The Onion Says It Has Deal to Take Over Alex Jones’ Infowars

Satire web site the Onion says that it has — after 17 months authorized wrangling — efficiently landed a deal to let it take over Infowars, the right-wing conspiracy-fueled web site run by Alex Jones.

Ben Collins, CEO of the Onion, confirmed to Variety particulars of the company’s new plan to assume management of Infowars under a cope with Gregory Milligan, who was appointed by a chapter courtroom to handle the Infowars web site.

Under the phrases of the settlement, The Onion’s guardian company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license the infowars.com area identify and related mental property including its identify, as first reported by the New York Times. The deal would run for six months, with an possibility to renew for another six months.

In November 2024, the Onion gleefully revealed its successful bid for Infowars, which was sued into chapter 11 (as was Jones) after the households of victims in the Sandy Hook mass capturing in Connecticut received a judgment in 2022 against Jones in a defamation swimsuit. Jones had repeatedly lied and posited baseless conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook bloodbath. (During the defamation trial in Texas in 2022, Jones testified that he now believes the Sandy Hook capturing was “100% real.”)

But the following month, a chapter choose in Texas rejected the Onion’s money bid of $1.75 million to purchase the Infowars belongings, saying the public sale course of lacked readability and that the households of the Sandy Hook capturing victims deserved more cash.

Now, under the new cope with the court-appointed administration, the Onion said In the coming weeks (and pending courtroom approval) it can launch a new digital platform and comedy network, led by inventive director Tim Heidecker 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 company.

“A lot of institutions and people gave up on doing the right thing over the last two years. Despite an insane amount of threats and bullshit, we persevered,” Collins said in an announcement. “Eight years, almost to the day, after the Sandy Hook parents first filed suit against Alex Jones, they’ll finally get some justice, and even some money. You will get a new home for funny things on the internet, a tote bag with a good logo on it and a great newspaper made by human beings in your real-life mailbox.”

Heidecker, whose credit embrace “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Adult Swim, commented: “There are a lot of talented people making great work with very little support. This is a chance to build a place for ambitious, specific, internet-native comedy and to make something genuinely new out of a very broken piece of media history.”

The Onion said the plan was developed with the help of Sandy Hook households. “The Sandy Hook families took on Alex Jones to stop him from inflicting the same harm on others. For years, he used his corrupt business platform to torment and harass them for profit,” said Chris Mattel, associate at Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder and lawyer for the Sandy Hook households who received a $1.4 billion verdict against Jones and Infowars in Connecticut. “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.”

Alex Jones has not commented on the Onion’s new plan to take over Infowars.

In April 2024, New York-based G/O Media bought The Onion to Jeff Lawson, co-founder and former CEO of Twilio and a longtime fan of the satire web site. Lawson employed Lawson, a former NBC News reporter overlaying disinformation, extremism and the web, to run the company.

On Monday, The Onion shared a faux message from the fictional CEO of Global Tetrahedron, “Bryce P. Tetraeder.”

“With this new InfoWars, we will democratize psychological torture, welcoming brutal and sadistic ideas from everyone, even the very stupidest among us. It will be like the Manhattan Project, only instead of a bomb, we will be building a website,” Tetraeder’s submit said. “The InfoWars of tomorrow will converge into a swirling vortex of content about content, talent acquiring talent, rings of concentric media mergers processing all human artistry into one endlessly digestible slurry. This will be a dank, sunless place, one where panic and capital feed on each other like twins in the womb of a hulking, unknowable monster—a monster known by many names, but which I like to call modern-day America.”