Headline at New York Magazine.
Does anyone find this funny?
Last June, the satirical website’s new CEO, Ben Collins, saw that a federal bankruptcy judge had ordered Alex Jones to liquidate his assets at auction to pay off the millions he owes to Sandy Hook families he defamed. “That’d be one of the funniest jokes of all time if we pulled this off, if the Onion bought Infowars,” Collins said on Thursday afternoon. “Then I was like, ‘What if we actually did it?’”
There's nothing funny in the vicinity of the Sandy Hook massacre. It's not a playground for anyone. To the extent that the pain the victims' families have experienced through Alex Jones can be converted into a dollar amount, he's obligated to come up with the money, but I guess this is more about disabling him from continuing to speak to the world. What good is the website to anyone else? The Onion thinks it's funny if the URL goes to a page that isn't him but people who hate him?
[W]ith Infowars, there is an opportunity [for The Onion] to expand its editorial focus into the weird online world of far-right conspiracism and snake-oil pills — under the URL that helped launch this world into contemporary politics and media.
“We want to rip out the underlying structure and just be like, ‘Look at how they made you fear everything and buy yourself into this sort of thing,’” said Collins....
Something about owning the bare structure of the place helps you make that point?
The purchase includes the intellectual property of Infowars as well as its physical assets, including the studio and cameras Jones used for years to broadcast his show. They will also get Jones’s once-lucrative dietary-supplement and vitamin business of Brain Force–branded pills, though Collins said he is not exactly sure what it will look like. “It’ll be something funnier than ‘Bone Force 9,000,’ but it’s along those lines,” he said. When Infowars relaunches in January, it will be from the Onion’s headquarters in Chicago. Jones’s lease on his studio had just two months remaining, according to Collins.
So the "its physical assets, including the studio and cameras Jones used for year" only included the last 2 months on a lease.
The connection to Sandy Hook will remain at the core of the new Infowars.
Oh, no! The least funny thing in the world "will remain at the core" of this "funniest jokes of all time." I guess Collins is a comic genius. I don't know. I haven't noticed an Onion headline in years. But I remember when The Onion was great, when it was small — just a free paper here on the UW campus. It was quite charming, once. That was back in the 1980s.
UPDATE: "Judge orders hearing to review Onion’s purchase of Alex Jones’s InfoWars/Judge to audit if conspiracy theorist’s bankruptcy auction was fair, which could delay buying process for satire site" (The Guardian)("The only other bidder was First United American Companies, a company that is affiliated with one of Jones’s product-selling websites").
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97 comments:
It's another NOT FUNNY thing I guess, converted into dollars. Women are involved, I'd guess.
Apparently, this purchase did not actually occur.
Judge stopped it, because apparently it was not the high bid. So maybe it's not all about money, after all, but cheating is still popular among a certain sector.
I have an opinion about what we should do about the pain of the Sandy Hook families - but of course I cannot give it to you. That's illegal in the United States. I would have my job taken from me. I would be sued. I would have all my possessions taken from me. And I would be hounded for the rest of my life.
You cannot discuss Sandy Hook in the United States.
Because we don't have Free Speech in the United States if it hurts some mommy or daddy somewhere.
Alex Jones is a disgusting cretin. He has a right to free speech - but when bad things happen to him because he goes too far with his lies- well - sucks to be U, a-hole.
He is a clown.
He has a right to free speech but ...
"But" is doing a whole lot of work there destroying the First Amendment.
The judge suspects it's a fixed auction, and that would be fitting because ... well, Alex Jones did say that everything about Sandy Hook is fake and staged, right?
Not sure I follow the reasoning here. If the Onion were to buy Infowars... do they think no one would notice? That the audience would stay, as they convert it into the opposite of whatever Infowars publishes? "Why sure, these people will stay right here and keep reading and buying as we insult and denigrate them!"
I guess I'm not too surprised: look at the leftist readers they have. Maybe they just think everyone is as braindead.
They destroyed him because he destroyed Barack Obama's signature goal - gun confiscation in the United States along the lines of what Australia did.
The globalists bought the Drudge Report, but were smart enough not to brag about it.
why? how?
This was a State ordered crushing of dissent. That is all.
Nobody actually thinks this was about Sandy Hook comments.
