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    The Onion Buys Alex Jones’s Infowars Out of Bankruptcy

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    The satirical news site planned to turn Infowars into a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” who peddle conspiracy theories and health supplements.The Onion, a satirical publication that skewers newsmakers and current events, said on Thursday that it had won a bankruptcy auction to acquire Infowars, a website founded and operated by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.The Onion said that the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems.Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit dedicated to ending gun violence that was founded in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, will advertise on a relaunched version of the site under The Onion.The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements, Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in an interview.Family members of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 first graders and six educators, sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut Superior Court in 2018 after he spread the baseless claim that the rampage was a fabricated pretext for confiscating Americans’ firearms.The Onion declined to disclose the price it paid for Infowars and its assets, including its production studio and diet supplement business. Mr. Jones could not immediately be reached for comment, but he said on the social media platform X this week that he planned to continue producing his online program, “The Alex Jones Show,” until he was forced to stop.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alex Jones’s Infowars Will Be Auctioned Off to Pay Sandy Hook Families

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      A sale of the Infowars website and other property is set for November, and could determine the conspiracy theorist’s fate as a broadcaster.A Houston bankruptcy judge ruled on Tuesday that assets from the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars empire can be auctioned off to help pay families of the Sandy Hook mass shooting victims the defamation awards he owes them.The auction, set for mid-November, will include Infowars’ website, social media accounts, broadcasting equipment, product trademarks and inventory owned by Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company.Mr. Jones’s fate as a broadcaster most likely depends on who buys his business. Though the Infowars name and assets are potentially of interest to a range of entities on the far right, under the terms of the sale anyone can bid.Mr. Jones spent years spreading lies that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 first graders and six educators was a hoax aimed at confiscating Americans’ firearms, and that the victims’ families were actors complicit in the plot. The families suffered online abuse, personal confrontations and death threats from people who believed the conspiracy theory.Relatives of 10 victims sued Mr. Jones in 2018 for defamation and were awarded more than $1.4 billion in damages in trials in Texas and Connecticut. But the most the families are likely to ever see is a small fraction of that, and they have been divided over how to equitably distribute the money.As the cases headed to court in 2022, Mr. Jones’s company declared bankruptcy. Mr. Jones declared personal bankruptcy soon afterward.Since then, the families have been wrangling in bankruptcy court over assets and revenue that are far less than they originally envisioned. Mr. Jones’s personal and business assets combined are worth less than $10 million, according to independent valuations presented in court. His lawyers and other bankruptcy professionals will be paid first, leaving even less for the families.The Connecticut and Texas sides divided sharply over how to go after Free Speech Systems. Lawyers for the families who sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut — the relatives of eight victims — favored shutting down the company and liquidating its assets, with the money distributed among the family members.Lawyers for families who sued Mr. Jones in Texas favored a settlement in which he would pay them a percentage of his income over the next decade, most likely netting more money for each relative. As a condition of the latter deal, Mr. Jones would have had to agree never to mention the shooting again.The asset sale is probably the least lucrative option for the family members, though its potential for shutting down Infowars appealed to some. Juries in the two lawsuits awarded individual relatives widely varying amounts, and lawyers from the Connecticut and Texas sides have been dueling over how to fairly allocate the money.The situation is further complicated by the fact that a jury has yet to decide how much in damages Mr. Jones must pay Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son Noah Pozner died in the shooting. More

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      ‘The Truth vs. Alex Jones’ Review: How Conspiracy Theories Work

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      Directed by Dan Reed (“Leaving Neverland”), the documentary offers a lesson in how conspiracy theories work and shows how parents confronted Jones in court.Even though the legal battle between Sandy Hook families and the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been thoroughly covered, it is still hard to watch him in the documentary “The Truth vs. Alex Jones” without experiencing a wave of nausea.Directed by Dan Reed (“Leaving Neverland”), the film methodically lays out the horrors that families in Newton, Conn., faced on Dec. 14, 2012, when a gunman killed 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary. Parents of the victims share memories from that morning before their children left for school. Daniel Jewiss, the lead investigator, walks viewers through how the slaughter unfolded.Then the documentary shows how, just as the parents were dealing with unfathomable grief, Jones, through his Infowars broadcasts, began promoting the idea that the shooting was a hoax. As he continued to spread falsehoods, people who latched on to such claims harassed the families. Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed at Sandy Hook, describes the harassment as coming in waves. “It was almost like I knew when Alex Jones said something,” he says in testimony excerpted in the film.If there is value in seeing these events recapped, it is in the power of seeing the parents confront Jones in court. (Over two trials, in Texas and Connecticut, they won more than $1 billion in damages.) It is also in the horror of seeing just how confidently Jones deflects questions and tries to steer proceedings to his advantage — denying the families what Alissa Parker, Emilie’s mother, calls “a moment of reflection” from him.“The Truth vs. Alex Jones” offers a lesson in just how vicious and pervasive conspiracy theories can become and a chilling portrait of how little they may trouble their purveyors.The Truth vs. Alex JonesNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Max. More

