“Such is the InfoWars I envision: An infinite virtual surface teeming with ads. Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object, free radical misinformation, sentences and images so poorly thought out that they are unhealthy even to view for just a few seconds. The InfoWars of old was only the prototype for the hell I know we can build together: A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery, their minds fully disintegrating on contact.”
The real story is that Ben Collins, the editor-in-chief of The Onion, managed to find a way to control the prolific purveyor of misinformation with the help of the Sandy Hook families, as he posted on Bluesky. A New York Times article lays out in detail how the plan would work, which still technically must be approved by a judge. In short, The Onion is paying $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property. Tim Heidecker has been hired to serve as the creative director of InfoWars and plans to parody Alex Jones’ whole schtick until the joke gets old.
The Onion‘s quest began in November 2024; just a couple of weeks after the site announced it was purchasing InfoWars, a judge blocked the sale because there were other potential buyers that could have maximized the amount of money given to the Sandy Hook families. Jones spent years falsely smearing the Sandy Hook shooting as a false flag operation; he was eventually ordered to pay the families $1.4 billion. Jones declared bankruptcy shortly thereafter, and the families have received little of that money. On Bluesky, Collins wrote that a share of The Onion‘s InfoWars merch sales would be paid out to the families, “which will be the first time they get any money since they filed this lawsuit eight years ago.”
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