The difference between Drudge and Jones is Drudge is a sellout and coward.
The Onion? Are they still around?
It wasn't that it wasn't "the high bid". There were no other bids considered. It wasn't an auction at all. And there were a number of other highly irregular goings on that caused the entire process to be shut down.
Apparently, the Onion wanted to use the promise of future asset revenues as part of their purchase package now! Did you ever see that at any other auction.
No, there seems to be something almost conspiratorially criminal with how the judge has been working hand in glove with the Onion dudes. We'll have to wait to see more.
Best Onion headline: "Vote, Voter Wasted." Well, it's at least up there with "Johnny Cash called in to Assess Flood Levels."
Yes, but no. Hence this publicity exercise which was cut short because, in reality, the Onion does not have sufficient cash available to actually successfully purchase this property in a real auction scenario.
I sense a Judge Merchan-type proceeding has been going on....
"But" is doing a whole lot of work there destroying the First Amendment."
Correct. The New Soviet Democraticals always "test drive" their destruction of the Constitution against the most likely targets first before rolling those tactics out more broadly.
Always amazes me how so many on this side of the aisle fall for it because they don't like the personalities, on their side mind you, involved. Thereby helping the New Soviet Democraticals establish the precedents they want.
And yet everyone knows it isn't Drudge ... but Microsoft ... controlling the Drudge Report. Again ... they took out Bill Clinton. So they got destroyed one way or another.
The First Amendment wasn't written for Ann Althouse. It was written for Alex Jones.
My free speech = I don't give a flying fig about Alex Jones. He is a vile human being.
If Alex Jones likes Trump - that is not good news for Trump.
A young man named Adam Lanza murdered his mother to acquire firearms, then used those firearms to murder children at a school he once attended. How did that individual not get flagged by any professional psychiatric professional as dangerous to himself and others?
Challenging times for the Onion. It must be getting very difficult to write actual satire in a world where the president wants to nominate Matt Gaetz as Attorney General.
OTH — it was a natural acquisition, given how similar the contents are in substance, although not in intention. Now we can all be satisfied that the best intention won.
You are just mailing it in now. You should take a break, have time to think, and come back with fresh energy in a couple of weeks. We like having you around as a foil, but we have standards.
Infowars would continue doing what infowars does. Its readers won’t even know or notice that’s it’s now satire.
>Ann Althouse said...
Does anyone find this funny?<
Well, I'm not rolling on the floor but, yeah, it's a fairly funny prank. A prank on Alex Jones nutters, playing on their chagrin at being directed to a website that isn't him but people who hate him. A prank that has nothing to do with the Sandy Hook families and only to do with the Onion, Alex Jones, and his fans. Yeah, pretty funny.
Sounds like lightweight religion tag time.
actually the scheme was much worse than 'crisis actor' they wanted to follow the strategy of exploiting events like Dumblane and Port Arthur,
What did Alex Jones do exactly? Serious question. I didn't follow it.
Grandma, drugs, guns, and psychiatry are an explosive mix.
A hook is used to pull onions of the stage.
What about the chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay?
He expressed his opinion that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged and included "crisis actors." The purpose of staging it, his opinion was, to give Barack Obama a "hook" to begin gun confiscation in the United States along the lines that they did in Austraila when a similar event occurred there, thus disarming Americans for the "transformation."
Whack job? Many though so. But many also believed, falsely, that this is the United States and he's free to speak his whack-job opinion.
But we aren't free. They destroyed him and used the same kind of lawfare used against Trump to confiscate all of Alex Jones' money and assets.
He was embarrassingly right too often, which placed him on the 'annoying' radar, and then made the mistake of being wrong enough to get sued.
The EPA concluded in lab tests of atrazine that it turned frogs from one sex to the other (life ... uh ... uh ... finds a way). So in a manner of speaking yes, some drugs in use in hormone treatments were found to turn frogs gay.
His outrage at this finding was used against him to make him appear to be a nutjob, because of course, his spittle-speckled delivery that he used to attract listeners does in fact make him look a bit whacky.
So they destroyed him to prove to every American that you don't really have the Free Speech you claim to have.
You may report to the camps, Ice.
