The satirical news publication The Onion was named the winning bidder for Alex Jones’ Infowars at a bankruptcy auction Thursday, backed by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims whom Jones owes more than $1 billion in defamation judgments for calling the massacre a hoax.
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00:00I had known some of the lawyers for the San Diego family.
00:03So I gave them a ring.
00:03I was like, what does this look like?
00:04How do we actually do this?
00:05And they gave us some information about how to get this moving.
00:10So then we thought we can make a bid here.
00:12And the families decided they would effectively join our bid, back our bid,
00:21to try to get us over the finish line, because by the end of the day, it was us or Alex Jones.
00:26That's who could either continue this website unabated, basically unpunished for what he's done to these families over the years.
00:34Or we can make a dumb, stupid website.
00:36And we decided to do the second thing.
00:38Thankfully, you know, Everytown partnered with us on the launch of this thing.
00:42They were founded after Sandy Hook as a response to Sandy Hook.
00:45They've long loved The Onion because we have this iconic headline that we publish every time there's a mass shooting.
00:51It says, there's no way to stop this, says Only Nation, where this regularly happens.
00:56We've published it 37 times verbatim after every mass shooting.
00:59Everytown knows the power of that specific article.
01:02And we thought this might be a good partnership.
01:03Let's take over this thing.
01:05A good way to put ads on top of the dumbest website in the world that we've just acquired.
01:10And thankfully, we won.
01:12We're still a bit in shock, but here we are.
01:16We own, The Onion owns InfoWars.
01:18You know, when you think about the unmitigated harm that Alex Jones and InfoWars brought to Sandy Hook families.
01:28It's just poetic justice that now Everytown and The Onion together will open a new chapter on InfoWars and a chapter that is devoted to the issue of gun safety.
01:42This is an opportunity to actually staunch the flood of misinformation.
01:48And talk straight to people about facts, about research, about data and do it in a way with The Onion's creativity that will land in as common sense.
02:02We are very excited about what we can do with this thing.
02:05The Onion is best when it sort of meets the media moment and has done that for the last 35 years of its existence.
02:12You know, first it was newspapers and then it was The Onion News Network, which went after cable news in its own way.
02:18And now we clearly have a new media ecosystem where people try to scare you all day about the big scary forces that are holding you down and try to fix that with supplements or try to fix that with weird, one weird trick products that they sell to you in their podcasts and on their Instagram accounts and in their TikTok pages.
02:38We're going to go after all of the like every facet of alternative media that is trying to get you addicted to stupid stuff.
02:47Like there is a whole world of podcasters and TikTok influencers who have some really curious ideas of the world.
02:58And I also think that we're learning right now that their followings are just as big, if not bigger than traditional celebrities.
03:06And they've gone unmocked.
03:10They've gone, they got a free pass to this point.
03:14And we don't think that that's fair.
03:16Humor is one of the most effective ways to reach people and to actually combat misinformation.
03:23And so that's why we're all in.
03:25That's why this made perfect sense to us.
03:27In the view of American life, you know, these people are pure victims.
03:31And it's true. Like they are.
03:33They've gone through so much.
03:34It's horrible.
03:34They're also human beings.
03:36And they also like to laugh at things.
03:38And they also like fun and good things to happen in the world.
03:41And they put their their weight behind this because they realized this was a very good prank and a very good prank with a very long tail that might last for a very long time.
03:50And we are proud to do our duty as good Americans and use our gestures, privilege and get rid of it on their behalf.
04:01I think that the families are so relieved that.
04:07The.
04:09Misinformation, the painful, cruel misinformation that has been visited upon them will be staunched.
04:17This is turning a chapter and turning a chapter on a very, very painful moment.
04:22Our full relaunch is in January, but it's going to be a full on onion, onion style experience, I would say.