The Onion buys Alex Jones’ Infowars at auction with assist from Sandy Hook families

The satirical information publication The Onion won the bidding for Alex Jones’ Infowars at a financial setback auction, backed by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims whom Jones owes more than $1 billion in defamation judgments for calling the massacre a hoax.

“The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the fairness we have long awaited and fought for,” Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed in the 2012 shooting in Connecticut, said in a statement Thursday provided by his lawyers.

The Onion acquired the conspiracy hypothesis platform’s website; social media accounts; studio in Austin, Texas; trademarks; and video archive for an undisclosed sales worth. The purchase gives a satirical outlet — which carries the banner of “America’s Finest information Source” on its masthead — control over a brand that has long peddled misinformation and conspiracy.

The Onion was founded in the 1980s and for decades has skewered politics and pop population, including making Jones a frequent target of mocking articles. Mass shootings in America, such as the Sandy Hook attack, are often followed by The Onion publishing slightly updated versions of one of its most well-known recurring pieces of satire: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only country Where This Regularly Happens.”

“No worth would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds,” The Onion said in a satirical post confirming the sale. “And yet, in a stroke of excellent fortune, a formidable special profit throng has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.”

The Infowars website was down Thursday morning. On his live broadcast, Jones was angry and defiant, vowing to test the sale and auction procedure in court and saying he would use a recent studio that was already set up. He later announced his display was being shut down, but he resumed a short period later at a recent location and using a different social media account.

“The trip has just begun. Thank you,” Jones said as he signed off.

The Onion, based in Chicago, consulted on the bidding with some of the Sandy Hook families that sued Jones for defamation and emotional distress in lawsuits in Connecticut and Texas, lawyers for the families said.

“Our clients knew that factual accountability meant an complete to Infowars and an complete to Jones’ ability to spread lies, pain and terror at scale,” said Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the families.

Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion’s parent business, Global Tetrahedron, told The Associated Press in a video interview that it plans to relaunch the Infowars website in January with satire aimed at conspiracy theorists and correct-wing personalities, as well as educational information about gun violence prevention from Everytown for Gun Safety. Collins joked that The Onion’s bid was $1 trillion but would not disclose the actual amount.

“We thought it would be a very amusing joke if we bought this thing, probably one of the better jokes we’ve ever told,” Collins said. “The (Sandy Hook) families decided they would effectively join our bid, back our bid, to try to get us over the complete line. Because by the complete 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 silly, stupid website, and we decided to do the second thing.”

The publication bills itself as “the globe’s leading information publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local information events” and says it has 4.3 trillion daily readers. Recent headlines have included, “Trump Boys Have Slap Fight Over Who Gets To Run Foreign Policy Meetings,” “Oklahoma Law Requires Ten Commandments To Be Displayed In Every Womb” and “Man Forgetting Difference Between Meteoroid, Meteorite Struggles To Describe What Just Killed His Dog.”

Sandy Hook families sued Jones and his business for repeatedly saying on his display that the shooting that killed 20 children and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax staged by crisis actors to spur more gun control.

Parents and children of many of the victims testified that they were traumatized by Jones’ conspiracies and threats by his followers.

Sealed bids for the private auction were opened Wednesday. Both supporters and detractors of Jones had expressed profit in buying Infowars.

Jones had told listeners that if his supporters won the bidding, he could remain on the Infowars platforms. The financial setback trustee named First United American Companies, a business affiliated with one of Jones’ product-selling sites, as the “backup bid,” in case The Onion purchase falls through.

First United American Companies asked the financial setback court in Houston in a filing on Thursday to hold a position conference immediately on “the apparent defects in the sale procedure, including changing the procedures, lack of transparency, and inaccurate disclosures to interested bidders,” saying “the worth of the assets is in the procedure of being destroyed at this very minute.”