When this all started, the Onion released a priceless 'press statement':
"Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.
No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group 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..."
> 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. The InfoWars of old was only the prototype for the hell I know we can build together: A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery, their minds fully disintegrating on contact.
The Onion is satire, so ... But Alex Jones is currently busy with Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and others to bitterly criticize Trump for the Iran war.
Trump retaliated by calling all of them "low IQ".
Given that Carlson's media company has an investment from the ubiquitous 1789 Capital (Thiel and Trump Jr.), we don't know if this is theater to keep the isolationist MAGA in the fold.
It could also be that they sacrifice Trump in order to accelerate Thiel's and Vance's technocracy.
Anyway, these influencers are still useful for their masters.
Or just inspect element + press delete. In some cases you also need to then delete an extra gray overlay and re-enable scroll on the base html tag, but takes 30s
> radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society
Oh, I am all ears! Who are the "most vulnerable members of society" according to them? And why do they think it is cool to patronize 'em? Seriously, I wanna know. Are we talking about women? children? people with disabilities? immigrants? Foreigners?
The list you just thought up trying to argue about literal jokes from a literal joke making company tells us more about you and your opinions regarding others than it says about the joke the joke making company made
The context is that Jones blew up the court process every chance he got, setting a new record for contempt fining. The most important piece was refusing to comply with discovery (his lawyer was so bad-behaved here he ended up with a disciplinary suspension). As a result Jones received a default judgement, i.e. the plaintiffs win by default and he doesn't get to argue his case. This also means the plaintiffs get everything they were asking for. And then for some reason he didn't even enter an argument during the damages calculation phase, so the jury just went with whatever the plaintiffs said.
Besides Jones and his lawyer absolutely botching his defense and basically giving up the case (and pissing off the courts as I understand it, which is a bad fucking idea and usually also leads to larger fines), the $1.4 billion is just what Jones managed to rack it up to before entering bankruptcy proceedings, which froze his debt collectors out for a bit.
Alongside the class action, Jones was iirc also facing several separate lawsuits, so what you're seeing here is multiple lost lawsuits (I think he lost 4?) adding up.
The bankruptcy also doesn't wipe the slate clean for Jones afaiu, because he specifically was found to be malicious in his behavior. Court debts aren't wiped in that situation. He's still on the hook for that.
I don't think so. With how much money was made and direct attacks on individual members on the legal system, I think it's a breath of fresh air to see the rich and influential actually get punished. There's frustrating the legal system, and then there's lying under oath and executing smear campaigns against judges.
If Alex Jones wanted a smaller settlement, he could've chosen to destroy fewer lies, comply with legal orders, or simply not commit any number of his many other legal infractions.
He's desperately trying to weasel his way out of paying any of it back by doing things like moving assets around, leaving companies empty, and then declaring bankruptcy on them. His victims will probably spend the rest of their lives chasing after the compensation they're owed, but perhaps at least taking Jones' branding from him might be punishment for a man like him.
It is absurdly large and deliberately so. First of all this was a class action suit representing 22 plaintiffs. Secondly, the number was large to punish the defendant for continuously disrespecting the count with bad repeated behavior. Third, there was no defense because the defendant failed to work with the court resulting in a summary judgment.
The idea was never to apply a reasonable punishment, it's just an excuse to destroy and silence a voice that, for better or worse, is uncontrollable by the establishment. Out of every 10 things you read on a place like Infowars, 5 will be crazy cucko insane shit, 4 will be common sense american conservative talking points, but one will be some hard truth that no side of the power scale wants to be said out loud. Infowars delenda est.
I’m just not sure you can make the claim that this is an issue between the outlet and the establishment. It’s had hosts like Roger Stone doing 5 episodes a week. He’s the former campaign advisor for the sitting president of the United States, and advisor to Dole, Bush (both), and Reagan.
It doesn’t get more establishment than that. So the “down and out anti-establishment underdog” narrative doesn’t apply in my opinion.
To people like that, random college students are "establishment" because they are lefty, and the literal President of the United States is "anti-establishment" because he uses slurs on social media.
If people want to get their "hard truths" out, they shouldn't contaminate them with 9/10 parts of lies, and they certainly shouldn't run a harassment campaign against the parents of murdered children.
He had every possible chance to argue his case, both against culpability and then against the specific damages, but both he and the lawyers he hired refused to do so. This 1.4b dollars was not a particularly harsh judgment coming down from the establishment (note that the establishment is the president Jones was a paid campaign member for), it was the result of his implicit acceptance of every claim the Snady Hook parents made.
