That sale was scuttled by a bankruptcy court. Now, The Onion has re-emerged with a new plan: licensing the website from Gregory Milligan, the court-appointed manager of the site.
On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
The licensing deal has been agreed to by The Onion and the court-appointed administrator. But it is not effective until Judge Gamble approves it, and Mr. Jones could appeal any ruling. That means the fate of Infowars remains in limbo until the court rules, probably sometime in the next two weeks. Mr. Jones continues to operate Infowars.com and host its weekday program, “The Alex Jones Show.”
The Onion Has a New Plan to Take Over Infowars https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/business/infowars-alex-jo...
I saw OP and went to infowars dot com to have a look. I scrolled a bit, clicked some links, looked at the store, had a good laugh at the comedy of this ironic site.
Now you’re telling me the site is not a joke from The Onion? Reality is stranger than fiction.
"Video: ‘Homophobic’ 6-Week-Old Baby Cries After Gay Dad Tells Him ‘There Is No Mama’"
"UK Approves Bills To Remove Criminal Penalties For Women Who Commit Their Own Abortions"
"Nigerian Photographed Killing Cat And Trying To Cook It In Front Of Children’s Playground In Italy"
I appreciate this story appears to be all about the rage-bate headlines, but I don't believe that either six-week old babies say "Mama" (with purpose) or that a baby that age would be capable of responding in the way described to an adult saying "there is no Mama". It doesn't work like that at that age.
[Source: have three kids]
Edit: but it is likely the baby is older than 6 weeks in that video - this seems to be the source of confusion (read carefully - the 6-week-old video was a different, older video):
In December, when Texson was 6 weeks old, he shared a video with the text overlay “6 week old homophobic baby,” which was viewed more than 36 million times. In that video, Texson smiles in response to being told he has a sister, a brother and puppies but frowns when McAnally says that he has two dads. In the most recent video McAnally has shared, Texson laughs and says the sound “ma ma ma,” when asked if he wants “dada or pop.” Later on, in the video, he cries and looks frustrated." - https://www.newsweek.com/entertainment/shane-mcanally-video-...
Of course, getting stuck on if they got the age of the baby wrong is throwing out the baby with the bathwater - the main thrust of the story is true.
[Apologies for being somewhat absolutist about this, but...] babies do not (typically) understand the literal meaning of words - or indeed understand language generally - at 6 weeks. They may understand tone, but not words.
Again, rage bait headlines and all that.
> Of course, getting stuck on if they got the age of the baby wrong
Was hoping to provide useful data for any readers who may be here to "gratify their intellectual curiosity"* that certain claims referenced in this thread are ... implausible ... and that's putting it mildly.
* this is HN ;)
Pronounced social smiling (as in the video) already by six weeks would also pretty unusual.
No, your baby typically needs to be propped up to sit at that age. They simply don't have that fine motor control and coordination, let alone the comprehension of whatever app you put in front of them.
That said, for me, having only ever used android phones, I always find myself wondering "how do you go back" when I help my mom with her iPhone. No back button! So I guess I'm not as intuitive as a 3 month old on reddit :)
I don't see how that's a laughing matter.
"Trump Anticipates Chinese Leader “Will Give Me A Big, Fat Hug”"
"Photos Of A Cucumber & Ron Paul Playing Baseball Massively Ratio Netanyahu & Mark Levin On X"
To be fair, he did.
> Trump Responds To Controversial Image Of Himself As Jesus, Says It Actually Depicted Him As A Doctor & Slams “Fake News” For The Misinterpretation
Had I not already heard this story via the mainstream media on this side of the Atlantic, this could easily be another satirical headline. With Trump as President, Poe’s law now covers reporting on facts – not just expressions of opinion.
A baby has even less understanding.
Everyone who is debating the homophobia of the baby is projecting.
That’s cringeworthy.
Previously, they were trying to buy the assets outright. That got into the "one group of families is owned $1.4 billion and another is owned $50 million" and the "how do you maximize the returns from Alex Jones assets to satisfy those claims?"
This is using a different structure.
> On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
They're not buying it - they're licensing it from the victims families instead.
I'm surprised you're surprised.
Somehow I don't think the confidence is meant to be taken at exactly face value.
Does that mean their use of the branding and claims of ownership could be illegal or would it be covered under the first ammendment?
