Discussion
At Long Last, InfoWars Is Ours
bigyabai: > 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.In any age where Polymarket didn't already exist, we'd have called this satire.
CobrastanJorji: It's still not as bad as the actual InfoWars, which if I recall was selling "Alex Jones Natural" supplements, which were mostly just stuff like regular iodine tablets with a massive market and a cool name like "Survival Shield X-2."
add-sub-mul-div: Maybe that could help fund The Onion. Why should the rich on the right have a monopoly on swindling the poor on the right with fake supplements?
jmward01: So they are now setting the content on infowars.com? Honestly, I can't tell since everything on that site looks so fake it isn't believable. The onion transition may be hard to detect.
junon: Seems like there will be a new logo with an onion on it, judging from the tote bag merch shown in the article. That's when we'll know, I suppose.
pton_xd: It was barely funny when I read the headline a few years ago. Really weird story, I guess I just don't understand the humor at all. I'd rather stop hearing about InfoWars entirely.
incomingpain: You want to be associated with toxic waste IP?Why? You're not going to attract any of the audience. You likely could have just chose a new name and built whatever you want to do with this.
OgsyedIE: The Onion and Mr Beast are the highbrow and lowbrow versions of the same niche: absurdism, spectacle and indifference without staying power. Since there's such low retention, the content must be weighted to constant new conversions and new reconversions.Edit: if you have the time, watch their youtube series Sex House, Helcomb County Municipal Lake Dredge Appraisals and Dr. Good (approx 75 minutes each). There's no nudity, gore or cursing, just some very clever themes about the parallels between television and hell that are still relevant right now, if not more so.
mattkrause: The Onion has been around since 1988, so...decent staying power.
busterarm: And hasn't had any cultural relevance aside from this stunt for just about the last decade.It's like saying that National Lampoon is still relevant.
gegtik: do you have a rubric to share for qualifying for cultural relevance?
ravenstine: No offense, but the humor of it has gone right over your head. Building an InfoWars clone isn't nearly as funny as acquiring the real one just to mock it.
occamofsandwich: I guess.. But renting a 4th reich site seems far darker than they might be used to and likely to make them the butt of the joke when Hitler's testtube clone gets elected from it in 35 years.
saulpw: You say "without staying power" but I still remember and frequently cite these ancient Onion article headlines: - Drugs now legal if user is gainfully employed - Top 10 Genocides of the 20th Century (Infographic) - Cycle of Abuse Running Smoothly I mean sure, it's a satirical news site and it's got a constant stream of new content, much of which is forgettable. But that's true of every other news site too. The gems make it stick.
luke727: Maybe it's just me but I don't see much humor in this. His brand and assets may have been liquidated, but he's still doing his show and it remains popular. The only people who really won in this saga are, as usual, the lawyers.
jakedata: "Tu Stultus Es""Drugs Win Drug War""History Sighs, Repeats Itself"and of course..."SICKOS"
jimt1234: I visited with my family in rural Missouri recently. Alex Jones and InfoWars is gospel to them. I was amazed at how many times cited him as an authority on various topics. I thought they were joking, but apparently, Obama made a promise with his father before his passing that he would destroy the United States. Oh, and of course, Obama is Satan, and Trump was sent by God to protect us all. Of course.
kstrauser: Grew up in Springfield, posting this from California. There's a reason for that.
qwerpy: It’s the weather, right? Not a big fan of west coast politics compared to back home but I’ll tolerate it in exchange for the sun :)
mothballed: The insane size of the judgement against Jones for Sandy Hook just shows they were looking to make someone pay for the dead kids and with the killer dead, the guy defaming the dead kids (and by proxy of that, as the legal argument goes, their parents, since obviously the parents were rightly claiming otherwise) was the nearest asshole in sight.Probably the most notorious lesson that when an asshole does a terrible thing and nothing can be extracted from him, you shouldn't go out of your way to do something dumb enough that everyone who already had their pitchforks out justifies you being the scapegoat instead.
wat10000: The amount of the judgment seems reasonable for years of harassment against a bunch of people, all done for a profit, plus a bunch of egregious misbehavior in court.
