Satirical newspaper The Onion faced legal hurdles after acquiring right-wing conspiracy site Infowars, but the people behind it now say they are avoiding court by launching a new Infowars site.
Infowars founder Alex Jones declared bankruptcy in 2022 following a defamation lawsuit filed by the family of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, with Jones claiming the incident was a fabrication. He was ordered to pay them $1.3 billion in damages, and The Onion was sold at an Infowars auction in 2024, but a judge immediately blocked the sale.
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Then, in April 2026, The Onion announced a new way to acquire outlets. It’s a licensing agreement that allows The Onion to post on Infowars’ site and begin making payments to the Sandy Hook family. However, it too has faced legal challenges, and The Onion has decided not to wait for the court to reinstate its website, MS NOW reported.
“Alex is holding Infowars.com hostage,” The Onion CEO Ben Collins told MS NOW. “He was deliberately trying to degrade the assets so that these families could never sell them, and the courts have largely complied. We are tired of waiting.”
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The new Infowars will launch on July 2nd with original programming, with comedian Tim Heidecker as creative director. Mr. Heidecker is known for his Adult Swim shows such as “Tim and Eric’s Great Show, Great Job!” Along with creative partner Eric Wareheim, he will host a parody of Jones’ old Infowars show. Heidecker’s “urgent” statement (in which he gives his impressions of Jones) is already available on YouTube.
Other shows coming to Infowars this summer include “The Jim Hagerty Show” and a documentary-style film called “Birth of a Nation,” which shares the same name as a 1915 racist film featuring the Ku Klux Klan, according to MS NOW.
Heidecker said in an April interview with TIME magazine that there was a “transitional phase” of doing Onion-style parodies, and that he ultimately wanted to turn Infowars into “a great comedy destination – a new streaming site, a new comedy platform.” He also said the team hopes this will be profitable and “provide a healthy budget for young creators to create interesting things for the world.”
He reiterated this in an interview with WIRED in June, saying comedy would be “curated” from Infowars “in the same way that Adult Swim was a brand.”
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