When this all started, the Onion released a priceless 'press statement':
"Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.
No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars..."
The Onion is satire, so ... But Alex Jones is currently busy with Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and others to bitterly criticize Trump for the Iran war.
Trump retaliated by calling all of them "low IQ".
Given that Carlson's media company has an investment from the ubiquitous 1789 Capital (Thiel and Trump Jr.), we don't know if this is theater to keep the isolationist MAGA in the fold.
It could also be that they sacrifice Trump in order to accelerate Thiel's and Vance's technocracy.
Anyway, these influencers are still useful for their masters.
Or just inspect element + press delete. In some cases you also need to then delete an extra gray overlay and re-enable scroll on the base html tag, but takes 30s
I don't think so. With how much money was made and direct attacks on individual members on the legal system, I think it's a breath of fresh air to see the rich and influential actually get punished. There's frustrating the legal system, and then there's lying under oath and executing smear campaigns against judges.
If Alex Jones wanted a smaller settlement, he could've chosen to destroy fewer lies, comply with legal orders, or simply not commit any number of his many other legal infractions.
He's desperately trying to weasel his way out of paying any of it back by doing things like moving assets around, leaving companies empty, and then declaring bankruptcy on them. His victims will probably spend the rest of their lives chasing after the compensation they're owed, but perhaps at least taking Jones' branding from him might be punishment for a man like him.
The context is that Jones blew up the court process every chance he got, setting a new record for contempt fining. The most important piece was refusing to comply with discovery (his lawyer was so bad-behaved here he ended up with a disciplinary suspension). As a result Jones received a default judgement, i.e. the plaintiffs win by default and he doesn't get to argue his case. This also means the plaintiffs get everything they were asking for. And then for some reason he didn't even enter an argument during the damages calculation phase, so the jury just went with whatever the plaintiffs said.
The idea was never to apply a reasonable punishment, it's just an excuse to destroy and silence a voice that, for better or worse, is uncontrollable by the establishment. Out of every 10 things you read on a place like Infowars, 5 will be crazy cucko insane shit, 4 will be common sense american conservative talking points, but one will be some hard truth that no side of the power scale wants to be said out loud. Infowars delenda est.
I’m just not sure you can make the claim that this is an issue between the outlet and the establishment. It’s had hosts like Roger Stone doing 5 episodes a week. He’s the former campaign advisor for the sitting president of the United States, and advisor to Dole, Bush (both), and Reagan.
It doesn’t get more establishment than that. So the “down and out anti-establishment underdog” narrative doesn’t apply in my opinion.
To people like that, random college students are "establishment" because they are lefty, and the literal President of the United States is "anti-establishment" because he uses slurs on social media.
If people want to get their "hard truths" out, they shouldn't contaminate them with 9/10 parts of lies, and they certainly shouldn't run a harassment campaign against the parents of murdered children.
If "hurting innocent people with [their] voice without regret" is to become cause for such "settlements" there are many, many individuals about to be "settled down". Jerks like Hasan Piker, cooks like Candace Owens can all start their application for affordable housing soon.
Can the down-voters for once let go of their pacifiers and explain where they don't agree? Is it because I call Piker a jerk or Owens a cook? They're an interesting combo, a living proof of the horse shoe theory of political extremism. I'm used to finding apologists for the "left" on this site so it is probably the former but maybe there are closeted Owens supporters here as well?
Speak up, ye absolutely not down-trodden knee-jerk-down-voters, let us all partake of your wisdom.
As a drive by reader that votes, I can guess why you copped a few whacks;
The tone is off and it appears to carry the implication that you might believe that none of the above (Jones, Piker, Owens) should be landed with fines despite on the face of it saying the opposite.
A cleaner comment would be better; just explain what it is that Piker has done that is equivilant to Jones' multi decade harrassment of the Sandi Hook parents, ditto Owens.
( for record, I'm non-USAian and unfamiliar with either Pikr or Owens )
Yes, and he should be punished for the Sandyhook fiasco. But 1.4 billion dollars? Is that reasonable punishment? Why not 1 trillion dollars? It's as clear as day that the intent is to silence his voice, and not because of Sandyhoook.