You should read how this particularly huge settlement was achieved. It’s on Alex Jones for refusing to participate in the legal debate, contemning the court, refusing discovery, et cetera.
With better legal defence he may have to pay much and much less.
As a drive by reader that votes, I can guess why you copped a few whacks;
The tone is off and it appears to carry the implication that you might believe that none of the above (Jones, Piker, Owens) should be landed with fines despite on the face of it saying the opposite.
A cleaner comment would be better; just explain what it is that Piker has done that is equivilant to Jones' multi decade harrassment of the Sandi Hook parents, ditto Owens.
( for record, I'm non-USAian and unfamiliar with either Piker or Owens )
Your comment was bad because you don't know the context of Jones' case and how the penalty was arrived at, and are thus extrapolating without any merit to other people.
Neither Hassan Piker nor Candace Owens, nor any other of the many inflammatory voices on the left or right of the new media ecosystem, have done anything remotely close to the type of harassment that Alex Jones exposed the Sandy Hook victims to. Directly accusing grieving parents and children of being completely fake paid "crisis actors", again and again, with images and "analysis" and so on, is beyond anything another media personality has had the poor taste and temerity to try - perhaps in history, certainly in America.
Even then, the only reason the judgement ended up at such a gigantic number is that Alex Jones and his lawyers refused to argue their case to any extent, and in fact directly attacked and antagonized the court and the judge. They lost the case through summary judgement after repeated refusals to follow the normal procedural rules or even to show up in court. Then, they repeated the same refusal to participate or argue their case during the damages settlement, again forcing the court to simply award the amount requested by the plaintiffs, which is always set to a huge number as a negotiating tactic.
So no, the fact that someone argues that Alex Jones deserved this punishment fully is not in any way in conflict with believing that Hassan or Candace Owens or any other new media personality deserves anything similar.
Not sure if it even matters since Alex Jones is just going to keep doing what he's doing.
Judgements demanding he pay billions keep coming out and he just says he's not paying, and nobody has forced him to either. Even if infowars' brand changes hands, that's the extent of it.
A million dollars a year for... what? A gag that fans of infowars won't watch, and there aren't enough anti-fans to appreciate? It feels personal at this point.
Tim heidecker summarised their thinking wonderfully.
"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”.
Not to mention Alex Jones is still up and running elsewhere spreading his nonsense and hawking his merch. So it's a cute gag, I guess, and gets the Sandy Hook families some money, but doesn't really change the status quo.
So, amongst all the things that happened and happening right now, you think "someone is incredibly petty against Alex Jones" is worth spending your time complaining about. Alex Jones, the one who harassed mass shooting survivors.
Pause for a moment. Do you have young kids? Imagine for a moment that they were slaughtered in a mass shooting and a bunch of people made money by launching a harassment campaign targeting you as a liar who probably never had kids, or alternatively used them as paid actors. Imagine this campaign went on for years.
And someone repurpose one of the instigator’s web sites as a humour outlet is the issue that leaves a bad taste in your mouth?
As opposed to the Alex Jones show, a Two Minute Hate for rightwingers? These people love to dish it out but can't take it when someone else uses their tactics against them.
i don’t understand how this is not a 1st amendment violation
can someone explain the difference between what alex jones said about sandy hook and what other people say about 9/11 being an inside job, hologram planes, fake this fake that etc
First amendment prevents the federal government from preventing speech or punishing for speech (subject to a few exceptions).
This was not that.
This was a civil defamation case; the parents bought a case of actual material harm and harrassment of epic proportions before two seperate judges in two seperate states and both courts made the finding that Jones had indeed caused harm and harrassment .. and continued to do so over years.
This is not a case about Sandy Hook the event - it is a defamation case by the victims of that event, that Alex Jones directly attacked.
This is the biggest difference - no one is claiming that all of the people who lost their loved ones in the 9/11 attacks were actually actors paid to pretend that they were grieving for their parents and children and friends. No one was encouraged to personally attack said victims and survivors to "expose their lies" because of 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Furthermore, defamation law works very differently for claims against public personalities ("Bush did 9/11!") compared to claims against private persons ("this random child shown crying in news reports after her classmates were supposedly killed is actually pretending!"). Also, vague accusations of orchestrating a criminal conspiracy / cover up are far harder to litigate than very clear claims of massive fraud. Finally, the Sandy Hook victims were generally able to show specific damages they suffered, attacks against them by people in their community, because of Jones' actions; Dick Cheney may have been more generally hated because of claims about 9/11 conspiracies, but was not directly harasses in the same way.