NoMoreNicksLeft: Reasonable by what metric? I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people. Is it reasonable because Alex Jones can afford it (hint: he can't, not even if he wasn't hiding his money)?This judgement ends up being more akin to punishing him by forcing him off of his platform, which is actually unconstitutional even for a shitbag like him.
neaden: To be clear, you don't actually have a constitutional right to slander people.
tptacek: When corporations are sued, they tend to take the lawsuits seriously, which is probably a big factor in why their outcomes are so different than Jones'.
pogue: Seems like it's still not theirs until a judge signs off on it.That sale was scuttled by a bankruptcy court. Now, The Onion has re-emerged with a new plan: licensing the website from Gregory Milligan, the court-appointed manager of the site.On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.The licensing deal has been agreed to by The Onion and the court-appointed administrator. But it is not effective until Judge Gamble approves it, and Mr. Jones could appeal any ruling. That means the fate of Infowars remains in limbo until the court rules, probably sometime in the next two weeks. Mr. Jones continues to operate Infowars.com and host its weekday program, “The Alex Jones Show.”The Onion Has a New Plan to Take Over Infowars https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/business/infowars-alex-jo...
pityJuke: I’m surprised they’ve said it so confidently given how it completely collapsed last time…
shagie: I believe its because its a different structure.Previously, they were trying to buy the assets outright. That got into the "one group of families is owned $1.4 billion and another is owned $50 million" and the "how do you maximize the returns from Alex Jones assets to satisfy those claims?"This is using a different structure.> On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.They're not buying it - they're licensing it from the victims families instead.
micromacrofoot: those judgements should be higher tooI think this one was high because alex jones harassed parents of murdered children to the point where they had to move out of the town their children were buried in. These people were harassed to the point of being afraid to visit the graves of their children. Sometimes examples need to be set in egregious cases.
ocdtrekkie: Bear in mind buying it to ruin it is a very real public service. Alex Jones was hoping a conservative ally would buy it and then just continue to let him do what he wants.Jokes aside, The Onion is basically spending a giant pile of money to burn the website down.
burkaman: This is not final and still has to be approved by a judge (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/business/infowars-alex-jo...)
adzm: > Tim Heidecker, one of the comedians behind “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, has been hired to serve as “creative director of Infowars.” He said he initially plans to parody Mr. Jones’s “whole modus operandi.”> Mr. Heidecker has been working on his impression of Mr. Jones. But eventually, when that joke gets old, Mr. Heidecker said that he hoped to turn Infowars into a destination for independent and experimental comedy.> “I just thought it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity,” Mr. Heidecker said in an interview.
underlipton: His brand of comedy is very hit-or-miss for me (the best way I can describe it is "smug"), but context drives me to wish him luck in his presumed efforts to turn InfoWars into a literal joke instead of just a figurative one.
djmips: I would describe it as absurdism.
Kye: Finally, competition for Clickhole.
arrakeen: heidecker has been honing this persona for years now in the On Cinema universe. looking forward to this quite a bit
davexunit: Tim Heidecker... from?
djmips: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_%26_Eric
jazz9k: If we were judging sites on misinformation/conspiracies and the people that are hurt by it, BlueSky would be shutdown immediately and liquidated. so would most of the mainstream news sites.The only reason Alex Jones was targeted is because he helped get Trump elected.It's also very odd that the military basically took over the town after Sandy Hook and it was bulldozed less than a year after the mass shooting:https://www.npr.org/2013/10/25/240242673/newtown-residents-d...
TheOtherHobbes: This is a very impressive satire on the Palantir manifesto.Accidental and ironic, but still impressive.
mattkrause: 65,000 print subscribers (on par with the Boston Globe!) and 300% revenue growth last year suggests they're doing okay.https://www.fastcompany.com/91502944/the-onion-most-innovati...
busterarm: When I worked at an ISP we had a lot of landline phone customers too and I'm sure they will continue to for a long time.At least as long as their current customers keep breathing.You can run a business off inertia/nostalgia for quite a long time.People are confused about what I said. Success and Relevance are not the same thing. National Lampoon still has a business too, but I doubt that any of you have seen a new movie of theirs since Van Wilder/Repli-Kate came out in 2002.A million dollars a year for a domain name is quite a lot. And I know what was paid for the sales of some big (in the keyword marketing/leadgen space) domain names...Sale, not lease.
floren: > You can run a business off inertia/nostalgia for quite a long time.They only reintroduced print editions in 2024 after an 11 year break. Those 65,000 print subscribers are all people who decided they wanted to start paying money for The Onion in the last 2 years.
thrance: The globalists won, Hallelujah!
tclancy: There are some folks really upset about us not platforming a maniac. If you feel like stopping Alex Jones from being actively harmful is a slippery slope directly to something you might say, boy, I would want to take a minute and think that through.
mrhottakes: He understands the modern conservative male mindset better than anyone, it's amazing
frumplestlatz: He may understand what the modern liberal mindset wants to believe about the modern conservative male mindset, but I would not say that lends itself to a particularly accurate representation.
