Double-checking whether a deranged headline is real or satire is a reflex now. “It’s like an Onion article” has become a cliche. The Onion, founded originally as a print newspaper on the campus of Wisconsin University in 1988 which grew to a website and video channel, is now a global icon of contemporary news satire. Outrageous stories delivered with a straight face have provided 30 years of public stress relief, and occasionally genuinely profound insights.

Conspiracy-loving Texan Alex Jones became successful radio “shock jock” in Austin in the 1990s. After his firing from KJFK radio 1999 for ignoring management’s directive to lay off his controversial, conspiratorial, he and his wife launched the Infowars brand, originally as a newsletter, then a website and online broadcast.

Infowars’ goals weren’t too terribly different from The Onion’s – provide imaginitive takes on the news of the day. But in the case of Infowars, the cognitivie dissonance Alex Jones provided wasn’t an invitation to laughter, but to paranoia and rage. Jones introduced a daily parade of national and international conspiracies to dedicated audiences, while selling them merch and supplements. Like all good conspiracists, his approach started out as fairly egalitarian – whoever was on power was out to get you. They were all in on “it”. Bill and Hilary Clinton were murderous cocaine kingpins, then Bush-Cheney were preparing to put Americans into extermination camps. Jones may have started out as a true believer but by the 2010’s, as mass information warfare and neo-fascist politics became exploded, Infowars became an essential component of an alt-information ecosystem dedicated to detaching people from the truth. And it made Jones a huge amount of money.

Among the dizzying array of falsities Jones pushed was a long-running narrative that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012, in which 20 children and six adults were killed, was a hoax – all theater, concocted by “the left”. Under the under the guise of pressuring them to come clean with the truth, he conducted a harassment campaign against the families of the murdered children. Eventually, the families filed a joint lawsuit against Jones for defamation. The outcome was that Jones was ordered to pay our $1.4 billion. Jones appealed the ruling last year. The appeal was denied but Jones has applied for bankruptcy. So far, no money has been paid out yet.

Meanwhile, as Jones’s dark star was rising, The Onion began to stumble, with frequent ownership changes and multiple buyout attempts by the likes of Comedy Central and Viacom. Eventually, the brand seemed to lose its way – the satire wasn’t as biting, its direction was unfocused, it wasn’t as funny. In 2024, the owners, holding company G/O Media, sold the publication to Chicago-based Global Tetrahedron (the company deliberately emulates a “Sinister Corporation” which first appeared in an older from The Onion). Former NBC News reporter Ben Collins took over as CEO. Collins’s new approach was to give the editorial staff free reign and to not shy away from directly addressing contemporary issues. The result has been a rejuvenated Onion, as relevant to the times as it has ever been.

When Jones put the Infowars website up for auction in late 2024, as part of his bankruptcy process, Ben Collins saw a golden – very funny – opportunity. He immediately announced plans to to purchase the site. The idea was to turn Infowars into a parody of itself (which it almost was already really), and also use it to address issues like the US gun control problem. The move was endoresed and supported by the Sandy Hook families. But the purchase was stopped by the court on the grounds that the bidding process was flawed, then that Jones was no longer in bankruptcy and so the site was off the auctioning block.

This week The Onion finally reached an agreement to acquire the Infowars brand. Pending approval of a Texas judge The Onion would license Infowars and bpublish its own content across the its site and other platforms. The Onion plan also includes paying profits from the site directly to the Sandy Hook families.

The Onion posted its announcement of the imminent acquisition in a piece “At long last Infowars is ours“, in which the character of megalomaniac CEO revels in the new disinformation tools at his disposal:: “With this new Infowars, we will democratize psychological torture, welcoming brutal and sadistic ideas from everyone, even the very stupidest among us. It will be like the Manhattan Project, only instead of a bomb, we will be building a website.”

Visitors to the Infowars website at press time will be treated to hundreds of absurd and outrageous headlines – like “Euthanasia Is Now 6% Of All Deaths In The Netherlands”. This is in fact still the regular Infowars content. What new content The Onion will provide is still under wraps, but comedian Tim Heidecker, who does a famously brutal Alex Jones impression, has been tapped as the creative director of the new site and is working with The Onion’s writers. The big question is when the Infowars website switches to its Onionized version, how will we know?