Yes, we got that DLWFA ... you don't care if Alex Jones' Free Speech rights are erased, because you don't like him. And it's people like you who are not smart enough to figure out where that leads.
That one is a little better.
This isn't funny in the least. (But then again, the Onion hasn't been funny in a long time.)
The Onion basically trolled themselves. Assuming the deal goes through, they didn't really buy anything that would justify the money they spent. Alex Jones would have lost the site anyway no matter who bought it.
This would be like someone buying the Althouse Blogger site and posting anti-Althouse posts on it. The site would go down to three of four readers. (And I think we all know who those three or four people would be.)
Plus, an internet vitamin company is a weird thing to own by itself. I suspect that without Alex Jones attached to it, almost no one will buy the vitamins. (I also suspect that these fly by night internet businesses are probably a bit of a scam anyway.) After all, what expertise do political sites have with vitamins of coffee? The success of the vitamin company is probably dependent on the number of viewers the Alex Jones site got. If the revamped site gets almost no viewers, they might actually lose money with the vitamin company.
Don't start asking questions about Sandy Hook, Mike. Or they'll take your stuff, too.
Bob Boyd: Alex Jones claimed, day after day, that the children murdered in Sandy Hook and their families weren’t real victims but “crisis actors” hired by the government to fake the mass murder of little children to justify taking away our guns. He openly encouraged his followers to “investigate” the surviving parents. Various lunatics started sending death threats to the parents of the murdered children. They were caught “investigating” the children’s graves (including digging), and showed up relentlessly at the parents’ houses and work to protest or harass or threaten them and their other children. This went on for years. Finally, some of the fathers sued Jones (not women, heartless Hardin — I assume you would prefer nobody blow your grandchildren’s heads off and then show up at your door to tell you it didn’t really happen).
The only justice would be to turn the Infowars studios over to the families to be bulldozed into pebbles, then salt the earth.
You are a troll, Dixus.
That's why the judge halted the sale. The Onion didn't actually bring any cash to the table. They didn't "buy" anything. And the "auction" the judge believes may have been staged ... like Jones says Sandy Hook was staged.
Should we end the First Amendment because it causes some "nuts" to "investigate" parents?
Is it possible that such a finding could one day be used to shut down legitimate news organizations?
Apparently the most "challenging" of The Onion's times is actually coming up with actual cash to purchase InfoWars at an actual auction....something they could not do.
Tells you quite a bit about this failing media property that had to mount a "fake purchase" story to generate the barest of interest in itself.
You moron, Alex Jones really did scream fire in his deranged followers heads, and then they committed serious crimes against the mourning families, and they would call and tell him what they did and he would encourage them to do more. This wasn’t free speech. It was incitement to commit crimes. You can say all the sick garbage you want to say about Sandy Hook, but if you encourage someone to attack the parents, stalk their surviving kids, and try to dig up their dead children’s bodies, and that person does it, it’s a criminal conspiracy.
But you really don’t mean it. You’re just a troll.
Alex Jones was wrong and should have lost in court. What shocked most people was that the court issued a judgement against Alex Jones for $1.5 billion. That was an egregious amount to award people who weren't financially harmed by the defamation. (The Sandy Hook families actually agreed to settle later for $85 million because they knew that an appeals court would probably throw the $1.5 billion out because it was a ridiculous amount.)
He, like many if not most school shooters, was receiving psychiatric help and was on psychotropic drugs. Why his mother thought it was a good idea to buy him firearms in that state led to a tragedy. There’s a great book about Columbine that goes into some of this.
I am not quite sure I understand the concern completely, but it does seem to me a satirical publication ought to tread lightly when their approach to humor openly acknowledges some people will believe the stuff they are publishing is real news.
Era of That’s Not Funny?
“As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.”
Because they didn’t “investigate” the parents. They stalked, harassed and threatened them and tried to desecrate their children’s’ graves. And then Jones encouraged them to do more of the same. I was writing a report about him at the time and listened to his show every day. It was illegal, and it was dangerous.
I believe that in the United States, you have the absolute right to have that opinion Tina.
I've said NOTHING about Sandy Hook. Because I don't want to be destroyed and have my belongings taken from me. I am smart enough to avoid speech that offends the powerful in this Stalag of a country we used to call America.
The book about Columbine inspired the shooter at Sandy Hook. So that book should be burned.
