Satirical news website The Onion announced Monday what might seem to many like one of the media outlet’s signature jokes: it’s in the final stages of an agreement to take over Infowars, the far-right website founded by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. But The Onion — for once — was dead serious.
The new deal would see The Onion’s parent company pay an $81,000 monthly licensing fee to Gregory Milligan, the court-appointed bankruptcy manager for the website. It’s a Hail Mary bid by the farcical publication after a judge blocked its initial plan to acquire Infowars in 2024 during a bankruptcy auction.
The Onion had offered $1.75 million for Infowars’ assets — hoping to relaunch the site as a parody of itself — during a bankruptcy auction and was declared the winning bidder, but Jones was able to block the acquisition by arguing before the court that the bidding process was tainted by illegal collusion. That came after Jones was found to have defamed the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and ordered to pay one of the largest judgments ever as restitution.
Now, The Onion is asking a Texas county district judge to approve its unorthodox licensing agreement, which CEO Ben Collins announced Monday during an appearance on The Athletic’s podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out.”
“With the help of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has reached a long-awaited deal to take over InfoWars,” Collins wrote in a Monday afternoon post on Bluesky, adding that comedian Tim Heidecker will be joining Infowars as its new creative director.
The Onion plans to share the proceeds of its merchandise sales with the Sandy Hook families, Collins told Torre.
“I decided — with the help of everybody in my life and family — that I just wasn’t going to drop this,” Collins said on Torre’s podcast. “And I just didn’t want to make it so our most grievous sin as a country, which is mass shootings of kids in school, where financializing that and getting away with it is fine. If we can’t draw a line there, then there is no line anymore.”
Jones filed for personal bankruptcy in Texas in 2022 after losing the defamation lawsuit brought by the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting over his false portrayal of the shooting as a hoax involving actors. Jones later conceded that the shooting was “100 percent real,” and a bankruptcy judge approved auctioning off Jones’ Infowars platform and its assets to help him pay nearly $1.5 billion in court-ordered damages to the families.
The Onion resumed its print publication in 2024 after only publishing its content online for more than a decade, and the outlet has since surpassed some major regional newspapers in circulation.
