HN Reader

The announcement by America's Finest News Source: https://theonion.com/heres-why-i-decided-to-buy-infowars/

Alex Jones response: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857058831135645739

Tim Onion's (Ben Collins) statement on Bluesky: [0]

> Hi everyone.

> The Onion, with the help of the Sandy Hook families, has purchased InfoWars.

> We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website.

> We have retained the services of some Onion and Clickhole Hall of Famers to pull this off.

> I can't wait to show you what we have cooked up.

Next post: [1]

> Does anybody need millions of dollars worth of supplements?

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3law22g...

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3law23r...

The NPR article conveys that this was more than just a very clever stunt

> "The Connecticut families agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of The Onion's bid, enabling its success," according to their lawyers. ... Jones was hoping a bidder ideologically aligned with him would have bought Infowars and hired him back to keep doing his show.

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-5189399/alex-jones-auct...

There's tonnes of worthless merchandise and supplements of a dubious nature which The Onion, the least expected of all possible buyers, now has to find a use for. My first suggestion would be melting down all of the 500% marked up gold bars[0] and make a one-time-run charity auction collectible for the Sandy Hook families. Or upcycling all the paper in Alex Jones' books [1] into paper mache, and use it to make globes, to really stick it to the globalists!

[0] https://www.infowarsstore.com/24-karat-999-pure-gold-collect...

[1] https://www.infowarsstore.com/infowars-media/books/the-great...

Referring to Jones as "...the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name)..." in the announcement is a masterstroke given Jones' ridiculous ego.

I hope Jones is never named on the new site, but frequently and flagrantly referenced in a manner like this.

I hate to burst everyone’s bubble, but this is fake news. This deal is not final. The judge in the liquidation case is holding an evidentiary hearing next week to understand how and why secret bidding was set up and why it was not open to the general public. Sounds like a BIG loss for The Onion, not to mention the potential defamation cases that could arise from news outlets publishing an unverified story about a sale that isn’t final.

Source: https://x.com/behizytweets/status/1857195724242329997

Jeff Lawson the founder of Twilio owns The Onion, glad he's growing his quality retirement project.

The onion should just keep Alex Jones without any filters but put the onion logo on every page. The joke is already good enough, just keep it going.

Infowars Sale to Onion Questioned by Bankruptcy Judge: https://archive.is/i3KQZ

EDIT: the sale been blocked, Alex Jones is still live as of this edit (NOV 15th 12:28 EST)

I really can’t imagine a better steward. Truly amazing. I doubt there’s any way to undo all the damage that has been done, but at least we’ll get some cathartic laughs out of it all.

Is Alex Jones the new Press Secretary yet?

At the time the news of the Sandy Hook shooting broke, I was a highschooler in a vo-tech school in Connecticut.

Friday in late December are usually unserious days in K-12! People had their sights set on winter break and work was thin. But I remember that day had a lot of commotion, a lot of seriousness, and then a lot of silence.

Being a vo-tech school, we had students from all over the state. Some kids left or were taken out early, some of them having had ties to the families in Newtown. Throughout the day, our school got emptier and emptier.

A lot of students didn't return to the building for the whole week or so until winter break started. Even though the seriousness weaned over the days, there was an unbreakable eeriness that just comes with the building being so sparsely populated. Our highschool was a small one (about 400 students total) which exacerbated it.

I lived with my parents at the time and I saw my mom gradually become a Sandy Hook "truther" as she fell deep down Facebook rabbitholes. It was bad. Although she eventually came around, that created distance between us that never recovered.

There's a lot of bad and mind-boggling news abound, but this is a very personally satisfying headline.

What really should have happened in this case, like the the Parkland killer, was for the people who sued to also take his Name and Likeness.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/families-settle-court-b...

This would hopefully avoid letting him just rebuild another slime empire.

In one sense this is funny, in another it's justice, but I think from a broader perspective this is just more of the same tit-for-tat nonsense that moves the needle in the wrong direction.

My hypothesis is that the U.S. didn't become more divided because of moron sites like I.W. but rather because of our collective reaction to them. These groups are far easier to ignore when we stop trying to silence them.

I worry that this might make The Onion a less credible news source.

Really curious what the bidding was like or who else made an offer, since it seems that the Sandy Hook Victims (who own all of the debt?) wanted the sale to The Onion specifically

Perfectly balanced, as all things should be. Thanks, Tim Onion.

https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3law23r...

I'm watching his stream just to see how the drama goes down and a silly tech-adjacent bit popped up when he started ranting about Linux and how if "they" were trying to take Linus Torvalds down, they still couldn't ever own Linux!

