The Onion has said it has finally agreed a deal allowing it to take over Infowars, the far-right conspiracy-theory site formerly run by Alex Jones.
In a statement to Variety this week, the Onion’s CEO Ben Collins confirmed details of the satirical site’s plans for Infowars.
He told the outlet Infowars would be relaunched as a parody of itself.
The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, will pay $81,000 a month to license the infowars.com domain name and associated intellectual property including its name.
The deal will run for six months, with an option to extend for another six months.
On Monday, the Onion shared a fake message from the fictional CEO of Global Tetrahedron, “Bryce P. Tetraeder,” announcing that “at long last, Infowars is ours.”
The post read: “With this new InfoWars, we will democratize psychological torture, welcoming brutal and sadistic ideas from everyone, even the very stupidest among us. It will be like the Manhattan Project, only instead of a bomb, we will be building a website.
“The InfoWars of tomorrow will converge into a swirling vortex of content about content, talent acquiring talent, rings of concentric media mergers processing all human artistry into one endlessly digestible slurry. This will be a dank, sunless place, one where panic and capital feed on each other like twins in the womb of a hulking, unknowable monster — a monster known by many names, but which I like to call modern-day America.”
The Onion has also revealed the new multi-coloured logo for the platform, which of course features an onion.
It was back in November 2024 that the Onion announced it had won a bankruptcy auction to take control of Infowars.
Jones and his company had filed for bankruptcy after he was ordered to pay the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting $1.4 billion after he repeatedly called the Connecticut school shooting a hoax staged by “crisis actors.”
However, the Onion’s cash bid of $1.75m to acquire the Infowars assets was rejected by a Texas bankruptcy judge in December 2024. The judge said the auction process lacked clarity and that the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims deserved more money.
Under the new deal, which still needs to be approved by a judge, the Onion will launch a new digital platform and comedy network at Infowars.com, led by creative director Tim Heidecker and head of programming Mia DiPasquale.
The Onion said the platform is “designed to create a home for emerging and established comedic voices while expanding The Onion’s role as a modern satire institution.”
The plan has been developed with the support of the Sandy Hook families.