“Not The Onion” is an expression common on social media sites whenever news breaks that is so absurd or ironic, it smacks of The Onion-like satire.
Usually, such news doesn’t actually involve The Onion, though.
On Thursday morning, the nation’s premier satirical news site announced it had purchased Alex Jones’s conspiracy-fueled Infowars, and all its assets, for an undisclosed price at auction. In other words, a website already so untethered from reality it had been sued into bankruptcy for spreading dangerous lies, is now owned by a publication famously even less reliant on facts.
“Stand by for the funniest news you’ve ever heard in your life,” Onion CEO Ben Collins posted on X Thursday morning, moments before revealing the purchase.
Infowars was auctioned off in bankruptcy on Wednesday, to help Jones pay out the $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit he lost in 2022 to families of the victims of the horrific mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Those families sued Jones for defamation in 2018 for his made-up claims that the Sandy Hook massacre never happened, and were actually propaganda to manufacture consent for taking away Americans’ guns.
Because Collins had previously purchased The Onion earlier this year when that publication was up for auction, for very different reasons, users of the social media site Bluesky had frequently joked that Collins should also buy Infowars.
Apparently, the CEO took those suggestions quite literally. (Fast Company has reached out to Collins for comment and will update the story with his response.)
In a bit of poetic justice, assisting him in the endeavor were eight families of Sandy Hook victims, who clinched the purchase by agreeing to accept a smaller recovery to increase the overall value of The Onion’s bid, according to The Washington Post. As part of the deal, Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit founded in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting and dedicated to ending gun violence, will advertise on the new Onion property.
“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,” The Onion wrote of the purchase in a fake op-ed on Thursday morning, referring to Jones’s diet supplement business.
It is unclear for now what actual plans The Onion has for the former far-right outlet. In a hint of what’s to come, though, Collins wrote on X, “We’re planning on making a very stupid website.”