Satirical news outlet The Onion said Thursday it has acquired Infowars, a conspiracy-mongering website whose owner made money by running stories that falsely described one of America’s most notorious school shootings.
The Onion said it won a bankruptcy auction to buy Alex Jones’ Infowars site with the support of the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
The new InfoWars, launching in January, will serve as a parody of its former self, The Onion said, in which the anti-gun violence nonprofit was founded in 2012 after a shooting ad on the site once claimed. That a bloody attack was carried out.
The massacre killed 20 young children and six teachers in a particularly gruesome chapter of America’s gun violence epidemic.
The families sued Jones in 2018 after he spread claims that the shootings involving the actors were staged.
Four years later he won a $1.4 billion defamation settlement against bankrupt Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems.
A Texas judge in September said other assets owned by Infowars and Free Speech Systems could be auctioned off to raise money for creditors, including Sandy Hook families.
The Onion declined to disclose how much it paid for Infowars, including its production studio and dietary supplement business.
Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit formed after the Sandy Hook shooting, will advertise on a modified version of Infowars.
The nonprofit said its and Onion’s goal is to end gun violence.
“‘No way to stop it,’ says the only nation where it happens regularly,” is The Onion’s famous headline after a mass shooting.
Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said that bidding to buy Infowars was an easy decision, calling it “an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the public.”
“Infowars has shown a steadfast commitment to inciting anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society – values that connect deeply with all of us at the Global Tetrahedron,” the company wrote on its website Thursday.
Ben Collins, chief executive of Global Tetrahedron, said the new Infowars would poke fun at internet personalities like Jones who trade in misinformation.
“We thought it would be a funny joke,” Collins told The New York Times.
“This will be our answer to this world without guardrails where there are no gatekeepers and everything is kind of crazy.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