Not sure if it even matters since Alex Jones is just going to keep doing what he's doing.
Judgements demanding he pay billions keep coming out and he just says he's not paying, and nobody has forced him to either. Even if infowars' brand changes hands, that's the extent of it.
A million dollars a year for... what? A gag that fans of infowars won't watch, and there aren't enough anti-fans to appreciate? It feels personal at this point.
Tim heidecker summarised their thinking wonderfully.
"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”.
Not to mention Alex Jones is still up and running elsewhere spreading his nonsense and hawking his merch. So it's a cute gag, I guess, and gets the Sandy Hook families some money, but doesn't really change the status quo.
https://archive.is/yoLYM
When this all started, the Onion released a priceless 'press statement':
"Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.
No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars..."
Full statement here https://theonion.com/heres-why-i-decided-to-buy-infowars/
The Onion is satire, so ... But Alex Jones is currently busy with Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and others to bitterly criticize Trump for the Iran war.
Trump retaliated by calling all of them "low IQ".
Given that Carlson's media company has an investment from the ubiquitous 1789 Capital (Thiel and Trump Jr.), we don't know if this is theater to keep the isolationist MAGA in the fold.
It could also be that they sacrifice Trump in order to accelerate Thiel's and Vance's technocracy.
Anyway, these influencers are still useful for their masters.
https://babylonbee.com/news/alex-jones-worried-people-will-s...
Babylon Bee forces you to accept cookies to use their site. Worth avoiding.
I shut that site down as soon as I saw that. Gross.
As with all silly internet block BS, simply reload the site and hit escape before the cookie banner loads.
> reload the site and hit escape
What exactly does that do? Which web browser?
I’m on mobile right now, so can’t test.
I'm on Firefox and it did nothing for me. The popup came up so fast between me refreshing and hitting escape.
Alternatively, you can disable JavaScript on the website. That lets me view it.
Or just inspect element + press delete. In some cases you also need to then delete an extra gray overlay and re-enable scroll on the base html tag, but takes 30s
Discussion (627 points, 2 days ago, 320 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47837611
Maybe I’m out of touch, but doesn’t a $1.4b dollar settlement for this seem rather… large?
I don't think so. With how much money was made and direct attacks on individual members on the legal system, I think it's a breath of fresh air to see the rich and influential actually get punished. There's frustrating the legal system, and then there's lying under oath and executing smear campaigns against judges.
If Alex Jones wanted a smaller settlement, he could've chosen to destroy fewer lies, comply with legal orders, or simply not commit any number of his many other legal infractions.
He's desperately trying to weasel his way out of paying any of it back by doing things like moving assets around, leaving companies empty, and then declaring bankruptcy on them. His victims will probably spend the rest of their lives chasing after the compensation they're owed, but perhaps at least taking Jones' branding from him might be punishment for a man like him.
The context is that Jones blew up the court process every chance he got, setting a new record for contempt fining. The most important piece was refusing to comply with discovery (his lawyer was so bad-behaved here he ended up with a disciplinary suspension). As a result Jones received a default judgement, i.e. the plaintiffs win by default and he doesn't get to argue his case. This also means the plaintiffs get everything they were asking for. And then for some reason he didn't even enter an argument during the damages calculation phase, so the jury just went with whatever the plaintiffs said.
We're not going to have a rehash of the McDonald's coffee settlement argument here, are we?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages
The idea was never to apply a reasonable punishment, it's just an excuse to destroy and silence a voice that, for better or worse, is uncontrollable by the establishment. Out of every 10 things you read on a place like Infowars, 5 will be crazy cucko insane shit, 4 will be common sense american conservative talking points, but one will be some hard truth that no side of the power scale wants to be said out loud. Infowars delenda est.
I’m just not sure you can make the claim that this is an issue between the outlet and the establishment. It’s had hosts like Roger Stone doing 5 episodes a week. He’s the former campaign advisor for the sitting president of the United States, and advisor to Dole, Bush (both), and Reagan.
