The Onion's Decision to Buy Infowars Started as Joke

11/14/2024 04:07 PM

The idea for The Onion to buy Infowars began, naturally enough, as a joke.

Last June, the satirical website's new CEO, Ben Collins, aw that a federal bankruptcy judge had ordered Alex Jones to liquidate his assets at auction to pay off the millions he owes to Sandy Hook families he defamed. "That'd be one of the funniest jokes of all time if we pulled this off, if The Onion bought Infowars," Collins said on Thursday afternoon. "Then I was like, 'What if we actually did it?'"

He then called the lawyers representing the families that successfully sued Jones for falsely claiming that the mass shooting that claimed the lives of their young children was a government hoax. "The families got pretty excited about it," Collins said. "It was a real bid that would take it out of Alex's hands." Next, he had to make sure it would actually be funny. "We started asking around in our network of hundreds of comedy writers in the Onion Hall of Fame, as we call it, what the new site would look like," he said. "And we just got really excited."

A few months later, on Thursday morning, Collins tweeted that his audience should "stand by for the funniest news you've ever heard in your life" before announcing the purchase.

"Please don't expect us to make more expensive jokes than this," Collins said.

The Infowars purchase, for an undisclosed amount, is the biggest push yet in The Onion's expansion efforts since it was acquired by tech executive Jeff Lawson in April. This summer, the brand also relaunched a newspaper from its headquarters in Chicago. But with Infowars, there is an opportunity to expand its editorial focus into the weird online world of far-right conspiracism and snake-oil pills — under the URL that helped launch this world into contemporary politics and media.

"We want to rip out the underlying structure and just be like, 'Look at how they made you fear everything and buy yourself into this sort of thing,'" said Collins, who was previously an NBC News reporter covering Jones and the world of disinformation. "Part of Alex's thing is 'Buy more ammo, get yourself so afraid of everything that you must buy this elixir and a gun.' And we want to expose that audience to that in its most bare form."

The purchase includes the intellectual property of Infowars as well as its physical assets, including the studio and cameras Jones used for years to broadcast his show. They will also get Jones's once-lucrative dietary supplement and vitamin business of Brain Force-branded pills, though Collins said he is not exactly sure what it will look like. "It'll be something funnier than 'Bone Force 9,000' but it's along those lines," he said. When Infowars relaunches in January, it will be from The Onion's headquarters in Chicago. Jones's lease on his studio had just two months remaining, according to Collins.

The connection to Sandy Hook will remain at the core of the new Infowars. The Onion's winning bid will go directly into the pockets of the families defamed by Jones. And the site has partnered with Everytown for Gun Safety for a multi-year ad campaign when Infowars relaunches. (If it sounds strange at first glance, remember that The Onion's most famous headline is about mass shootings — "''No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.")

"I've talked to a couple of family members," said Everytown for Gun Safety president John Feinblatt. "There's nothing we can do together that will bring back their loss, but what we can do is give them an ounce of sense of restitution, an ounce of sense of respect for them, and an ounce of sense that we're willing to fight misinformation and expose the stuff that they got visited on them. And for that, I think is the reason why they wanted this to happen." According to a statement from the families' attorney issued on Thursday, they agreed to a smaller recovery from Jones to help allow the deal to go through.

Jones, meanwhile, seemed as surprised as everyone else by the business news that felt like an Onion headline. He seemed flustered as his informed his audience of the sale. "I don't know what's going to happen," he said in a video posted to X. He then went live on his show to call Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser who just got out of prison. "Dude, what the fuck is this story?" Bannon asked him over the phone, flustering Jones even further. He went to a break, one of his last on the network he built up from the ground.