UltraSane: Trump lies constantly
fmbb: I can’t believe this.I saw OP and went to infowars dot com to have a look. I scrolled a bit, clicked some links, looked at the store, had a good laugh at the comedy of this ironic site.Now you’re telling me the site is not a joke from The Onion? Reality is stranger than fiction.
troped2: My favorite headlines:"Video: ‘Homophobic’ 6-Week-Old Baby Cries After Gay Dad Tells Him ‘There Is No Mama’""UK Approves Bills To Remove Criminal Penalties For Women Who Commit Their Own Abortions""Nigerian Photographed Killing Cat And Trying To Cook It In Front Of Children’s Playground In Italy"
logifail: > 6-Week-Old BabyI appreciate this story appears to be all about the rage-bate headlines, but I don't believe that either six-week old babies say "Mama" (with purpose) or that a baby that age would be capable of responding in the way described to an adult saying "there is no Mama". It doesn't work like that at that age.[Source: have three kids]
dougb5: If "people are confused" I think it's because you are rejecting empirical evidence that The Onion is relevant without offering any counter-evidence of your own. Is it possible it's just no longer relevant to you personally? (I myself am a proud print subscriber...)
busterarm: Yeah some people do like feet.
contextfree: It's called Global Tetrahedron but it has a dodecahedron as a logo/emblem (guessing intentional)
htx80nerd: Jones wasnt telling or encouraging his listeners to harass the Sandy Hook families. That's internet nut jobs. Jones didnt even come up with the theory, he just talked about it on his show.This is basically a free speech issue akin to the JFK shooting theories.
traderj0e: He didn't just talk about it, he claimed it. "Yeah, so, Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured" - Alex JonesEdit: Someone else posted a doc with a bunch of quotes on this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47839299
wat10000: Some more here: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alex_Jones
narrator: [delayed]
mothballed: Alex Jones did not, as far as the evidence we have seen, harass the parents. Alex Jones did not direct anyone to harass the parents.Some of his viewers used Jones' statements as justification for harassments.Interestingly, as far as I know, nothing was pursued against the people harassing the parents. They went after the rich guy saying lies they didn't like, then depended on the fact no one besides the defense wants to side with someone who says such shockingly vicious lies about the facts surrounding dead kids.
Shog9: The defense - including Jones himself - also did a very poor job, so it's debatable whether anyone at all wanted a different outcome.
wat10000: That's understating things rather substantially. He ignored court orders. He continued to defame the plaintiffs during the trial, including a statement on air that one of the plaintiff's death by suicide was actually a murder and part of the conspiracy.If you were sued and your objective was to lose as badly as possible and get as harsh a judgment as possible, it would look a lot like what Jones did here.
weberer: Alex Jones is live right now discussing thishttps://banned.video/channel/the-alex-jones-showhttps://x.com/AJNlive
onychomys: I thought the entire point of all of this was that I no longer needed to care what Alex Jones thinks about literally anything.
weberer: You're always free to not click on things you don't want to watch.
traderj0e: The Onion's humor is like that drawing of the angry crying guy wearing a laughing face mask. It's only "funny" if you're pissed off about something.
DonHopkins: Woo hoo, sounds like some of their jokes landed and you just couldn't take it. Do you only appreciate humor if it's punching down?Do you have any funny jokes about the children who were "killed" at Sandy Hook or the crisis actors who pretended to be their parents and mourn for them that you want to share with the class?
traderj0e: That's the thing, their jokes don't land. Idk what the Sandy Hook shooting has to do with this, the Onion has been around for much longer.
shagie: [delayed]
andrewflnr: > Nothing can stop us now that we’re in charge of a website.Somehow I don't think the confidence is meant to be taken at exactly face value.
motbus3: Can someone put me to speed on it? Who is the onion? Who is info wars? What is happening? I can't comprehend but it feels that I cannot really Google for it
ro_bit: Finally, wojak invocation on HN
traderj0e: Proud to be part of this historic moment, took until 2026 but better late than never
like_any_other: Source: the video: https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/2045335697893269640
busterarm: I remember when The KLF burned a million quid. They were being internally consistent. It was artistically relevant.Most people thought they were insane. Bill Drummond wrote about how it strained his relationship with his kids. You can tell that he regrets it.Personally I think a million bucks to lease a domain name for a year is a really terrible business decision. You might be able to argue that it's going to victims but you could almost certainly just park that money into an interest-bearing account and do better for those victims.But it's also been obvious from the beginning (starting with Jones' own comments) that nobody really gives a shit about these families and they're just props in other peoples' theater show.