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      Russia’s Unsupported ‘Dirty Bomb’ Claims Spread Through Right-Wing U.S. Media

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      After Russia claimed that Ukraine would use a “dirty bomb” — a conventional explosive that can spread radioactive material — on its own territory, Western countries reacted with skepticism, noting that Russia often accused others of doing what Moscow was considering doing itself. Russia provided no evidence to support its claim.But on right-wing media and in many right-wing communities online, Russia’s claim was portrayed as believable, and as a dire warning that could serve to escalate Russia’s war on Ukraine for Ukraine’s benefit, or even trigger a new world war.Alex Jones, the American conspiracy theorist who often spreads lies on his Infowars platform, during his online show on Monday suggested that Ukraine would detonate a dirty bomb within its borders and then blame Russia as “a pretext to bring NATO fully into the conflict” and start World War III. “My analysis is, about 90 percent at this point, that there’s going to be full-on public war with Russia, and at least a tactical nuclear war in Europe,” he added.The Gateway Pundit, another right-wing American news site, repeated Russia’s claims in an article on Sunday and asked: “Would this surprise anyone?”And on YouTube, Gonzalo Lira, an American commentator who lives in Ukraine, said that “all the evidence” pointed to a “deliberate provocation that is being staged by the Americans.” The video received more than 59,000 views and circulated through right-wing social media.America’s far right has repeatedly sided with Russia in the conflict, echoing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia’s baseless claims that the war was about routing corruption in Ukraine or ending neo-Nazism.As the conflict has continued, online communities have interpreted developments through their own conspiratorial lens, picking up Russian narratives that Ukraine would bomb its own citizens to curry international sympathy.Those discussions continued this week regarding claims about the possible use of a dirty bomb in the conflict.In one video — circulated widely on the messaging app Telegram and seen more than 36,000 times on the video-streaming service Brighteon — a streamer suggested that a “cabal” of Democrats and leftists was plotting to use the dirty bomb to set off a nuclear war, which would prevent Republicans from winning the midterm elections.“The cabal is so desperate, obviously, that they can’t allow that to happen,” the host said. “And even if it does happen, they’ll probably try to push for war before the next Congress gets in.” More

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      Your Monday Evening Briefing