Inside a lot of humor is some deep seated truth.

It's encouraging that an org based on humor / even a little truth here ultimately buys and will discard an empire of hateful lies.

Financial Ruin and Mockery seem appropriate for the peddlers of vitriolic clickbait.

This is so good. I love that country.

Interesting piece on The New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/post/188430/alex-jones-meltdown-reac...

> “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,”

How hard is it really to start a new podcast?

I wonder if Cards Against Humanity bid against them.

Looks like a judge has blocked the finalization of the sale pending a hearing: https://nypost.com/2024/11/15/media/infowars-sale-to-the-oni...

They can just run the original content with a The Onion logo and every will find it hilarious.

I know you on HN aren't actually interested in the truth, but here it is anyway. The Onion did not purchase Infowars: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857223561754059168?t=7Q-...

I thought this was a prank, but "The satirical news company plans to shutter Jones’ Infowars and rebuild the website featuring well-known internet humor writers and content creators."

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/onion-wins-alex-jones-i...

See also: "Why I Decided To Buy 'InfoWars'"

"Make no mistake: This is a coup for our company and a well-deserved victory for multinational elites the world over... we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal."

https://theonion.com/heres-why-i-decided-to-buy-infowars/

I wish I lived in the reality where the Waking Life (2001) version of Alex Jones was the one we got: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5HLn3eYLSo

The Onion did a fundraising campaign a few months ago. Glad to see this is where my donation went!

Justice, both poetic and civil. Bravo to The Onion.

I posted the full audio of the 14 Nov 2024 hearing with the bankruptcy judge so you can hear all sides of the story, and the judge's reaction. Apologies it's on the Tweeter/Xitter.

https://x.com/magazedia/status/1857962924762898502

Apparently the sale has been reversed and is being contested. https://x.com/ericldaugh/status/1857261507010052306?s=46

Well not so fast the judge says: https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1857223561754059168

> striv[ing] to make life both scarier and longer

There are "weather", "climate" and "Climate"... And that above is "Climate". A concise definition of the Times.

Bless the Onion!

Inside a lot of humor is some deep seated truth.

It's encouraging that an org based on humor / even a little truth here ultimately buys and will discard an empire of hateful lies.

Anybody else have to triple check it wasn't just The Onion trolling?

What's wild is that if I go to the Infowars website I can't actually tell if The Onion is controlling it yet or not. It all looks like satire already, full of absolutely ridiculous headlines.

Worth remembering that Donald Trump embraced Alex Jones after his sustained campaign of vicious, hateful and provably-false lies about dead child.

So did Joe Rogan.

I hope they preserve all the URLs - I'm laughing already just thinking about the wealth of inbound links soon pointing to parodic content.

That's the best practical joke I have ever heard!

Can Global Tetrahedron buy Twitter please?

Beautiful.

The poet they sent couldn't have done better.

"Infinite Growth Forever," - that onion-y sign off made me laugh.

I understand the vitriol against mr jones perfectly. Before his sandy hook saga I was actually somewhat of a fan of his work. I remember hearing an idiotic rant of his complaining that the US government was putting chemicals in the water that turned the frogs gay. But sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. "Researchers have found evidence that even extremely diluted concentrations of drug residues harm fish, frogs and other aquatic species" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/birth-control-in-...

That, and the purposeful addition of fluoride and other additives do put our freshwater at risk of a scandal if we ever undercount or overcount any risk. I wouldn't even put it past 1960's era scientists to have come up with insane grant proposals for asymmetric warfare of freshwater. Hell, who knows what project flies under the radar until its not. These are all things I would expect to read in an onion news article. Alex jones had the same vibe the onion had with their 9/11 coverage and why I think the purchase is both satirical and not at the same time. Satire is heterological in that way.

What I would like to remind the reader of is that alex jones made a big mistake in vilifying the victims. But please do not take that as a pass to do the same to alex jones as he did to his victims. An eye for an eye will make the world blind.

After the coup we will finally have the most trusted source of our news back.

The dankest timeline

It's really just a simple internal resource transfer, I reckon.

What a time to be alive !

"Area Satirists Acknowledge Death Of Irony; Diversify Into Creatine Supplements"

They should name it X

I hope they reward the Knowledge Fight guys for helping to make this happen

Everything about this is pure win

I refuse to believe in any conspiracies except that The Onion took over The Matrix and is running a Truman Show program full of unreal absurdities to see if I'll go insane.