ocdtrekkie: I get the impression that beyond the money from the sale, the victims would very much like Alex Jones control of InfoWars to end. This accomplishes both of those things. I don't generally find The Onion that funny, and probably will never visit the new InfoWars, but I'm eternally grateful that they were willing to step in and do this. Because someone had to. A "good business decision" is to let Alex run his show if you buy the brand, but that's still a win for him.Not only would another owner likely allow Alex Jones to continue to operate, but The Onion can truly salt the earth around Alex Jones' business. If they own the InfoWars trademarks... if they own The Alex Jones Show as a trademark? They can potentially shut down Alex Jones' future works if they violate InfoWars' trademarks and intellectual property. They can sue him if he says something defamatory about the new InfoWars. One of the perks here is that The Onion is well-versed in free speech rights, intellectual property rights, and trademark law. They already have lawyers good at this stuff.The Onion can be a truly significant thorn in Jones' side, the way most other outcomes for this could not. I'm guessing the new site won't be that funny, but thankfully I don't really care about the "art".
logifail: "6-Week-Old" babies don't have the muscle strength to hold their heads horizontally like that (and IMHO it would be foolhardy to wave them around like that)...Pronounced social smiling (as in the video) already by six weeks would also pretty unusual.
at-fates-hands: - The video of the baby has been widely circulated on social media. The same couple also posted a video of them saying the baby looked at them in a "homophobic" way. People in the comments said they should "Just throw the baby away."- The UK bill is real: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3511/stages/18040/amendmen...This new clause would disapply existing criminal law related to the accessing or provision of abortion care from women acting in relation to their own pregnancy at any gestation, ensuring no woman would be liable for a prison sentence as a result of seeking to end her own pregnancy. It would not change any law regarding the provision of abortion services within a healthcare setting, including but not limited to the time limit, the grounds for abortion, or the requirement for two doctors’ approval.- The video of the Nigerian has also been making the rounds on social media and has not been debunked as an ai generated fake. There are both images and video of the incident.Not really sure why you would post this sarcastically when all you had to do was a ten second google search to confirm none of these are cringe worthy, tinfoil hat conspiracies.
like_any_other: Do you think learning that 3/3 stories they thought were so ridiculous they were obviously fake, were in fact real, will cause them to reconsider their view of the world in any way?
freediddy: I think it's better if they keep all the URLs as they are right now, but then add misinformation into each page and put a big banner saying that this site is parody. Then search and AI will index this and then it will another lawsuit from Alex Jones to get the information removed from those alternate sources.
dfxm12: As of even more recently, Jones believes Trump is under demonic influences.
selimthegrim: Maybe that explains the video Trump posted
dlev_pika: Thank you, Tetrahedron - between this, you are the best possible end for that shit peddling, abusive scum that is AJ.Between this takeover, and Trump’s BRUTAL takedown of AJ a few days ago, karma seems to be catching up with AJ
kypro: Please can someone correct my opinion on this because I'm sure I'm missing something.I find it crazy that in the US you can't take an opinion on something without risking being bankrupted because that thing you said is later proven untrue and that it hurt someone's feelings – feeling which in the US have a monetary value of billions apparently.I agree that the media should be evidence based and it's bad when the media is presenting things which are clearly false, but I also think that sometimes the evidence is misleading and speculation can be useful to get to the truth.Surely cases like this show that it's simply far too dangerous to report on something in the US which might both upset people and could later proven to be false?We have a similar issue in the UK where even when it's widely understood that someone is abusing kids, if they're famous our media basically can't say anything because they'll risk being sued. While our law is well intentioned, it seems that it really just suppresses the free exchange of information which has repeatedly led to harms against children. The speculation while often harmful is sometimes useful.I just feel like there's a middle ground here. Maybe you can sue, but perhaps your feelings are only worth a few hundred thousand pounds? I get the US is much richer than the UK but being sued for billions for being wrong and hurting peoples feelings just seems insane. And I agree Jones was completely wrong to have said what he said.Why am I wrong on this? I hate holding this opinion and would like it changed.
