OAN Staff James Meyers
8:05 AM – Wednesday, December 11, 2024
A federal judge on Tuesday night rejected the sale of Alex Jones’ Infowars platform to satirical news outlet The Onion after Jones claimed that a recent bankruptcy auction was done by illegal collusion.
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The Onion was named the winning bidder on November 14th over a company affiliated with Jones.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez’s decision means Jones can stay at Infowars in Austin, Texas. The Onion was planning on kicking Jones out and relaunching Infowars in January as a parody.
At the end of a lengthy two-day hearing in a Texas courtroom, Lopez criticized the auction process as flawed and said the outcome “left a lot of money on the table” for families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
“You got to scratch and claw and get everything you can for them,” Lopez said.
The Onion offered $1.75 million in cash and other incentives for Infowars‘ assets in the auction. First United American Companies, which runs a website in Jones’ name that sells nutritional supplements, bid $3.5 million.
Additionally, Lopez cited problems, but no wrongdoing with the auction process. He said he did not want another auction and left it up to the trustee who oversaw the auction to determine the next steps.
Trustee Christopher Murray had defended The Onion’s bid during the hearing.
“Only two people showed up to bid and…one was just better than the other,” Murray testified, referring to The Onion. Asked how much better it was, he said “by a lot.”
Although the satirical outlet’s cash offer was lower than that of First United American, it also included a pledge by many of the Sandy Hook families to forgo $750,000 of the auction proceeds due to them and give it to other creditors, providing the other creditors more money than they would receive under First United American’s bid.
Meanwhile, after being named the winning bidder last month, The Onion CEO Bell Collins described its plans for Infowars in a statement to social media.
“We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website. We have retained the services of some Onion and Clickhole Hall of Famers to pull this off. I can’t wait to show you what we have cooked up,” he wrote.
Additionally, The Onion said its “exclusive launch advertiser” would be the gun violence prevention organization Everytown for Gun Safety.
In a satirical article posted to The Onion, the supposed CEO of Global Tetrahedron, the parent company of The Onion, said “the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.”
“Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic ‘panic’ and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses,” fake Global Tetrahedron CEO Bryce P. Tetraeder wrote. “No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds.”
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