Have you heard the good news? On Monday, the satirical news site The Onion announced that it’s relaunching Infowars, the hard-right conspiracy network founded in 1999 by the swollen, roaring, sobbing, pink, furious, lying, damp, swindling disinformation profiteer Alex Jones. For years, Jones raked in millions by using Infowars to sell shady nutritional supplements and survival gear to what must have been the most gullible audience in American media history, a Facebook-poisoned cadre of tabloid fantasists convinced that they were too shrewd to be fooled by the lamestream media. In large numbers, they tuned in to Infowars to hear Jones snort, shriek, and rant his way through paranoid fantasies such as “the government tells tornadoes where to go;” “the Pentagon is lacing our water with chemicals to make us gay;” “Sesame Street characters are covering up the link between vaccines and autism;” “Bill Gates’s so-called philanthropy is actually a scheme to make entire populations infertile;” “FEMA is part of a secret master plan to inter Americans in prison camps;” and “the Pentagon’s water chemicals are also making frogs gay,” among many, many others.
In December 2012, the 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza murdered 26 people, 20 of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. By the following April, Jones was spreading the narrative that this event—which remains the second-deadliest school shooting in United States history—was a hoax, perpetrated by the government to advance a gun-control agenda. Jones pushed the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory for years, milking it for attention and ratings. His listeners, hopped up on his claims that the shootings were staged by actors who were hired by the anti-gun lobby, tormented, stalked, and harassed the bereaved parents of the dead first graders. One conspiracy theorist claimed to have urinated on the grave of a 7-year-old murdered in the attack; parents received letters from people threatening to dig up their children’s coffins to prove they were empty. Meanwhile, Alex Jones funneled money to help fund January 6.
The Sandy Hook parents sued Jones, and finally, in 2022, a court ordered him to pay $1.4 billion in damages for defamation and for the infliction of emotional distress. In 2025, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, forcing the liquidation of Infowars and its assets to help cover Jones’s enormous debts.
And now, with the support of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has agreed to a deal to turn Infowars into a parody website, making fun of precisely the kind of spittle-flecked conspiracy bellowing, interspersed with ad reads for dubious muscle powders, that Jones used to amass his fortune. The deal still has to be approved by a Texas judge, which is admittedly a terrifying sentence; nevertheless, and I’m speaking objectively, this is clearly one of the greatest things that has ever happened in the history of the world. Just look at this trailer. Crab salt!
Here are my five key takeaways from this news, which is proof that there are still rays of hope in this morally cursed universe, hallelujah, praise Lady Justice and her sister Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution.
Key takeaway no. 1: There are still rays of hope in this morally cursed universe, hallelujah, praise Lady Justice and her sister Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution.
If you didn’t follow Jones’s campaign of deceit around Sandy Hook as it was happening, it might be hard for you to understand how miserable it felt to watch an amoral grifter profit off the deaths of schoolchildren. Actually, what am I talking about? Anyone can understand how miserable that felt. If you have half a heart or one-sixth of a brain, of course you see that anyone who gets rich by leading a targeted harassment campaign against parents whose young children were murdered is a monster. Plain and simple.
Yet for nearly a decade, it seemed as if Jones would be able to go on selling his lies about one of America’s worst tragedies. Here’s how bad it got: When Jeremy Richman, the father of a 6-year-old girl killed at Sandy Hook, died by apparent suicide in 2019, Jones spread a conspiracy theory that Richman had been murdered to distract from the Mueller report.
Now, though? Assuming the Texas judge doesn’t betray humanity—again, a terrifying sentence—Jones not only will lose his flagship property; he will also be forced to watch as his legacy gets turned into the joke it always should have been. These are dark times in America. That the minds behind The Onion and ClickHole are going to spend their workdays turning Jones into a buffoon, with the blessing of his victims, is a small, weird, precious beam of light, and a reminder that some forms of accountability are still possible.
Key takeaway no. 2: The Onion is not kidding around.
The Onion has a long and storied history in American culture—it was founded in 1988 as a print newspaper, and has been publishing online for 30 years—but it might just be entering its golden age. In 2024, the former NBC News reporter Ben Collins became CEO after The Onion was acquired by Twilio cofounder Jeff Lawson. Under its new leadership, the organization has seemed to exist inside a gravity-defying bubble of fizzy possibility. Other media organizations have relentlessly contracted; The Onion brought back its print edition, which had been shuttered in 2013. Other media organizations have pivoted to appeasing the Trump administration; The Onion has become, if anything, sharper, bolder, and more politically engaged than it’s ever been.
It’s also—and you’d think this would be an asset for a satirical publication, but it’s a bar many fail to clear—very funny. The headlines may be fake, but when it comes to capturing the feeling of living in America during the madness of the second Trump presidency, The Onion is more accurate than The New York Times. Behold:
The Infowars deal demonstrates the mix of madcap dreaming and strategic focus that the organization operates with these days. Collins got the idea to go after Jones’s crown jewel when Bluesky users suggested that buying Infowars would be a funny thing for The Onion to do. (How comprehensively is The Onion crushing it right now? It unearthed the funniest possible idea on Bluesky, which is like discovering the world’s largest gold deposit under an IRS regional office in Buffalo.) Global Tetrahedron, The Onion’s parent company, won an auction to acquire Infowars’s assets in 2024, but a Texas judge—oh, God—blocked the sale on the grounds that the auction process hadn’t raised enough money for the Sandy Hook families. He reached this ruling even though many of the Sandy Hook families had supported The Onion’s bid.
