Infowars Is Dead — Long Live the Joke: How The Onion Plans to Bury Alex Jones’ Empire in Satire

Depending on how much dark irony you can handle, there is something almost poetic about the possibility that America’s most well-known fake news source will take over Infowars, a platform based on the idea that nothing is what it seems. Not phony in the sense of Infowars. Fake as in purposefully, expertly, and creatively fake. A Texas judge has received a proposal from The Onion to temporarily take over Infowars’ digital properties, transforming one of the most divisive areas of the internet into what its new management refers to as a parody platform. The entire thing reads like a headline, which is difficult to ignore. Ten years ago, the Onion itself would have written.

When Infowars first launched in 1999, conspiracy theories needed a lot more work to propagate and the internet was still primarily dial-up. By positioning himself as the only voice willing to say what the mainstream media wouldn’t, Alex Jones, who broadcast from Austin with a voice that seemed calibrated for maximum urgency, gained an audience. That formula worked for years. The website developed into a media operation that combined sincere skepticism of the government with increasingly complex and harmful lies, and it became genuinely influential in some areas of American politics. Many of the people who ended up at Infowars don’t seem to be fringe lunatics by nature. Some were simply individuals who thought they weren’t getting the whole story elsewhere.

Infowars: The Rise, the Lawsuits, and the Strangest Ending in Media History

After the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, that goodwill, if it existed at all, crumbled. Jones described the shooting as a staged hoax, a production with “crisis actors,” and a plot designed to support the seizure of firearms. Six teachers and twenty first-graders were slain inside a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school. At least some members of Jones’ audience took him seriously. The victims’ families endured years of harassment, including death threats, altercations in parking lots, and a barrage of abusive emails. The brutality was persistent and targeted. A Connecticut jury awarded the families and an FBI agent more than $1.4 billion in damages by 2022. Nearly $50 million more was added by a Texas jury. Soon after, Jones declared bankruptcy.

During a liquidation auction in November 2024, The Onion made its debut as the successful bidder for Infowars’ assets. When a bankruptcy judge threw out the results due to procedural issues, that agreement collapsed. However, The Onion has returned, seemingly unfazed. This time, the proposal calls for a six-month exclusive license over all of Infowars’ intellectual property, including the website and social media accounts. The Onion would pay $81,000 a month in operating expenses, with the proceeds going to the Sandy Hook families. According to reports, Tim Heidecker, one half of the surreal comedy duo Tim and Eric, has already been hired to assist in running the business.

The Onion’s CEO, Ben Collins, explained the plan in a way that sounded more like someone who has actually been observing the internet’s decline in real time than a corporate press release. He described the issue as a media ecosystem that is overrun with people staring into cameras, creating health advice that is dangerous enough to cause harm, or creating conspiracy theories that have no basis in reality. In order to achieve comedic effect, The Onion would intentionally and openly create characters and plots that resemble that particular genre. The theory is intriguing. It’s still unclear if parody can truly pierce that content format’s sincerity.

For his part, Jones is not going away quietly. He admitted during his Monday broadcast that he might be physically removed from the Infowars building by the end of the month, but he promised to carry on broadcasting from a different studio that he has reportedly been setting up. His personal social media accounts, radio affiliates, and new websites he’s developing for the supplement and merchandise company, which has reportedly made millions of dollars a year, would all broadcast his show under his own name. “I’m not going anywhere,” he declared. He might be correct. Platforms have evolved, but just because an Austin judge is ordering a liquidation doesn’t mean that Jones’s appetite has vanished.

The idea that satire might actually occupy the digital and physical infrastructure of one of the most significant disinformation campaigns in recent American history is what makes this moment truly peculiar. The Onion would inherit all of that, including the Austin studios where Jones spent decades filming, the social media accounts with their growing fan bases, and the brand name itself, and start adding something completely different. There’s a sense that this is either a very complex joke that no one can fully control or a truly brilliant act of cultural reclamation. Perhaps both.

The plan still needs to be approved by the court. Jones has already stated that he plans to legally contest the licensing proposal, and Judge Maya Guerra Gamble in Austin is anticipated to provide an opinion. The Onion’s proposal is endorsed by the attorneys for the Sandy Hook families, giving what appears to be a ridiculous story a moral undertone. These families had to deal with harassment stemming from false information disseminated via that same platform for more than ten years. The notion that Infowars might become a vehicle for professional mockery and that they would receive its last revenue stream is either justice or the universe’s continued incomprehensibility.
In any case, today is Tomorrow’s News.