...One nation indivisible – with liberty and justice for all.

Justice has prevailed.

Welcome Back, Alex.

today an onion made me cry a bit

God I wish I could contribute to that.

Fitting!

potentially hilarious. can't wait to see what they launch.

I love this, it's like a pinnacle of performance art.

Maybe "performance satire"?

The current speculation by the right-o-sphere that Alex Jones is about to be appointed the Trump press secretary is apt for the moment where Trump seems to have made his nominations on the basis of how much they will disturb the left. It's hard to imagine anyone that could be more effective at achieving that than Jones.

Narrative security.

Is not even funny

Not sure if this is true or just another Onion article.

Oh now this is some good news in the post truth world of Trump 2.0

All I can do now is hope and prey that this ends up being the literal dictionary definition of “Poe’s Law”. #goodspeed

A significant percentage of the population will always gravitate towards the type of content produced by Alex Jones and Infowars.

Russia solved this by making "controlled" media outlets (and in recent years Telegram channels) for people who gravitate toward conspiracies and contrarian viewpoints without making them critical of the current Russian administration.

Obviously that is not what The Onion is planning to do but that is what this story reminded me of.

This is actually one of the funniest things I've seen

OJ Simpson payed 33.5M to the family of the woman he murdered.

It's insanity that you can flat-out kill someone and get paid less in civil court than denying a murder ever happened.

Breaking news: Trump names Alex Jones head of FCC

Can anyone explain how InfoWars was sued and found guilty of free speech? There must be much more I’m not getting but although Jones sounds like an asshole I don’t think that’s illegal.

Why can’t someone sell an opinion that a tragedy didn’t actually exist and was created to push an agenda? It could be a provably false claim but don’t they have the right to make it? Isn’t being despicable a basic right?

Funny concept. Shame that The Onion's writing these days so mid.

Next step: The Onion buys X.

When The Onion itself goes bankrupt in the not too distant future, can Alex Jones buy the Onion and get the domain back?

I'm very much not a fan of Q-anon and related subcultures, but the sandy-hook award of $1.5 billion is obviously ridiculous, and is clearly just a government/institutional exercise in dictatorial/systemic power.

There is no possible way that someone ranting on the internet can cause 1.5 billion of emotional damage or whatever the claim was.

In particular, the libel (and it should be libel, making claims that are not true, rather than 'defamation' which is merely slurring them), should be from a credible source. Alex Jones is obviously not a credible source in this, or any case, and is unlikely to have caused any material harm (loss of jobs etc) to the 'victims'.

I mean, good riddance to Alex Jones, but the tools and methods used were entirely inappropriate to a liberal democracy, where you prevail with better arguments.

Prediction:

Over the next decades the onion will slowly become not a, but the only, source of real news as all the other sources become more like info wars.

Holy cod, Infowars' afterlife as a (presumed) parody of itself is going to be bigger than its regular existence ever was.

The hilarious thing is that they just basically need to add the label "Satire:" to every "news" title on the site to realize value from it.

This is actually really good news.

The money they paid is going directly to Sandy Hook families

Nobody can use Infowars for evil.

Alex Jones looks like a fool.

This sounds like an Onion headline.

And to add extra spice, they're actually doing it for a good cause, educating about gun safety in cooperation with nonprofits and the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre.

Obligatory fuck Alex Jones with a bat with rusty barbed wire. He profited off the misery of murdered kids, this is beyond low.

Wait. When I first saw this news on Twitter I thought it was a joke, since it was a tweet by The Onion.

It looks like Everytown for Gun Safety is now getting ads on The Onion, too - of course The Onion is still out of money, but what the hell at least there’s a serious part to this.

Strange. I like The Onion as much as the next guy, but you can't make Infowars more of a "parody of itself" than it already is. Just shut it down?

I heard bidding got pretty heated between the Onion people, cards against humanity, and the pinboard guy

Among the things this year that I wish had never happened, this event is in the complement set.

Buying trash in order to put it in the dumpster forever is honorable.

But trash belongs in the dumpster, and nowhere else.

I hope that they can keep the spirit of the infowars conspiracy genre alive.

> “US seeks to destabilize Canada into a war with Mexico to solve the border crisis “

This is going to be the greatest satire website ever

Does Alex Jones get any of this money? Because if he does this is effectively a partial refund for him.

The Onion is irrelevant. In 3 years they will be gone and Alex Jones will pick this up for $5m

Making satire today is really hard. This could even be some article title on The Onion.

Reality is their biggest competitor.