There was an interview with Barry Jennings, Deputy Director of Emergency Services, who said he was trapped in Building 7 before the main towers collapsed. That is a literal statement from an eyewitness. A NIST study refuted him later, but that's a lot more fuel for theories than Sandy Hook had.
It does not help that Epstein friends Lutnick, Silverstein, Michael Jackson and Sarah Ferguson all had appointments in the WTC on that day and cancelled last minute. That doesn't mean an inside job of course, but several agencies knew something was going to happen even if not the exact date:
https://archive.is/yoLYM
When this all started, the Onion released a priceless 'press statement':
"Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.
No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group 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..."
Full statement here https://theonion.com/heres-why-i-decided-to-buy-infowars/
Brilliant plans for the future:
https://theonion.info/?p=1
> 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. The InfoWars of old was only the prototype for the hell I know we can build together: A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery, their minds fully disintegrating on contact.
The Onion is satire, so ... But Alex Jones is currently busy with Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and others to bitterly criticize Trump for the Iran war.
Trump retaliated by calling all of them "low IQ".
Given that Carlson's media company has an investment from the ubiquitous 1789 Capital (Thiel and Trump Jr.), we don't know if this is theater to keep the isolationist MAGA in the fold.
It could also be that they sacrifice Trump in order to accelerate Thiel's and Vance's technocracy.
Anyway, these influencers are still useful for their masters.
They’re just reading polls and reacting accordingly. There’s no principle involved.
Literally no principal involved.
Tucker will take any position for money see his entire career!
Plus the guy was advocating the administration should attack Iran for attempting to assassinate trump.
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Babylon Bee forces you to accept cookies to use their site. Worth avoiding.
As with all silly internet block BS, simply reload the site and hit escape before the cookie banner loads.
> reload the site and hit escape
What exactly does that do? Which web browser?
I’m on mobile right now, so can’t test.
I'm on Firefox and it did nothing for me. The popup came up so fast between me refreshing and hitting escape.
Alternatively, you can disable JavaScript on the website. That lets me view it.
Or just inspect element + press delete. In some cases you also need to then delete an extra gray overlay and re-enable scroll on the base html tag, but takes 30s
I shut that site down as soon as I saw that. Gross.
> radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society
Oh, I am all ears! Who are the "most vulnerable members of society" according to them? And why do they think it is cool to patronize 'em? Seriously, I wanna know. Are we talking about women? children? people with disabilities? immigrants? Foreigners?
Pretty lame to use such sweeping statements.
What exactly is patronizing here? Or is it just calling them the most vulnerable?
The list you just thought up trying to argue about literal jokes from a literal joke making company tells us more about you and your opinions regarding others than it says about the joke the joke making company made
Discussion (627 points, 2 days ago, 320 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47837611
Maybe I’m out of touch, but doesn’t a $1.4b dollar settlement for this seem rather… large?
The context is that Jones blew up the court process every chance he got, setting a new record for contempt fining. The most important piece was refusing to comply with discovery (his lawyer was so bad-behaved here he ended up with a disciplinary suspension). As a result Jones received a default judgement, i.e. the plaintiffs win by default and he doesn't get to argue his case. This also means the plaintiffs get everything they were asking for. And then for some reason he didn't even enter an argument during the damages calculation phase, so the jury just went with whatever the plaintiffs said.
Besides Jones and his lawyer absolutely botching his defense and basically giving up the case (and pissing off the courts as I understand it, which is a bad fucking idea and usually also leads to larger fines), the $1.4 billion is just what Jones managed to rack it up to before entering bankruptcy proceedings, which froze his debt collectors out for a bit.
Alongside the class action, Jones was iirc also facing several separate lawsuits, so what you're seeing here is multiple lost lawsuits (I think he lost 4?) adding up.
The bankruptcy also doesn't wipe the slate clean for Jones afaiu, because he specifically was found to be malicious in his behavior. Court debts aren't wiped in that situation. He's still on the hook for that.
We're not going to have a rehash of the McDonald's coffee settlement argument here, are we?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages
I don't think so. With how much money was made and direct attacks on individual members on the legal system, I think it's a breath of fresh air to see the rich and influential actually get punished. There's frustrating the legal system, and then there's lying under oath and executing smear campaigns against judges.
If Alex Jones wanted a smaller settlement, he could've chosen to destroy fewer lies, comply with legal orders, or simply not commit any number of his many other legal infractions.