Right, loudog ... same thing they did to Trump in fining him $480 million for some paperwork mistakes. Everyone agrees that was lawfare and unconstitutional and so is every case against Alex Jones.
Whey were none of THEM arrested, Tina?
For the moment, The Onion clings to power, so they are free to engage in fake news for the purposes of attracting an audience and selling advertising.
But not Alex Jones.
The gaslighting spinning around this alleged free speech violation is enough to melt a glacier. (Don't smirk, Kakistocrat. You're vapping as hard as the others.) First, let's be clear about free speech. Here's the law as written:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Shall, I repeat? CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW. The Constitution does not guarantee the citizens a right to defame each other. Some people have a high platform from which they shout lies about people whose voices could hardy carry across the average living room. Defamation laws exist to protect the voiceless from powerful liars. There are some who think Alex Jones is a victim of censorship. He's not. Censorship is what a censor does. That's what the Democrats want more than anything else, the power to censor. Jones was sued and found guilty in a court of law. Perhaps wrongly, but I doubt it. He appealed, and lost again on appeal. Jones appealed to the Supreme Court; it's the kind of basic civil liberties case that the High Court usually wants to hear. But not this one. They flatly declined to hear his case, and that should tell you something about the history of Alex Jones. It is rare liar who deserves to be silenced, but Alex Jones is a very rare liar who can't control himself. Numerous times he has retracted an accusation and in the next breath made a new slanderous allegation against that same party. That's pure paranoid compulsion in operation.
I have no use for either the Onion or Infowars, so combining them is just a violation of the 2nd law of Thermodynamics, and that is fine with me.
Well, Dixcus, we are, after all, talking about someone who thinks the BabBee is not funny and Kathy Griffin is. Not quite delicate enough to be put off by a bloody Trump head but vapors over the very mention of Alex Jones. Go figure.
Dixcus is an Alex Jones fanboy. Is anyone surprised by that?
Wasn’t it Jones who “discovered” Pizzagate?
I also heard that the plaintiffs were giving up some claims to payments as part of the deal.
I think everyone here is disgusted by E. Jean Carroll. Imagine yourself accused of a rape witnessed by no one that allegedly happened no specified day in no specified year with no forensic evidence. Who could not be found guilty if a judge conducted such an inquisition? But that's the state of the law in New York if that utterly corrupt decision stands -- an inquisition of which Tomás de Torquemada himself would stand in awe.
By opposing this settlement against Alex Jones you may believe you're defending free speech. You're not, you're defending E. Jean Carroll and all who seek to exercise the power to defame without limits.
Yes. And he was forced to retract that absurd allegation in less than three weeks.
Elon Musk has filed a defamation suit against Whoopie Goldberg. I think she has the right to ask for moral support from Dixcus
The trial was the joke.
It would be, could be funny but Alex has to agree to take the talk chair and interview who ever his Onion masters had penciled in for the day.
It would be, could be funny but Alex has to agree to take the talk chair and interview who ever his Onion masters had penciled in for the day.
I have no sympathy for Alex Jones- I was acquainted with several of the parents who lost children in the Sandy Hook shooting and could call a couple of them friends (I lived in Sandy Hook from late 1998 until 2014- just a quarter mile from the school). So, I despise Jones for what he did and won't defend him. I will just say that this lawsuit might punish him a bit but the parents will essentially get nothing from the judgment and it won't shut Jones up, either. Infowars without Jones is worthless.
except she and christine blasey ford has gotten away with it,
For me, the best was the front page header so big it needed two lines:
WA
R
You’re just afraid because you’re just a troll. I would never put anything on the internet without using my real name. I’ve lost jobs, been thrown out of my academic department, been put on a “hate watch list” by the DOJ, testified in federal court against a fake (company) union, thus losing the job I loved most (ILGPNWU), testified against a crooked cop who was working with drug dealers in my neighborhood, putting my life at risk. I used my real name when I used to infiltrate left-wing terrorist groups like ANTIFA and Extinction Rebellion. It confused them because they are evil commies but also really hysterical and dumb. I even had the Iranian Secret Police follow me home and stand with their arms crossed on my lawn, because outside the 1996 Olympics, I sponsored the Homa Darabi protest of the grotesque oppression of women in Iran. My neighbors skateboarded over and mooned them and threw beer bottles at their limousine and expensive suits until they left. They didn’t come back.
