The Onion Buys Infowars, Alex Jones’s Site, Out of Bankruptcy: “weird internet personalities” 

Source The Onion said that the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems.

Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit dedicated to ending gun violence that was founded in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, will advertise on a relaunched version of the site under The Onion.

The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements, Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in an interview.

Family members of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 first graders and six educators, sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut Superior Court in 2018 after he spread the baseless claim that the rampage was a fabricated pretext for confiscating Americans’ firearms.

The Onion declined to disclose the price it had paid for Infowars and its assets, including its production studio and diet supplement business, though it said in a tongue-in-cheek story that the site cost “less than a trillion dollars.” (The article added that all of the diet supplements would be melted down “into a single candy bar-sized omnivitamin.”)

In a court filing Thursday, the trustee in charge of the bankruptcy auction said the deal was expected to close before Nov. 30. The backup bidder is First United American Companies, a business associated with an online supplement store that bears Mr. Jones’s name. That bidder requested a meeting Thursday to address “apparent defects in the sale process,” according to a separate court filing.

Mr. Jones could not immediately be reached for comment, but he said on the social media platform X this week that he planned to continue producing his online program, “The Alex Jones Show,” until he was forced to stop.

In September, a Houston judge ruled that Infowars and other assets owned by Free Speech Systems could be auctioned off in bankruptcy to compensate Mr. Jones’s creditors, which include the families of the Sandy Hook victims. Mr. Jones declared bankruptcy in 2022 as the Sandy Hook case made its way to court.

Mr. Collins said that he was informed late Wednesday by the trustee in charge of the bankruptcy auction that The Onion’s bid had prevailed. In a video posted online Thursday, Mr. Jones said that his lawyers had been told by the trustee about the sale to The Onion.

“We thought this would be a hilarious joke,” Mr. Collins said. “This is going to be our answer to this no-guardrails world where there are no gatekeepers and everything’s kind of insane.”

Mr. Collins declined to disclose the value of the advertising deal with Everytown but said that it was a multiyear agreement that would include banner advertisements and sponsored articles on the site, which will be redesigned to fit its new editorial direction.

While the alliance between Everytown and The Onion may seem like an odd fit, the two organizations share an interest in curbing gun violence, said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown. Mr. Feinblatt said that mission was underscored with depressing regularity in the aftermath of mass shootings, when The Onion goes viral with its oft-shared headline: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”