He's desperately trying to weasel his way out of paying any of it back by doing things like moving assets around, leaving companies empty, and then declaring bankruptcy on them. His victims will probably spend the rest of their lives chasing after the compensation they're owed, but perhaps at least taking Jones' branding from him might be punishment for a man like him.
It is absurdly large and deliberately so. First of all this was a class action suit representing 22 plaintiffs. Secondly, the number was large to punish the defendant for continuously disrespecting the count with bad repeated behavior. Third, there was no defense because the defendant failed to work with the court resulting in a summary judgment.
The idea was never to apply a reasonable punishment, it's just an excuse to destroy and silence a voice that, for better or worse, is uncontrollable by the establishment. Out of every 10 things you read on a place like Infowars, 5 will be crazy cucko insane shit, 4 will be common sense american conservative talking points, but one will be some hard truth that no side of the power scale wants to be said out loud. Infowars delenda est.
I’m just not sure you can make the claim that this is an issue between the outlet and the establishment. It’s had hosts like Roger Stone doing 5 episodes a week. He’s the former campaign advisor for the sitting president of the United States, and advisor to Dole, Bush (both), and Reagan.
It doesn’t get more establishment than that. So the “down and out anti-establishment underdog” narrative doesn’t apply in my opinion.
To people like that, random college students are "establishment" because they are lefty, and the literal President of the United States is "anti-establishment" because he uses slurs on social media.
If people want to get their "hard truths" out, they shouldn't contaminate them with 9/10 parts of lies, and they certainly shouldn't run a harassment campaign against the parents of murdered children.
> Infowars delenda est.
Yes.
He hurt innocent people with his voice without regrets. He wanted to die on that hill and if so he can be lucky that only his voice might die.
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He had every possible chance to argue his case, both against culpability and then against the specific damages, but both he and the lawyers he hired refused to do so. This 1.4b dollars was not a particularly harsh judgment coming down from the establishment (note that the establishment is the president Jones was a paid campaign member for), it was the result of his implicit acceptance of every claim the Snady Hook parents made.
What would instead have been a reasonable punishment?
Either he truly believed that the kids at Sandy Hook were actors, or he was using it as part of his grift and making money of it.
As far as I can tell he has not reversed his stance on it
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You should read how this particularly huge settlement was achieved. It’s on Alex Jones for refusing to participate in the legal debate, contemning the court, refusing discovery, et cetera.
With better legal defence he may have to pay much and much less.
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As a drive by reader that votes, I can guess why you copped a few whacks;
The tone is off and it appears to carry the implication that you might believe that none of the above (Jones, Piker, Owens) should be landed with fines despite on the face of it saying the opposite.
A cleaner comment would be better; just explain what it is that Piker has done that is equivilant to Jones' multi decade harrassment of the Sandi Hook parents, ditto Owens.
( for record, I'm non-USAian and unfamiliar with either Piker or Owens )
Your comment was bad because you don't know the context of Jones' case and how the penalty was arrived at, and are thus extrapolating without any merit to other people.
Neither Hassan Piker nor Candace Owens, nor any other of the many inflammatory voices on the left or right of the new media ecosystem, have done anything remotely close to the type of harassment that Alex Jones exposed the Sandy Hook victims to. Directly accusing grieving parents and children of being completely fake paid "crisis actors", again and again, with images and "analysis" and so on, is beyond anything another media personality has had the poor taste and temerity to try - perhaps in history, certainly in America.
Even then, the only reason the judgement ended up at such a gigantic number is that Alex Jones and his lawyers refused to argue their case to any extent, and in fact directly attacked and antagonized the court and the judge. They lost the case through summary judgement after repeated refusals to follow the normal procedural rules or even to show up in court. Then, they repeated the same refusal to participate or argue their case during the damages settlement, again forcing the court to simply award the amount requested by the plaintiffs, which is always set to a huge number as a negotiating tactic.
So no, the fact that someone argues that Alex Jones deserved this punishment fully is not in any way in conflict with believing that Hassan or Candace Owens or any other new media personality deserves anything similar.
Not interesting
Adds nothing, inflammatory in tone, missing the point of discussion. If you weren't grayed out something would be serious wrong with this site.
> 5 will be crazy cucko insane shit, 4 will be common sense american conservative talking points
If you ask me, it's getting harder and harder to draw a line between those two categories...
Turning into an odd form of a take over. Basically renting it for 3 months to let Tim Heidecker do a few shows??
No way, i can't believe it actually happened! I would have though alex would though alex and his goons would have managed to stop it
Not sure if it even matters since Alex Jones is just going to keep doing what he's doing.
