess he'll have to use the same tools as the rest of us now.
I think this one was high because alex jones harassed parents of murdered children to the point where they had to move out of the town their children were buried in. These people were harassed to the point of being afraid to visit the graves of their children. Sometimes examples need to be set in egregious cases.
Some of his viewers used Jones' statements as justification for harassments.
Interestingly, as far as I know, nothing was pursued against the people harassing the parents. They went after the rich guy saying lies they didn't like, then depended on the fact no one besides the defense wants to side with someone who says such shockingly vicious lies about the facts surrounding dead kids.
If you were sued and your objective was to lose as badly as possible and get as harsh a judgment as possible, it would look a lot like what Jones did here.
free speech doesn't absolve you of responsibility for the damages your words cause, despite not causing them directly
If there is one thing courts do not like, it is people thinking they are above the law and defy the courts. Jones was dumb enough to do so multiple times. FAFO.
As for the high monetary amount: that was dealt by a jury, not a judge - the system the US (for whatever long gone reason) still seems to prefer over career professionals. Juries are even worse to piss off, and juries have been known to bring the hammer down on parties showing egregiously bad conduct - see e.g. the McDonald's hot coffee case, which partially ended up being (for the time) pretty expensive because McDonald's claimed utter BS in court that they knew was wrong. Jones' conduct was similar: he kept blathering stuff he knew was untrue and, on top of that, his army of suckers kept terrorizing people with Jones knowing about that and doing not even lip service to rein the suckers in.
This is basically a free speech issue akin to the JFK shooting theories.
Edit: Someone else posted a doc with a bunch of quotes on this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47839299
I thought I could add to it with this dumb joke but I forgot about the fact that Jones still has a sizeable following, and it's sometimes hard to tell if someone is just kidding or an insane lunatic. I'm in the former camp (I hope).
https://infowarslawsuit.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/1-Oct...
In any age where Polymarket didn't already exist, we'd have called this satire.
The only reason Alex Jones was targeted is because he helped get Trump elected.
It's also very odd that the military basically took over the town after Sandy Hook and it was bulldozed less than a year after the mass shooting:
https://www.npr.org/2013/10/25/240242673/newtown-residents-d...
That rather downplays the destructive impact he had on the families of Sandy Hook victims.
?
Was this a mistake, something you mis-remembered?
Why? You're not going to attract any of the audience. You likely could have just chose a new name and built whatever you want to do with this.
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.
It's like saying that National Lampoon is still relevant.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91502944/the-onion-most-innovati...
https://www.fastcompany.com/91502944/the-onion-most-innovati...
At least as long as their current customers keep breathing.
You can run a business off inertia/nostalgia for quite a long time.
People are confused about what I said. Success and Relevance are not the same thing. National Lampoon still has a business too, but I doubt that any of you have seen a new movie of theirs since Van Wilder/Repli-Kate came out in 2002.
A million dollars a year for a domain name is quite a lot. And I know what was paid for the sales of some big (in the keyword marketing/leadgen space) domain names...Sale, not lease.
They only reintroduced print editions in 2024 after an 11 year break. Those 65,000 print subscribers are all people who decided they wanted to start paying money for The Onion in the last 2 years.
Those 65,000 subscriptions are all people who subscribed since 2024 when it was relaunched.
It may be nostalgia, but it is not people who forgot that they had a subscription. It's people who signed up to pay money in the last two years.
OTOH, National Lampoon hasn't put out a magazine since 1998 or a film since 2015 (and that was a retrospective on the magazine).
I guess I'd agree that, in absolute terms, The Onion might be less of a cultural force than it was in 2005 (say), but part of that has to be that culture is a lot more long-tailed: music, movies, and TV aren't dominated by a handful of works either.
Because you're saying very confusing things. What does National Lampoon have to do with anything?
You're right! Their own claim is that it's insane they're still around, because they find it hard to match the absurdity of the last 10 years.