Maybe you're not highbrow enough for this...
> Mr. Heidecker has been working on his impression of Mr. Jones. But eventually, when that joke gets old, Mr. Heidecker said that he hoped to turn Infowars into a destination for independent and experimental comedy.
> “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,” Mr. Heidecker said in an interview.
I love it.
In case you didn't know, the creators of Birds aren't real rug pulled and stole millions with their crypto coin.
I didn't find anything about this though.
As opposed to the current factual information?
Tim and Eric's Title Explained
By calling the show "Awesome" and "Great" before the viewer has even seen it, Tim and Eric lean into a persona of unearned confidence.
For contrast, this is what I'd call absurdism without being smug: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fs...
—-
Today Now!: Save Money By Taking A Vacation Entirely In Your Mind
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7qYL_KT06-U
Today Now! Host Undergoes Horrifically Painful Surgery Live On Air
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_5yR--35uqA
How To Channel Your Road Rage Into Cold, Calculating Road Revenge
I love that. Like a familiar smell, it triggered in me a long lost memory of the old hacker ethos.
https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3mjwx7i...
When they ask about it, throw a bunch of breathless praise on Stallman hacking the laser printer, building an OS from scratch, predicting DRM, fighting against cellphone surveillance, etc.
Tell them you'll send them a link. Then link them to the Alex Jones interview with Richard Stallman. (It's a pretty good interview, btw.)
It's like hiding broccoli in a chocolate bar they were going to eat anyway.
> “The goal for the families we represent has always been to prevent Alex Jones from being able to cause harm at scale, the way he did against them,” said Chris Mattei, the lawyer who argued the Connecticut families’ case in court. The deal with The Onion promises “to significantly degrade his power to do that.”
> The Onion also plans to sell merchandise and share the proceeds with the Sandy Hook families.
Great work by all on this effort.
"Drugs Win Drug War"
"History Sighs, Repeats Itself"
and of course...
"SICKOS"
Accidental and ironic, but still impressive.
Jokes aside, The Onion is basically spending a giant pile of money to burn the website down.
Most people thought they were insane. Bill Drummond wrote about how it strained his relationship with his kids. You can tell that he regrets it.
Personally I think a million bucks to lease a domain name for a year is a really terrible business decision. You might be able to argue that it's going to victims but you could almost certainly just park that money into an interest-bearing account and do better for those victims.
But it's also been obvious from the beginning (starting with Jones' own comments) that nobody really gives a shit about these families and they're just props in other peoples' theater show.
If the victims don't benefit from the money now, they can bear their own interest. Time-value, etc.
Not only would another owner likely allow Alex Jones to continue to operate, but The Onion can truly salt the earth around Alex Jones' business. If they own the InfoWars trademarks... if they own The Alex Jones Show as a trademark? They can potentially shut down Alex Jones' future works if they violate InfoWars' trademarks and intellectual property. They can sue him if he says something defamatory about the new InfoWars. One of the perks here is that The Onion is well-versed in free speech rights, intellectual property rights, and trademark law. They already have lawyers good at this stuff.
The Onion can be a truly significant thorn in Jones' side, the way most other outcomes for this could not. I'm guessing the new site won't be that funny, but thankfully I don't really care about the "art".
Do you have any funny jokes about the children who were "killed" at Sandy Hook or the crisis actors who pretended to be their parents and mourn for them that you want to share with the class?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
> 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
They've reprinted / reposted that article 39 times since 2014 (Sandy Hook was in 2012)
Gun violence is something that the editorial board of The Onion feels strongly about.
As mass shootings became more and more common as a news satire site they felt that they couldn't continue to keep their heads in the sand and needed to write something about it. They couldn't continue to not write something about the news, and yet they felt they had to write something. Jimmy Kimmel is often Ha Ha funny... and yet https://youtu.be/ruYeBXudsds https://youtu.be/sB0wWEFIr50 https://youtu.be/Z0vLiQLpsc8
When you make jokes about the news, sometimes you have to write about the not ha ha funny, but rather the tragic news instead. This is how The Onion has addressed it.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-onion-became-one-of-th... ( https://archive.is/hEJhg )
> And as mass shootings increasingly became a tragic and appalling feature of the Obama era, it also became a subject that The Onion could not avoid covering all too routinely. “As more and more shootings happened, it became something that—as an organization that comments on the news—we couldn’t not write stories about…and it kept on growing and growing and growing to the point where [the problem of gun violence] just seemed overwhelming.”