Guess what? I’m still here. Because really standing up for real free speech is more powerful than all those pussies combined. You should try it. If I end up in a stalag, which this country is not, yet, so be it. What I do is nothing compared to being a soldier or a cop, or the mother of a disabled child — or one murdered in school who is then stalked by morons claiming her daughter never existed and didn’t really get her head blown off. You coward.
They were, braintrust.
Fair? Fair has nothing to do with it. Maximizing value for the bankrutpcy estate is the objective.
Alex Jones & The Onion owners are grifters
Alex Jones & The Onion owners are grifters
Speaking of satirical sites, what happened to althose.com?
Did you buy it and shut it down?
Ben collins the guy who tried to deplatform libs of tick tok right
I have a sense that Tina is onto Dixcus. He seems way too active and inflammatory to be a legit conservative commenter.
He must just be an idiot, of course. The left side of the aisle does not have exclusive rights on idiocy.
But they did not do that. It was not a "highest bid wins" type auction. They (plaintiff's attorney and judge) purposely chose The Onion to make sure no could purchase it and allow Jones to work. They publicly stated their goal was to punish, not get the judgement paid, not make the creditors whole, "to punish Alex Jones."
So now what do you think was the goal for the bankruptcy court in this instance?
Apparently some here DO think that Achilles. They must not be familiar with the facts about proceedings that resulted in today's fiasco.
The book is Columbine, by Dave Cullen. A great read. Those killers weren’t bullied or alienated — they were felons in the making. One committed crimes in the past but wasn’t put in prison. If that judge hadn’t shown leniency, all those kids would still be alive.
Apart from the Alex Jones angle, the auction itself was shenanigans in capital letters.
- The “auction” was apparently not public
- The “buyout” was not with real money… they told the court that the “money” used was Alex Jones’ future earnings, the money (over $1B) he owes. It was basically “credit.”
- The people who ran the auction did NOT tell the other bidders “credit” could be used.
Elon Musk was also interested in the property, and his lawyers are likely to become involved.
Wow, Yancey. You should write about that — with their permission. It would be powerful.
Yes she got away with defaming Trump "without evidence" as they say. But SHE won a defamation judgement against Trump, which truly inverts that argument. And I don't trust Tina's account od the Sandy Hook details either. I just went back and reviewed all the articles AP and CNN ran and nowhere was "stalking" described or any account of any arrests. Not one. In fact "arrest" as a search term only produced lots of articles from the families calling for Jones' arrest. "Harassment" was described and I'm sure it happened and was horrible, but again, I'm not taking Tina's word for it that Jones "encouraged harassment of the families."
Thanks for the informative replies.
Stipulating all that is correct, although my hunch is the higher courts refused to hear it because Jones allowed TWO default judgements to be entered against himself by failing to comply with orders to produce documents. Anyway, if all you state is correct, it still does not justify using a bankruptcy court as venue to punish Jones and, as the plaintiff's attorney said, "silence him once and for all."
I could understand The Onion buying InfoWars in order to learn how to be funny again. I'm not sure buying a bunch of used AV equipment is going to help though.
The Onion was dead before Collins bought it, and he's succeeded beyond his wildest dreams of making it even more dead.
Dixcus said...
The First Amendment wasn't written for Ann Althouse. It was written for Alex Jones.
Will you marry me?
Indeed. Jones is a liar and a fraud. He should be shunned and mocked in every direction.
Anne, has anyone ever shot your child’s head off, you dozy bint?
Drago: you have no idea what Alex Jones actually did. So shut the fuck up.
"Drago: you have no idea what Alex Jones actually did. So shut the fuck up."
I shan't do it. Though that's precisely what you Surrender-Cons would love.
So..where to put the threshold between free speech and lawfare? Some people still maintain Trump being shot was a psy op. That might be painful to the family of Cory Compatore.
In 2016, one of Hillary's top financial supporters bought The Onion. This article describes why: to stop it making fun of Hillary. https://theintercept.com/2016/01/26/ha-ha-hillary-clintons-top-financial-supporter-now-controls-the-onion/
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