The Onion buys Alex Jones’ InfoWars with help from Sandy Hook families

The Onion, a satirical news site and self-proclaimed “corporate lord,” has acquired the right-wing conspiracy theory site Infowars.

Onion CEO Ben Collins said Thursday that the organization acquired the media site in a court-ordered auction.

“The Onion acquired Infowars with the help of the Sandy Hook family,” Collins wrote. “We’re going to make it very interesting. very stupid website”

The site’s former owner, Alex Jones, shared a clip on X/Twitter shortly before the announcement, saying that the “Connecticut Democratic Party” was trying to shut down the site. Infowars is currently offline.

The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, a group of former writers who acquired the site in April, issued a statement following news of the latest acquisition, The New York Times reported.

Chief Executive Officer Bryce P. Tetrader proudly calls himself a “trafficker” in his satirical portrayal of millionaire venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. X pagecelebrated the purchase, saying the decision was “easy”.

“Today we celebrate the newest addition to the Global Tetrahedron LLC family of brands. And let me tell you, we truly consider ourselves family,” he wrote. “Like families, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, fungible assets that can be absorbed or discarded by patriarchs according to the opaque whims of the market.

“And like members of a family, our brands view each other with mutual suspicion and malice.”

Founded by Jones in the late ’90s, Infowars gained notoriety as one of the largest conspiratorial misinformation sites in the United States.

Jones gained attention after he promoted a conspiracy theory that the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings never happened. In fact, 26 people (20 of them 6- and 7-year-olds) were killed and two others were injured at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

The incident remains one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.

Jones was sued by the victim’s family for $965 million (£759 million). He lost his case and was also ordered to pay $473m (£372m) in punitive damages.

Tetrader said Infowars is an “invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the public,” and that the site is “an elaborate combination of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutritional hacks.” , adding that the site “aims to make life scarier, scarier, and richer.” Longer for everyone. ”

According to CNN, the acquisition includes the acquisition of Jones’ company’s intellectual property, including its website, customer list, inventory, certain social media accounts and production equipment.