This is hilarious.
In any age where Polymarket didn't already exist, we'd have called this satire.
Between this takeover, and Trump’s BRUTAL takedown of AJ a few days ago, karma seems to be catching up with that shit peddling, abusive bottom-feeder scum that is AJ.
Here is to them eating each other, and choking on it.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/knowledge-fight/id1192...
I find it crazy that in the US you can't take an opinion on something without risking being bankrupted because that thing you said is later proven untrue and that it hurt someone's feelings – feeling which in the US have a monetary value of billions apparently.
I agree that the media should be evidence based and it's bad when the media is presenting things which are clearly false, but I also think that sometimes the evidence is misleading and speculation can be useful to get to the truth.
Surely cases like this show that it's simply far too dangerous to report on something in the US which might both upset people and could later proven to be false?
We have a similar issue in the UK where even when it's widely understood that someone is abusing kids, if they're famous our media basically can't say anything because they'll risk being sued. While our law is well intentioned, it seems that it really just suppresses the free exchange of information which has repeatedly led to harms against children. The speculation while often harmful is sometimes useful.
I just feel like there's a middle ground here. Maybe you can sue, but perhaps your feelings are only worth a few hundred thousand pounds? I get the US is much richer than the UK but being sued for billions for being wrong and hurting peoples feelings just seems insane. And I agree Jones was completely wrong to have said what he said.
Why am I wrong on this? I hate holding this opinion and would like it changed.
Timeline:
1. Alex Jones hosts guests on his show questioning if a mass school shooting was a falsified event.
2. The controversy drove a massive increase in traffic to his videos.
3. This encouraged Mr. Jones to host additional guests who made direct claims that parents of the slain children were actors hired by the US government.
4. Those parents received intense harassment and death threats. Many had to move away from their homes.
5. The parents sent many requests to the Infowars show asking Mr. Jones to stop claiming they were actors; Infowars did not stop.
6. The parents sued.
7. Infowars failed to comply with standard evidence discovery requests.
8. After many attempts by the court to achieve compliance, the plaintiffs moved for a default judgement. The court accepted.
9. At the award hearing, plaintiffs provided evidence that Mr. Jones moved assets out of Infowars to a company owned by his parents specifically to evade paying the judgment.
10. The jury at the award hearing awarded the plaintiffs about $1B in damages. Rationale was to discourage Mr. Jones from continuing to libel family members impacted by mass shootings.
The award hearing was exceptionally dramatic and theatrical. The defense was repeatedly caught in lies and accidentally sent evidence to the plaintiff's lawyer, revealing Mr. Jones's perjury.
The prosecution even told them that they had completely fucked up and did they intend to send everything, and the defense said "Yes". Then when these messages were brought up in court, the defense tried to say that they couldn't be allowed because they were private correspondence between them and their client. To which the prosecution supplied their conversation with the defense showing that tried to make them aware and gave them a chance to correct their error.
It was a monumental fuck up.
Also, this is the kind of case where USA allows Alex Jones kind of bad actors a lot more leeway then most of world countries.
Ad hominem. Personally I think Alex Jones deserves far worse than this judgement.
> Also, this is the kind of case where USA allows Alex Jones kind of bad actors a lot more leeway then most of world countries.
Not an argument. I'm from the UK, I understand other countries police feelings more aggressively. That isn't justification.
My opinion on this is strictly in regards to what I feel is appropriate punishment from the government given what Jones did. I don't like the idea that you can be fined by the government for lying (even if those lies hurt peoples feelings). I could accept it if the fine was reasonable, but $1b isn't reasonable in my opinion.
We can disagree on these things without being mean to each other =) I appreciate your view. I guess I just disagree.
To quote Jones:
“We’ve clearly got people where it’s actors playing different parts of different people. I’ve looked at it and undoubtedly there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it.”
That isn’t even phrased as a “what if” — it’s asserting that Sandy Hook was staged. It’s framed as a truth, not a possibility, and the jury found that Alex Jones knew it wasn’t true when he was saying it.
