In a fitting and just outcome, Infowars, the hateful tool of the odious Alex Jones, who profited from horrid lies about the murdered of children of the Sandy Hook school massacre, is now the property of The Onion, with the backing of the families of the slain boys and girls.
So now the world’s leading “fake news” site, a place where comedy carries the day every day, controls a brand that with a straight face told hurtful, harmful, corrosive lies. Allow yourself to smile.
For those who need the whole story retold: Jones over many years built a media empire designed to make people believe that the worst fever-dream conspiracies of their imaginations were true, concocted by nefarious always-out-to-get-them political enemies.
He exalted in telling people that the attacks on New York City on 9/11 were an inside job, that the Boston Marathon bombing was staged, that a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor was a hub of human trafficking, and that government was putting chemicals in the water to manipulate humans’ sexuality.
Along the way, he sold people dietary supplements, toothpaste and more he falsely claimed could cure diseases and bolster masculinity— disgusting lies sufficient on their own to make him a pariah.
After a classroom of first-graders and a half-dozen educators were murdered by a delusional young man armed with an assault rifle in Connecticut in December 2012, Jones went even lower: He called the children’s deaths faked and their families crisis actors, feeding his listeners the poisonous falsehood that mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers enduring the worst agony of their lives were cynical pretenders.
When people who’d been fed this poison sent the families hate mail and death threats, the families didn’t sit down and take it. They sued Jones and Infowars for defamation, and ultimately, heroically, yielded a judgment that he would have to pay out nearly $1.5 billion. This required reducing his little empire to the rubble of bankruptcy— then selling the rubble at auction.
Few stories about the news media have happy endings nowadays as trust is systematically breaking down and disinformation is growing like black mold in every online crevice. This one does have a positive outcome. The Onion, in a press release, proclaims it will now aim “to end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor for good.”
Everytown for Gun Safety, funded by Mike Bloomberg, will put advertising dollars into the new enterprise, spreading the important message about the dangers of firearms, a mission shared by The Onion, which highlights the absurdity of unnecessary gun deaths.
The Onion aims its barbs every time the United States, a place where guns are the closest thing we have to a national religion, suffers a mass shooting: “ ‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
So soon enough the clever people who brought the world headlines like “World Death Rate Holding Steady at 100 Percent,” “Drugs Win Drug War,” “Area Man Passionate Defender of What He Imagines Constitution to Be” will be putting Infowars to good use.
Infowars is dead. Long live Infowars.