linkregister: Yes, your understanding is not aligned with the facts of the case. This was not close to an unfair abridgement of Mr. Jones's rights.Timeline:1. Alex Jones hosts guests on his show questioning if a mass school shooting was a falsified event.2. The controversy drove a massive increase in traffic to his videos.3. This encouraged Mr. Jones to host additional guests who made direct claims that parents of the slain children were actors hired by the US government.4. Those parents received intense harassment and death threats. Many had to move away from their homes.5. The parents sent many requests to the Infowars show asking Mr. Jones to stop claiming they were actors; Infowars did not stop.6. The parents sued.7. Infowars failed to comply with standard evidence discovery requests.8. After many attempts by the court to achieve compliance, the plaintiffs moved for a default judgement. The court accepted.9. At the award hearing, plaintiffs provided evidence that Mr. Jones moved assets out of Infowars to a company owned by his parents specifically to evade paying the judgment.10. The jury at the award hearing awarded the plaintiffs about $1B in damages. Rationale was to discourage Mr. Jones from continuing to libel family members impacted by mass shootings.The award hearing was exceptionally dramatic and theatrical. The defense was repeatedly caught in lies and accidentally sent evidence to the plaintiff's lawyer, revealing Mr. Jones's perjury.
htek: I looked it up and was not surprised to see the rabid ramblings of a tech bro psychopath (but I repeat myself) with a drug addiction who gleefully admitted to wanting to hunt down Palantir's detractors with AI drones used to spray them with fentanyl-laced urine.
bena: An opinion would be something like "I think it's good that those kids were shot".You could say that all day and people would not like you, but no one could do anything about it.What Alex Jones did was deny reality. He suggested that the victims did not exist. He suggested the event did not happen and the grieving parents were government-hired actors. He riled up his listeners and effectively sent them after people. He did this in spite of knowing what he was saying on his show was not true. That was a large part of things, that Alex Jones was aware he was spreading misinformation.Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion".
traderj0e: Ok so they feel strongly about gun violence, where's the humorous part here? It's a pretty funny headline being used the first time, maybe they were better in 2014.
tart-lemonade: In a criminal case, if you refuse to cooperate, ignore warrants, etc, the state can and will send in the police to arrest you and continue their investigation while you sit in jail.In a civil case, that power doesn't exist; opposing council cannot order your arrest or send the police in to break down your door and execute a subpoena. This presents an obvious question: if there is no way to compel cooperation in a civil trial, why would anyone play along if they were guilty? To provide an incentive to do so, civil trials have sanctions, penalties issued by the judge to the offending party, which ratchet up in accordance with the severity of the misconduct displayed in the proceedings.Alex Jones/Free Speech Systems/Infowars repeatedly withheld and spoliated evidence, ignored subpoenas, committed bankruptcy fraud to delay the proceedings, and sent woefully unprepared corporate representatives to depositions in direct defiance of court orders. Their conduct was so egregious that two judges independently handed down default judgements: for refusing to cooperate at every step of the way, they lost the right to argue their case in front of a jury, so the juries would just decide how much Jones et al owed in restitution.If the juries felt Jones et al had been wronged and there was no real merit to the case, they would have awarded the Sandy Hook families $1 judgements (look up nominal damages, there is lots of precedence for this), but in both cases, the juries felt Jones' conduct was so egregious that they gave large judgements to the Sandy Hook families.In both trials, the judges went out of their way to go along with all the dumb arguments FSS's council was putting forth to ensure no appeal could ever succeed on the merits. All Jones had to do was give the appearance of cooperation and then he would have been allowed to argue to the jury that he was innocent, but he couldn't reign in his worst impulses, fired every competent attorney he had, and was left with Norm Pattis and Andino Reynal, attorneys who have no qualms catering to a client in ways that might jeopardize their law licenses.Defamation law is full of snakes, attorneys laser-focused on money with no morals who will happily do things like put rape victims on the stand to interrogate them on every detail and turn innocent misrecollections into wins for the rapist. That Alex couldn't even keep one of those around speaks volumes.Alex sacrificed his right to a trial to determine his innocence. He then declared bankruptcy because he knew he would never be able to pay for the consequences of his actions, and when you declare chapter 7 bankruptcy (personal and corporate), everything is for sale, including the news outlet he was the majority owner of.Alex isn't being silenced (and even if he were it's not the government doing it so the constitution doesn't play a role here). He got Judge Lopez to rule his Twitter account was not an asset that can be auctioned off, and he's been working to shift his audience over there so he can continue his grift, with his merch now being peddled by a company owned by one of his friends, Bigly, which will likely be untouchable by the bankruptcy court, so he's not going to end up on the streets.