Why so large? A few reasons. First, this was for 26 families, so a substantial number of people. Second, we’re not just talking emotional damages — we’re talking harassment that these folks received as a result of Jones’ lies. Third, a big chunk of the damages were punitive. Alex Jones has a history of lying to expand his audience, recklessly ignoring the effects of those lies. A judge decided that the verdict needed to be big enough to discourage Jones from continuing to lie.
(Arguably that didn’t work.)
Remember when BBC edited someone's speech to call citizens to storm and riot at a certain building?
I think the deliberate maliciousness of it should bare more punishment, but I still think $1B is extremely unreasonable.
It's also absurd to me that a judge should have the right to make up an arbitrarily big number as a means to inflect a secondary punishment. $1 million is discouragement, $1 billion is an attempt to destroy the business and his life. While I have no sympathy for Jones, I still find this problematic if what you're saying is true.
They have the ability to determine punitive damages within guidelines (many states have caps, for example), and if the defendant feels the damages are unreasonable they have every right to appeal to a higher court. Eventually the Supreme Court may make an unappealable decision, but the appeals process has to stop somewhere.
And at some point society needs a way to tell people who ignore lesser consequences that they don't get to participate in that society any more. In this case I think Alex Jones crossed enough malicious lines to deserve it; he's in bad shape because he's the kind of person who accuses school shooting survivors of fraud even though he knew he wasn't true! He had every chance in the world to back off and apologize, but he didn't. He tried to avoid facing judgement by hiding behind bankruptcy. He is a very bad human being.
Now, is that always the case for this kind of judgement? Nope, sometimes the system fails. Some people would say Gawker is an example of that failure. I am not totally sure about that one, but even if it is... I'm reluctant to toss out an entire system unless it's a systemic problem. And Alex Jones experiencing consequences for lying for profit does not seem, to me, to be evidence of a systemic problem.
You could say that all day and people would not like you, but no one could do anything about it.
What Alex Jones did was deny reality. He suggested that the victims did not exist. He suggested the event did not happen and the grieving parents were government-hired actors. He riled up his listeners and effectively sent them after people. He did this in spite of knowing what he was saying on his show was not true. That was a large part of things, that Alex Jones was aware he was spreading misinformation.
Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion".
> Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion".
I agree. I'm disagreeing purely on whether $1 billion is a reasonable fine for deliberately lying. Not on whether he is guilty.
It's dangerous to say false things and have a lot of money. People in power will use it as an excuse to take your money away, unless you're allied with them, of course.
I thought I could add to it with this dumb joke but I forgot about the fact that Jones still has a sizeable following, and it's sometimes hard to tell if someone is just kidding or an insane lunatic. I'm in the former camp (I hope).
https://infowarslawsuit.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/1-Oct...
This judgement ends up being more akin to punishing him by forcing him off of his platform, which is actually unconstitutional even for a shitbag like him.
Those people won a tort (in theory), because he caused them damages that he was responsible for making remedying.
By the legal definition of slander, your statement is false.
But when a corporation does something like Bhopal, you can generally count on them hyperprofessionally attending to every detail of the ensuring tort case. Unlike Jones, who at literally every step of the legal process thumbed his nose at the court, including, at one point, attempting to boycott the process outright.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Legal Eagle and the commentary on the cell phone evidence (3 years ago) https://youtu.be/x-QcbOphxYs
It's not the court's problem that Jones won't be able to afford to broadcast his messages so broadly after this judgment. I guess he'll have to use the same tools as the rest of us now.
Sure, some company poisons the groundwater with hexavalent chromium: let's fine them $2800 quintillion. That makes sense to me. I mean, it makes sense to you, right? I know that it must make sense to you, because I actually do see evidence of stupid shit thinking like this out in the real world all around me.
When you levy fines/awards that could never hoped to be paid in any real-world circumstances, you're not levying fines (or awards) at all, you're trying to fabricate a scenario, as a judge, to stop them from existing or doing what they do. And it isn't without consequence.
Here's an example... a judge sits at a bail hearing, finds out the arrestee is a cannibal murderer that eats babies, the cops found him with a half-eaten baby still screaming in his mouth but the doctors weren't able to save it. Does he deny bail, like a reasonable human being does? No, "Bail's set at $10 million!". You're happy because that monster will stay in jail until the trial. But now every other defendant will have their bail mysteriously drift higher, until you're crying that bail is unjust (it's not) because someone shoplifts and the bail is $50,000. And you just seem profoundly incapable of seeing this causal chain. Bail, for instance, was only ever meant to secure someone's appearance at trial. By definition it needs to be a high enough amount that they'd rather lose out on the money than skip the trial, but low enough that they can scrape together the money at all. Done correctly, there are amounts that carefully (but narrowly) find that overlap. But because apparently no one gets that or can get that, everything's fucked up beyond all sanity.
