You may recall that InfoWars’ stuff was going to be auctioned off. The auction is over! Guess who won?
The satirical news publication The Onion won the bidding for Alex Jones’s Infowars at a bankruptcy auction, backed by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims whom Jones owes more than $1 billion US in defamation judgments for calling the massacre a hoax, the families announced Thursday.
That’s, ummm, interesting. But what are they going to do with it all? I mean, old videos of Alex Jones raving about gay frogs are intrinsically comedic, but how do you use it on a satire site? I’d also be concerned that a lot of it is ugly and horrifying — children died at Sandy Hook — and I don’t see how to use it for humorous effect.
OK, the Onion does have one amusing article about their purchase. They’re going to need a lot more jokes, though.
This may be a failure of imagination on my part, but I really can’t think of anything satirical the Onion can do with InfoWars other than buying it and announcing the purchase like they just did. I suppose they could junk it up with satires and parodies of Jones’ previous rantings, but that might not be a good thing if Jones’ audience can’t (or just won’t) distinguish “serious” loony bullshit from satire.
I received an email from The Guardian today soliciting donations saying they are no longer posting on X. Good for them. I might reward them a little.
They get a studio out of it.
I guess that the gay frogs will be Onion regulars.
They could always present actual well researched real news “in the style of” the old videos, to trick Jones’ old fans into thinking they’re learning about the deeper conspiracy below the conspiracy while actually just telling them real things that are actually happening?
I mean, how else do you parody that stuff?
What are they going to do with it all? Things like string together out-of-context Alex Jones quotes in response to Donald Trump actions, of course. There’s a lot of funny/ridiculous crazy you could do with Jones once the psychotic context is edited out.
I haven’t got a sense of humor for any of this shit anymore. Lost it a long time ago.
It’s beyond parody now. Hundreds of thousands have died as a result of this insanity and probably millions more will die, but sure, laff it up.
It’s not funny anymore.
The Sandy Hook Parents organization put up some of the money for it so I assume they have a plan for it.
Two purely explanatory-of-procedure comments (and this is not legal advice etc.):
(1) It’s not entirely accurate to say that the Sandy Hook Foundation “put up some of the money for it” — it was instead a “creditor bid” valued not at what the creditor put up in cash, but the stated value based upon the face value of the creditor’s claim against the debtor. (That is, it functioned as “I bid the amount I won’t get to collect from the outside-of-bankruptcy judgment against the debtor(s).”) This is far from unusual and perfectly ordinary in corporate bankruptcies, if quite rare in “media” bankruptcies — foregoing a debt otherwise owed is treated in bankruptcy like cash paid in, because the full amount of that foregone debt can then be distributed to the other creditors. But then, any semblance of logic is quite rare in media bankruptcies…
(2) Unfortunately, allies of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named are asserting procedural irregularities in the sale process (n.b. every contested sale has something about it that is “procedural[ly] irregular[]” — remember that 100% of bankruptcies have significant poor recordkeeping by the debtor), so this is not a final sale. There’s a hearing on the objections already scheduled.
Alex Jones always looked like an angry moldy bowling ball to us. Of course, for a long time we’ve known he was just a ‘gutter ball’ never racking up any meaningful score. And, he should have been sued for false advertising. It wasn’t infowars it was disinfo wars. I’m glad the onion will have some fun roasting him. But, PZ is correct. A lot of stuff on that website should have been flushed a long time ago.
Make a series of deep dive, non satirical, documentaries about it?
They could invite Colbert to do a spoof video as his conservative alter ego… Tuck Buckford!
They could dismantle it all and sell off the parts like vulture capitalists, while keeping the name away from rwnjs like domain squatters. Win-win, seems to me. If they’re required to do something occasionally to maintain ownership of the name, that shouldn’t be too hard.
Isn’t the money going straight to Jones’ victims? Maybe it’s just a good deed by The Onion.
I would assume the money goes straight to the Sandy Hook families, and that may be why they did it.
From the AP article (https://apnews.com/article/onion-buys-infowars-alex-jones-6496f198d141c991087dcd937b3588e9)
Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, told The Associated Press in a video interview earlier Thursday that it planned to relaunch the Infowars website in January with satire aimed at conspiracy theorists and right-wing personalities, as well as educational information about gun violence prevention from the group Everytown for Gun Safety. Collins would not disclose the bid amount.
A follow-up on my own @8, point 2:
Here’s a nonpaywalled article at The Guardian explaining a bit about the hearing set for next week. It requires one further bit of explanation on bankruptcy-court process, though: An “evidentiary hearing” is required, under bankruptcy-court rules, whenever anyone may be asked to testify in open court to anything; and unlike most other US courts, that usually includes active questioning by the judge. That’s precisely what will happen here, as it’s quite clear that Trustee will be on the stand to explain the valuation process at minimum, and why there wasn’t a second round of bids. This is how one makes a record that is not just documents in a bankruptcy proceeding, and it’s pretty common when someone’s judgment/discretion is at issue.