Judgements demanding he pay billions keep coming out and he just says he's not paying, and nobody has forced him to either. Even if infowars' brand changes hands, that's the extent of it.
I hope Dan and Jordan can get the desk like they've always wanted.
I'm concerned they won't know what to do without Alex. Already going back over shows from 2006...
Editorialized title. It has a plan to take over that will need approval. Lots of non-paywalled coverage that would be better links, eg:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/20/the-onion-al...
See previous discussion linked in sibling as well.
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A million dollars a year for... what? A gag that fans of infowars won't watch, and there aren't enough anti-fans to appreciate? It feels personal at this point.
> It feels personal at this point.
Of course it's personal. Alex Jones is an arsehole manufacturing outrage for profit. Being made fun of is the least of his problems
Tim heidecker summarised their thinking wonderfully.
"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”.
Not to mention Alex Jones is still up and running elsewhere spreading his nonsense and hawking his merch. So it's a cute gag, I guess, and gets the Sandy Hook families some money, but doesn't really change the status quo.
I disagree. It's a lot better than if it were bought by simply a different far-right media outlet.
This keeps it out of that ecosystem, which I think is a really good thing.
Think of it as a million dollar ad buy.
Or a charitable gift to Sandy Hook families
> It feels personal at this point.
It is openly and proudly personal. It is also political, also openly.
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So, amongst all the things that happened and happening right now, you think "someone is incredibly petty against Alex Jones" is worth spending your time complaining about. Alex Jones, the one who harassed mass shooting survivors.
Seems appropriate for satirists to do a petty attack on a bad man. That’s kind of the whole thing, isn’t it?
I’d rather it be collective action that produces real change, but humor is cathartic so I’ll take it.
Pause for a moment. Do you have young kids? Imagine for a moment that they were slaughtered in a mass shooting and a bunch of people made money by launching a harassment campaign targeting you as a liar who probably never had kids, or alternatively used them as paid actors. Imagine this campaign went on for years.
And someone repurpose one of the instigator’s web sites as a humour outlet is the issue that leaves a bad taste in your mouth?
As opposed to the Alex Jones show, a Two Minute Hate for rightwingers? These people love to dish it out but can't take it when someone else uses their tactics against them.
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It's funny
Because it's funny that The Onion will be taking over InfoWars.
> It feels personal at this point.
Fucking hell that's a funny line.
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i don’t understand how this is not a 1st amendment violation
can someone explain the difference between what alex jones said about sandy hook and what other people say about 9/11 being an inside job, hologram planes, fake this fake that etc
First amendment prevents the federal government from preventing speech or punishing for speech (subject to a few exceptions).
This was not that.
This was a civil defamation case; the parents bought a case of actual material harm and harrassment of epic proportions before two seperate judges in two seperate states and both courts made the finding that Jones had indeed caused harm and harrassment .. and continued to do so over years.
This is not a case about Sandy Hook the event - it is a defamation case by the victims of that event, that Alex Jones directly attacked.
This is the biggest difference - no one is claiming that all of the people who lost their loved ones in the 9/11 attacks were actually actors paid to pretend that they were grieving for their parents and children and friends. No one was encouraged to personally attack said victims and survivors to "expose their lies" because of 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Furthermore, defamation law works very differently for claims against public personalities ("Bush did 9/11!") compared to claims against private persons ("this random child shown crying in news reports after her classmates were supposedly killed is actually pretending!"). Also, vague accusations of orchestrating a criminal conspiracy / cover up are far harder to litigate than very clear claims of massive fraud. Finally, the Sandy Hook victims were generally able to show specific damages they suffered, attacks against them by people in their community, because of Jones' actions; Dick Cheney may have been more generally hated because of claims about 9/11 conspiracies, but was not directly harasses in the same way.
There was an interview with Barry Jennings, Deputy Director of Emergency Services, who said he was trapped in Building 7 before the main towers collapsed. That is a literal statement from an eyewitness. A NIST study refuted him later, but that's a lot more fuel for theories than Sandy Hook had.
It does not help that Epstein friends Lutnick, Silverstein, Michael Jackson and Sarah Ferguson all had appointments in the WTC on that day and cancelled last minute. That doesn't mean an inside job of course, but several agencies knew something was going to happen even if not the exact date:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_intelligence_befo...
Note that Putin warned on 9/9. He also warned of the Boston marathon bomber:
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/boston-bombing-anniversary...
In short, there is a lot more material for speculation than for Sandy Hook.
Freedom of speech loses again. They blamed Alex Jones more than the acfual murderers.
Something is definitely wrong with our justice system.
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