Awards are like this too. By setting the award too high, these people will never even get a fraction of it (the damages they suffered will never get recompense), and rather than incentivizing Jones' future good behavior, they pushed him into even more noxious and socially maladjusted behavior and have inspired some sort of narcissist-martyr complex beyond even that which he was already making the world suffer for.
That's why I didn't bring it up. Because it's a dumb idea that totally misunderstands everything.
The actual damages awarded here is about $64 million per plaintiff, which is a lot, but not utterly absurd. If we used that amount for your chromium hypothetical, the company would need to have killed about 44 trillion people. This is, I'm reliably informed, more people than there actually are. A reasonable amount for damages in the groundwater case would be whatever it costs to either clean it up or take ownership of the affected land. If it's discovered after it has already hurt people then it needs to include damages for those people.
It doesn't really compare with bail. As you say, the purpose of bail is to ensure appearance at trial. The purpose of tort awards is to compensate for damages, and sometimes to punish. Bail is set based on the defendant: how likely are they to flee, what sort of means do they have? Damages are set based on the consequences of the tort: how much damage was there, does the person deserve additional punishment on top?
If a person has $100, then setting bail above $100 doesn't make any sense. It's equivalent to no bail. Awarding more than $100 in damages makes sense, because they can obtain more money later. Even if they don't, you're meant to award based on damages, not ability to pay. If the damages were $1,000 then the award should be $1,000 regardless of whether the person is a hobo or Jeff Bezos.
If there is one thing courts do not like, it is people thinking they are above the law and defy the courts. Jones was dumb enough to do so multiple times. FAFO.
As for the high monetary amount: that was dealt by a jury, not a judge - the system the US (for whatever long gone reason) still seems to prefer over career professionals. Juries are even worse to piss off, and juries have been known to bring the hammer down on parties showing egregiously bad conduct - see e.g. the McDonald's hot coffee case, which partially ended up being (for the time) pretty expensive because McDonald's claimed utter BS in court that they knew was wrong. Jones' conduct was similar: he kept blathering stuff he knew was untrue and, on top of that, his army of suckers kept terrorizing people with Jones knowing about that and doing not even lip service to rein the suckers in.
I think this one was high because alex jones harassed parents of murdered children to the point where they had to move out of the town their children were buried in. These people were harassed to the point of being afraid to visit the graves of their children. Sometimes examples need to be set in egregious cases.
And if he had been fined $35 million dollars, the example would have been set, they'd have been paid, and he'd have spent the next 20 years figuring out how much that award fucked him when he couldn't be insured for anything, when no one would touch him for any sort of gig worth having. He might have ended up destitute. But if you do the Dr. Evil "1 billion dollars!" thing, which he could never actually pay, the plaintiffs get nothing for all their misery, and the money he does hide in offshore accounts is there for him to loaf around on forever. Why is this so counterintuitive for everyone?
He was busy hiding millions of dollars in assets well before the judgements were handed down [0]. He fraudulently declared bankruptcy in multiple shell companies to try and delay the proceedings [1]. He made no secret of the fact that he was going to do everything in his power to avoid giving a single dime to the Sandy Hook families, regardless of the outcome. He had known for years that he was lying, his own staff had repeatedly raised objections to his behavior in writing, and if the award was $35 million, that's only a few year's profits for him to sacrifice. For reference, his personal expenses are $100k/mo [2] and his previous salary was $1.4 million/yr [3]. On Infowars' best days, they would rake in $800k in profit [4]. Sure, those $800k days weren't super often, but they are still a cartoonishly profitable business by every measure. $35m would not be a real punishment.
It should also be noted that $1.4b is the combined amount for all of the plaintiffs, not just one person. And this isn't an isolated incident; he's been defaming people his entire career, and every time he got a small judgement or was only required to apologize, he just went on to defame other people [5], and all the times he didn't get sued he never even apologized. He only cares about money, so that's how you send a message to him.