At that point, everyone basically assumed that the takeover bid was finished. Instead, The Onion kept working on the bid for 17 more months. The new deal is structured completely differently than the one the judge rejected. For one thing, it doesn’t involve an auction; a second auction had been ruled out during the legal wrangling that followed the first. For another, The Onion isn’t buying Infowars outright. It’s leasing the name, for $81,000 a month, from Infowars’s court-appointed bankruptcy manager, and sharing the merchandising revenue with Sandy Hook families. Collins has also brought in the beloved comedian Tim Heidecker, who’s made a speciality of mocking right-wing conspiracy media, as creative director for the new site.
The Onion went after a totally loopy and far-fetched idea, then put months of meticulous practical work into making it a reality. Admittedly, I’m biased—my bias is that I love things that are fun and cool and hate things that are predatory and evil—but I find this intensely inspiring.
Key takeaway no. 3: Sometimes, the best way to create the world you want is to behave as if it already exists.
One thing I love about The Onion’s strategy is that Collins and his team have been forthright about what they’re trying to do. They’re not striking an apologetic or conciliatory tone; they’re not hiding behind the sort of half-embarrassed journalistic both-sides doublespeak that tends to emanate from their notionally more truth-telling media peers. (On both the left and the right: David Ellison is clearly buying up media properties to force them in a more MAGA-friendly direction, but he’s not saying so outright.) The Onion is also not waiting to announce its intentions until the legal process has been fully cleared. It has a cool thing planned and it wants to show you—if a judge invents a reason to forbid it, that’s on the judge. For its part, The Onion is operating as if the right outcome is also the likeliest one. In an era when our leaders routinely pursue policies that could charitably be described as “pro-death,” this makes for a refreshing change of pace.
I get the sense that this approach stems from a sincere conviction that making fun of Alex Jones is not only very fun, but also the right thing to do. On Monday, Collins went on Pablo Torre Finds Out to talk about his plans for Infowars, and … well, this is all pretty great. You should probably just watch the clip.
“I just didn’t want to make it so our most grievous sin as a country, which is mass shootings of kids in schools—where financializing that and getting away with it is fine,” Collins said. “If we can’t draw a line there, then there is no line anymore.”
Politically and ethically, this statement should be about as uncontroversial as it gets. It’s also a stronger act of moral leadership than we’re currently receiving from most of the people actually running the country.
Key takeaway no. 4: Dante had the right idea about justice.
If you were to devise a level of hell designed to torment Alex Jones for eternity, a bespoke dimension of punishment perfectly tailored to the nature of his crimes, I think it would look like this: a bunch of progressive comedy writers using his own network to ridicule him while raising money for people he wronged and exploited.
Jones’s shtick has always been to behave in patently ludicrous ways, performing a bizarre theater of high-decibel emotional incontinence, while using his over-the-top, roided-up, alpha-male persona to compel the respect of his audience. Here he is, for instance, ripping his shirt off on camera—something he particularly loves to do—while ranting about Hillary Clinton:
Or consider this classic, in which he declares holy war on the nefarious forces harvesting baby organs to make Pepsi flavoring:
Outright mockery from people who aren’t afraid of him—mockery that punctures his weird conviction that testosterone means gravitas—is ruinous to Jones. Maybe it’s just about bearable when it comes from some namby-pamby member of the East Coast globalist media elite like me. But on his own network? The one he founded and built from the ground up, with nothing but hard work and a bottomless willingness to hurt anyone and everyone for a dollar? To have everything he used to pretend to stand for held up to ridicule, there, by people acting like him, talking like him, forever? Dante depicted traitors as being encased in a lake of ice in the Ninth Circle of Hell; this is Jones’s version.
They really will be actors this time. It really will be staged. Infowars will still be making money off someone else’s pain, but this time the pain will be his, and the money will be someone else’s. It's so perfect I can hardly believe it’s real.
By the way, Jones reacted to Collins’s Infowars announcement by storming, shirtless, onto the set of another Infowars host’s show, then launching into a rant about how the plan to parody him proved that The Onion’s staff was full of “skin-walkers.” I think he meant it metaphorically rather than literally? Regardless, this is going to go great.
In fact, it’s already going great. Here’s one of the top headlines on Infowars—which is still controlled by Jones for the moment—as of April 23.
When I first saw this, I genuinely assumed it had been posted by The Onion. Nope! Alex Jones shared it on X himself, then sent it to Elon Musk with the caption, “please help.”
Key takeaway no. 5: Everyone who profits from, normalizes, minimizes, or enables mass shootings should be treated to the same degree of social humiliation.
The truth is that Alex Jones is not the only one doing this. Every politician who takes cash from the NRA, works against gun-control legislation, and tweets out meaningless pablum after a mass shooting is also monetizing death. Every conservative pastor who gins up donations from his gun-loving parishioners by telling them that the Bible loves concealed-carry permits is monetizing it. Every regular person who shrugs after a school shooting because it’s sad, but, well, not sad enough to make them give up their guns is complicit in the system.
Just last week, a father in Shreveport, Louisiana, killed seven of his own children and one of their cousins, eight little kids ranging in age from 3 to 11. The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, whose district includes Shreveport, and who has consistently opposed all forms of gun-control legislation, literally tweeted “thoughts and prayers.”
This is a depraved situation, and everyone who’s contributed to the stagnation and loss of urgency that sustains it should be held up to the same level of contempt as The Onion is showing to Jones. Obviously we can’t have a fake news network devoted to every politician who’s on the take from the gun lobby; the internet would run out of bandwidth before we got halfway down the list. But the original purpose of satire, after all, was to excoriate wickedness, and something about seeing Jones treated as he deserves made me think about how all these people deserve to be treated, how they’d be exposed and shamed in a just and rational universe.
The Mike Johnsons of the world should be laughed out of respectable society. No, it won’t happen. If it did, it would save lives.