It doesn’t get more establishment than that. So the “down and out anti-establishment underdog” narrative doesn’t apply in my opinion.
To people like that, random college students are "establishment" because they are lefty, and the literal President of the United States is "anti-establishment" because he uses slurs on social media.
If people want to get their "hard truths" out, they shouldn't contaminate them with 9/10 parts of lies, and they certainly shouldn't run a harassment campaign against the parents of murdered children.
> Infowars delenda est.
Yes.
He hurt innocent people with his voice without regrets. He wanted to die on that hill and if so he can be lucky that only his voice might die.
If "hurting innocent people with [their] voice without regret" is to become cause for such "settlements" there are many, many individuals about to be "settled down". Jerks like Hasan Piker, cooks like Candace Owens can all start their application for affordable housing soon.
Can the down-voters for once let go of their pacifiers and explain where they don't agree? Is it because I call Piker a jerk or Owens a cook? They're an interesting combo, a living proof of the horse shoe theory of political extremism. I'm used to finding apologists for the "left" on this site so it is probably the former but maybe there are closeted Owens supporters here as well?
Speak up, ye absolutely not down-trodden knee-jerk-down-voters, let us all partake of your wisdom.
As a drive by reader that votes, I can guess why you copped a few whacks;
The tone is off and it appears to carry the implication that you might believe that none of the above (Jones, Piker, Owens) should be landed with fines despite on the face of it saying the opposite.
A cleaner comment would be better; just explain what it is that Piker has done that is equivilant to Jones' multi decade harrassment of the Sandi Hook parents, ditto Owens.
( for record, I'm non-USAian and unfamiliar with either Pikr or Owens )
Not interesting
Yes, and he should be punished for the Sandyhook fiasco. But 1.4 billion dollars? Is that reasonable punishment? Why not 1 trillion dollars? It's as clear as day that the intent is to silence his voice, and not because of Sandyhoook.
What would instead have been a reasonable punishment?
Either he truly believed that the kids at Sandy Hook were actors, or he was using it as part of his grift and making money of it.
As far as I can tell he has not reversed his stance on it
> 5 will be crazy cucko insane shit, 4 will be common sense american conservative talking points
If you ask me, it's getting harder and harder to draw a line between those two categories...
Turning into an odd form of a take over. Basically renting it for 3 months to let Tim Heidecker do a few shows??
No way, i can't believe it actually happened! I would have though alex would though alex and his goons would have managed to stop it
Not sure if it even matters since Alex Jones is just going to keep doing what he's doing.
Judgements demanding he pay billions keep coming out and he just says he's not paying, and nobody has forced him to either. Even if infowars' brand changes hands, that's the extent of it.
I hope Dan and Jordan can get the desk like they've always wanted.
I'm concerned they won't know what to do without Alex. Already going back over shows from 2006...
Editorialized title. It has a plan to take over that will need approval. Lots of non-paywalled coverage that would be better links, eg:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/20/the-onion-al...
See previous discussion linked in sibling as well.
A million dollars a year for... what? A gag that fans of infowars won't watch, and there aren't enough anti-fans to appreciate? It feels personal at this point.
> It feels personal at this point.
Of course it's personal. Alex Jones is an arsehole manufacturing outrage for profit. Being made fun of is the least of his problems
Tim heidecker summarised their thinking wonderfully.
"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”.
Not to mention Alex Jones is still up and running elsewhere spreading his nonsense and hawking his merch. So it's a cute gag, I guess, and gets the Sandy Hook families some money, but doesn't really change the status quo.
I disagree. It's a lot better than if it were bought by simply a different far-right media outlet.
This keeps it out of that ecosystem, which I think is a really good thing.
Think of it as a million dollar ad buy.
Or a charitable gift to Sandy Hook families
It's funny
> It feels personal at this point.
It is openly and proudly personal. It is also political, also openly.
Because it's funny that The Onion will be taking over InfoWars.
> It feels personal at this point.
Fucking hell that's a funny line.