Edit: I completely forgot to mention that the Sandy Hook families did offer to settle: $85 million paid over 10 years [6]. Jones countered with $55 million [7]. If Jones and his companies could afford $5.5m/yr, that says a lot about the profitability of the operation and the inadequacy of $35m.
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/business-alex-jones-austin-texas-...
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61142905
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64644080
[3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/alex-jone...
[4]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alex-jones-testifies-in-sandy...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones#Litigation
[6]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/11/28/alex-jones-...
[7]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alex-jones-offers-to-pay-sand...
Some of his viewers used Jones' statements as justification for harassments.
Interestingly, as far as I know, nothing was pursued against the people harassing the parents. They went after the rich guy saying lies they didn't like, then depended on the fact no one besides the defense wants to side with someone who says such shockingly vicious lies about the facts surrounding dead kids.
If you were sued and your objective was to lose as badly as possible and get as harsh a judgment as possible, it would look a lot like what Jones did here.
free speech doesn't absolve you of responsibility for the damages your words cause, despite not causing them directly
In a civil case, that power doesn't exist; opposing council cannot order your arrest or send the police in to break down your door and execute a subpoena. This presents an obvious question: if there is no way to compel cooperation in a civil trial, why would anyone play along if they were guilty? To provide an incentive to do so, civil trials have sanctions, penalties issued by the judge to the offending party, which ratchet up in accordance with the severity of the misconduct displayed in the proceedings.
Alex Jones/Free Speech Systems/Infowars repeatedly withheld and spoliated evidence, ignored subpoenas, verifiably lied under oath, committed bankruptcy fraud to delay the proceedings, and sent woefully unprepared corporate representatives to depositions in direct defiance of court orders. Their conduct was so egregious that two judges independently handed down default judgements: for refusing to cooperate at every step of the way, they lost the right to argue their case in front of a jury, so the juries would just decide how much Jones et al owed in restitution.
If the juries felt Jones et al had been wronged and there was no real merit to the case, they would have awarded the Sandy Hook families $1 judgements (look up nominal damages, there is lots of precedence for this), but in both cases, the juries felt Jones' conduct was so egregious that they gave large judgements to the Sandy Hook families.
In both trials, the judges went out of their way to go along with all the dumb arguments FSS's council was putting forth to ensure no appeal could ever succeed on the merits. All Jones had to do was give the appearance of cooperation and then he would have been allowed to argue to the jury that he was innocent, but he couldn't reign in his worst impulses, defaming the victims during the trial and chasing away every competent attorney he had, leaving him with Norm Pattis (CT trial) and Andino Reynal (TX trial), attorneys who have no qualms catering to a client in ways that might jeopardize their law licenses.
The real kicker is that defamation law is full of snakes, attorneys laser-focused on money with no morals who will happily do things like put rape victims on the stand to interrogate them on every detail and turn innocent misrecollections into wins for the rapist. That Alex couldn't even keep one of those around speaks volumes.
Alex sacrificed his right to a trial to determine his innocence. He and Free Speech Systems then declared bankruptcy because he knew paying for the consequences of his actions was impossible, and when you declare chapter 7 bankruptcy, everything is for sale, including the "news" outlet he ran.
Alex isn't being silenced (and even if he were it's not the government doing it so the constitution doesn't play a role here). He got Judge Lopez to rule his Twitter account was not an asset that can be auctioned off, and he's been working to shift his audience over there so he can continue his grift, with his merch now being peddled by The Alex Jones Store, a company owned by one of his friends (Bigly), which will likely be untouchable by the bankruptcy court, so he's not going to end up on the streets unable to spread his message.
> Reasonable by what metric? I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people.
I fully support greater penalties on corporations that break the law. That said, I still view Jones' judgements as well-earned and reasonable.
This is basically a free speech issue akin to the JFK shooting theories.
Edit: Someone else posted a doc with a bunch of quotes on this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47839299
And I don't think most grifters believe their own grift. Those guys selling NFTs obviously didn't believe their own grift enough to hold them instead. I knew some personally.
Again, I find it ironic that you're using the same conspiratorial line of thinking that Jones himself does: e.g. "The CDC has changed their mask guidance so they must be lying about it"
If this guy was some kind of savant, he wouldn't have been in that situation at all. There is no evidence that he is some evil genius. He has no higher education and is a diagnosed narcissist.
