Early Friday morning, Infowars.com winked offline — displaying a blank page with the words “Off Air.”
The shutdown of Alex Jones‘ far-right conspiracy website comes as satire publisher The Onion is trying to complete its takeover of Infowars.com and turn it into a parody of itself. On Thursday, a Texas appeals court halted the ability of the court-appointed administrator in Infowars bankruptcy case to grant The Onion access to Infowars.com and its name, sending the matter back down to a lower court for further review.
Global Tetrahedron, the parent of The Onion, announced a deal in April with the Infowars bankruptcy administrator to pay $81,000 per month to license the Infowars.com domain name and associated intellectual property including its name for six months, with a potential sale of Jones’ bankrupt company at that point. Funds from the The Onion’s licensing deal (and the possible future sale) would go toward the families of Sandy Hook elementary school shooting victims. The families won judgments in 2022 against Jones totaling $1.4 billion in defamation cases against him; last fall the Supreme Court rejected Jones appeal of the verdicts. Jones had repeatedly lied and posited baseless conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook massacre, including falsely accusing the parents of the murdered children of colluding with the U.S. government in a supposed plot to restrict gun rights.
About the Infowars site shutdown, Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion, wrote in a post on Bluesky, “Goodbye, get lost, and we’ll see you soon.”
On Thursday evening, Mother Jones journalist Anna Merlan reported in a post on Bluesky, “A visibly toasted Alex Jones, surrounded by his crew, says ‘they’ are going to turn off the power at midnight at the Infowars studio. ‘Until then we’re going to air hours of Sandy Hook documentation.’” To which Collins commented, “What an evil piece of shit. I cannot wait to take over.”
The Onion’s latest plan to commandeer Infowars was developed with the support of Sandy Hook families. “The Sandy Hook families took on Alex Jones to stop him from inflicting the same harm on others,” Chris Mattel, partner at Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder who is an attorney for the Sandy Hook families, said in a statement last month. “When Infowars finally goes dark, the machinery of lies that Jones built will become a force for social good, thanks to the families’ courage and The Onion’s vision, persistence and stewardship.”
On Thursday, Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter Emilie Parker was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, told the Austin American-Statesman about the appeals court’s pause in the deal, “It just seems like the courts are enabling an abuser to continue to abuse.” The Onion’s Collins said on Bluesky, “Thank you to the families for standing with us through all of this. The court has to end this useless delay so we can pay them.”
Jones is still posting material on the internet in various places, including on X, Rumble and alexjoneslive.com, but without the Infowars name. In his sign-off from Infowars, Jones said among other things, “We commit ourselves to God in this holy fight” and “We are committed and if God stands with us, who can stand against us!”
In April 2024, New York-based G/O Media sold The Onion to Jeff Lawson, co-founder and former CEO of Twilio and a longtime fan of the satire site. Lawson hired Collins, a former NBC News reporter covering disinformation, extremism and the internet, to run the company.
The Onion is hoping to launch a new digital platform and comedy network at Infowars.com, led by creative director Tim Heidecker (whose credits include Adult Swim’s “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”) and head of programming Mia DiPasquale. The effort “is designed to create a home for emerging and established comedic voices while expanding The Onion’s role as a modern satire institution,” according to The Onion.
In November 2024, The Onion gleefully revealed its winning bankruptcy-auction bid for Infowars. But a Texas bankruptcy judge rejected its cash bid of $1.75 million to acquire the Infowars assets, saying the auction process lacked clarity and that the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims deserved more money.
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