Photo courtesy of Flickr. Alex Jones testifying before a Senate Intelligence committee.
Abigail Manbeck
News Editor
Recently at a bankruptcy auction, Infowars, which was a company owned by Alex Jones, was bought by a satirical news site called The Onion.
Jones was no longer able to own Infowars because of the money he owed to the families and victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. A few years ago, Jones spoke of claims stating that the shooting was just a hoax, and spread defamatory information, causing harm and hurt to the victims and their families. Because of this, Jones owed over a billion dollars to said victims and families. This large sum of money caused him to give up a lot of the property that he owned.
After having to relinquish his company Infowars, and sending it to a bankruptcy auction for The Onion to bid and then win, the Infowars site was taken down. Jones was then talking from a new studio location about this matter. Not only was the website up for auction, but also the social media pages, Jones’ studio in Texas, all of the trademarks, and video archives.
A parent of a student who was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting was rejoicing with a comment on the situation, “The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for.”
Jones was pretty upset with the outcome of what happened to his company. He made a comment saying that this situation is “a total attack on free speech.” He also made an announcement that his show was going to be shut down as well.
The Onion’s parent company Global Tetrahedron CEO Ben Collins said that the Infowars website will be back up in January with a satirical approach. The site will focus on right-wing people, conspiracy theorists, and education about gun violence prevention that will come from a group called Everytown for Gun Safety.
Collins made a statement saying, “We thought it would be a very funny joke if we bought this thing, probably one of the better jokes we’ve ever told. The [Sandy Hook] families decided they would effectively join our bid, back our bid, to try to get us over the finish line. Because by the end of the day, it was us or Alex Jones, who could either continue this website unabated, basically unpunished, for what he’s done to these families over the years, or we could make a dumb, stupid website, and we decided to do the second thing.”
It seems that Jones is not taking this situation the best, however, The Onion seems like they will put his old site to a potentially positive use.