You're putting the logical cart before the horse. The phrase "conflict of interest" by definition implies a perspective of a negative impact on one of said interests. An external observer who doubts what they say might view this as a conflict of interest (rightly so), but from the perspective of someone who genuinely believes the interests are aligned, it is not a conflict.
It's kind of funny but this is exactly some of the logic conspiracy theorists use to discredit authority: "Scientists profit from [vaccines/moon landing/whatever research] so therefore it is a conflict of interest when they [recommend/make policy/teach kids]"
Of course some people lie. But Jones? This guy has been doing this forever, he either is the most talented actor to ever walk the planet, or he is an idiot community college dropout with paranoia and confirmation bias. It is way more likely the latter.
People with fringe views do actually exist, they aren't all actors.
I'll bet those people I mentioned who post videos like Alex Jones and only get 10 views, some of them believe it. But they're dull and aren't making money off it. Also plenty of people have a few fringe views and theories, but they aren't claiming something far-fetched every time something happens.
?
Was this a mistake, something you mis-remembered?
The only reason Alex Jones was targeted is because he helped get Trump elected.
It's also very odd that the military basically took over the town after Sandy Hook and it was bulldozed less than a year after the mass shooting:
https://www.npr.org/2013/10/25/240242673/newtown-residents-d...
Why? You're not going to attract any of the audience. You likely could have just chose a new name and built whatever you want to do with this.
Edit: if you have the time, watch their youtube series Sex House, Helcomb County Municipal Lake Dredge Appraisals and Dr. Good (approx 75 minutes each). There's no nudity, gore or cursing, just some very clever themes about the parallels between television and hell that are still relevant right now, if not more so.
It's like saying that National Lampoon is still relevant.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91502944/the-onion-most-innovati...
https://www.fastcompany.com/91502944/the-onion-most-innovati...
At least as long as their current customers keep breathing.
You can run a business off inertia/nostalgia for quite a long time.
People are confused about what I said. Success and Relevance are not the same thing. National Lampoon still has a business too, but I doubt that any of you have seen a new movie of theirs since Van Wilder/Repli-Kate came out in 2002.
A million dollars a year for a domain name is quite a lot. And I know what was paid for the sales of some big (in the keyword marketing/leadgen space) domain names...Sale, not lease.
They only reintroduced print editions in 2024 after an 11 year break. Those 65,000 print subscribers are all people who decided they wanted to start paying money for The Onion in the last 2 years.
OTOH, National Lampoon hasn't put out a magazine since 1998 or a film since 2015 (and that was a retrospective on the magazine).
I guess I'd agree that, in absolute terms, The Onion might be less of a cultural force than it was in 2005 (say), but part of that has to be that culture is a lot more long-tailed: music, movies, and TV aren't dominated by a handful of works either.
Those 65,000 subscriptions are all people who subscribed since 2024 when it was relaunched.
It may be nostalgia, but it is not people who forgot that they had a subscription. It's people who signed up to pay money in the last two years.
Because you're saying very confusing things. What does National Lampoon have to do with anything?
You're right! Their own claim is that it's insane they're still around, because they find it hard to match the absurdity of the last 10 years.
- Drugs now legal if user is gainfully employed
- Top 10 Genocides of the 20th Century (Infographic)
- Cycle of Abuse Running Smoothly
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-onion-became-one-of-th... ( https://archive.is/hEJhg )
It is growing and containing its messaging that has been going on for over a decade about gun violence.
From the article:
> But on the topic of gun control and gun violence, it is a political issue that Onion staffers clearly, perhaps even deeply, care about.
> Joe Garden, a former Onion writer and features editor who started working at the publication in the ’90s and left in 2012, told The Daily Beast that while most of the editorial staff tended to lean reliably liberal, their political satire was governed by being “against things that we thought were stupid.”
> And as mass shootings increasingly became a tragic and appalling feature of the Obama era, it also became a subject that The Onion could not avoid covering all too routinely. “As more and more shootings happened, it became something that—as an organization that comments on the news—we couldn’t not write stories about…and it kept on growing and growing and growing to the point where [the problem of gun violence] just seemed overwhelming.”
> “Any mass shooting is horrible, but when they just start happening just a few months [apart], it’s mind-boggling,” Garden continued. “And it’s terrifying that so little has been done about it.”
This is very much in continuing that messaging and mission in the way that they know how.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...