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      Daniel E. Slotnik and (Want to get this newsletter in your inbox? Here’s the sign-up.)Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Monday.Firefighters at the scene of a missile strike in Lviv, Ukraine, today. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times1. Russia has begun its offensive in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian officials said.“Now we can state that the Russian forces have started the battle for the Donbas that they have been getting ready for a long time,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address.Russia claimed today that it had hit some 300 Ukrainian targets, mostly in the east, in one of the broadest barrages of missile attacks in weeks. There was also a missile strike on the western city of Lviv, which had been relatively unscathed until now. Seven people there died. Russian forces are closing in on a complete capture of the city of Mariupol, which would be a major strategic prize in the fight.In Russia, the central bank chief warned that ripple effects from Western sanctions were only beginning to spread, despite President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia’s economy remains stable. Moscow’s mayor said 200,000 jobs were at risk in the Russian capital alone.Travelers may no longer need to wear masks in U.S. airportsAlyssa Pointer for The New York Times2. A federal judge struck down the mask requirement on planes and public transit in the U.S.The ruling came days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended the federal transportation mask requirement through May 3. The judge in Florida said that the mandate “exceeds the C.D.C.’s statutory authority.”The judge’s decision apparently shuts down the requirement for people to wear masks on airplanes, in airports and while taking other public transportation. It was not immediately clear whether the Justice Department would appeal the judge’s order, which could keep the rule in place while the matter undergoes further litigation.In other Covid news, Philadelphia became the first major city in the U.S. to reinstate a mask rule in response to rising cases of the coronavirus. In China, several economic indicators show that Covid lockdowns could have a disastrous effect on the country’s economy.And in Shanghai, the authorities announced that some workers might have to live at their workplaces even after the city lifts its lockdown.Allies of former President Donald Trump are renewing a push to overturn the 2020 election.Veasey Conway for The New York Times3. Some Trump allies are pushing to “decertify” the 2020 vote in key states and overturn the election.More than a year after failing to cancel the 2020 election results, some of the same lawyers and associates are still insisting that former President Donald Trump won. In statehouses and courtrooms across the country, Trump allies are pressing for states to pass resolutions rescinding Electoral College votes for President Biden and to bring lawsuits that seek to prove baseless claims of large-scale voter fraud. The efforts, dismissed as preposterous by many legal experts, are nonetheless stoking Trump supporters’ grievances. Democrats and some Republicans have raised deep concerns about the effect of the decertification efforts, including the potential to incite violence of the sort that erupted on Jan. 6, 2021.Kenya’s Peres Jepchirchir won the 126th Boston Marathon’s women’s division.Winslow Townson/Associated Press4. Peres Jepchirchir and Evans Chebet won the Boston Marathon.Jepchirchir finished the 26.2-mile course in 2 hours 21 minutes 1 second, beating Ababel Yeshaneh in the women’s division by just four seconds in a sprint to the finish line.Evans Chebet won the men’s race with a time of 2 hours 6 minutes 51 seconds, his first victory at a major marathon. The Boston Marathon returned to its traditional slot on the springtime calendar after three years.In 2020, the race was canceled for the first time in its history. And last year, the race was pushed to October, when it competed for elite entrants with a cluster of other marathons. We have highlights from the race.Alex Jones addressed Trump supporters in 2020.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times5. Alex Jones’s Infowars and two affiliated companies filed for bankruptcy.The Infowars filing, which was made yesterday, came after courts in two states ruled against Jones, a far-right broadcaster, in defamation lawsuits by families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012.For years, Jones spread bogus theories that the shooting, which killed 20 elementary school students and six educators, was part of a government-led plot to deprive Americans of their guns and that the victims’ families were actors in the scheme. Two other companies connected to Jones, IWHealth and Prison Planet TV, also filed for bankruptcy protection. A homeless encampment along Glendale Boulevard in Los Angeles last month.Mark Abramson for The New York Times6. More than ever it has become deadly to be homeless in the U.S., especially for men in their 50s and 60s.There are many factors behind these lonely deaths: the aging of the unsheltered population; the wider availability of fentanyl, a fast-acting and dangerous opiate; the lack of treatment for chronic illnesses and the long-term health damage from years on the street. In many cities the number of homeless deaths doubled during the pandemic, and the problem is especially acute in California, where about one in four of the nation’s 500,000 homeless people live.“It’s like a wartime death toll in places where there is no war,” said Maria Raven, an emergency room doctor in San Francisco who co-wrote a study about homeless deaths.The four co-CEOs of the Lede Company at their New York City office.OK McCausland for The New York Times7. Meet the women of the Lede Company. They’re some of Hollywood’s top publicists (just don’t ask why).Their clients include Lady Gaga, Pharrell Williams, Emma Stone, Ariana Grande, Charlize Theron and the Obamas. And oh yes, an actor named Will Smith (about whom they have no comment). Discretion is their craft, making it tough for our reporter to get her subjects to open up.Marcy Engelman, Julia Roberts’s longtime publicist, did say of Amanda Silverman, one of Lede’s heads: “She knows how to play the game. She is very well liked, so she must take care of people.”Workers on the production line of the 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning.Sylvia Jarrus for The New York Times8. Ford’s new pickup truck could determine whether the automaker can survive in an industry dominated by Tesla.Driven by the dizzying success of Tesla, sales of electric vehicles appear to be on an unstoppable rise, and automakers are spending tens of billions of dollars to prepare to meet that demand.The question for Ford is whether Jim Farley, the company’s chief executive and a car guy from the Detroit area, can channel his inner Elon Musk. Farley, and Ford, are betting big on the F-150 Lightning, an electric version of the company’s signature pickup that could become one of the most important vehicles in the company’s 113-year history.The Gravity Diagnostics lab in Kentucky where an unwanted birthday party was thrown. Liz Dufour/The Enquirer via Imagn Content Services, LLC9. They wished him a “Happy Birthday!” he didn’t want. He sued and won $450,000.A Kentucky man, Kevin Berling, asked his manager at a medical lab to be sure no one threw him a birthday party. Berling has an anxiety disorder and knew the party would trigger it. But while the manager was away, Berling’s colleagues planned a celebration.After hearing of it, Berling spent the time in his car. Two supervisors confronted him about his “somber behavior.” After having a panic attack in the meeting, he was fired. A month later, he sued the company for disability discrimination.In other acts of workplace dissent, a Dollar General employee who loved her job but thought it needed improvements opened up on a TikTok series that went viral. She was fired.We say we like creative thinking and thinkers but our gut response isn’t always in sync.Illustration by Yoshi Sodeoka10. And finally, we look up to great artists, scientists and inventors. Or do we?The new science of implicit bias suggests we may talk a good game about admiring creativity but many of us are suspicious of it. Without realizing it, we may see creativity as disturbing.“People actually have strong associations between the concept of creativity and other negative associations like vomit and poison,” said Dr. Jack Goncalo, a business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Goncalo has looked at what spurs or hinders creators in studies. One main conclusion? Often, people’s subconscious views of creativity reflect a fear of change or uncertainty; creativity disrupts, and we like stability.Have an original eveningHannah Yoon and Eve Edelheit compiled photos for this briefing. Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern.Want to catch up on past briefings? You can browse them here.What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes.com.Here are today’s Mini Crossword, Spelling Bee and Wordle. If you’re in the mood to play more, find all our games here. More

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      Alex Jones and Donald Trump: A Fateful Alliance Draws Scrutiny

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      The Infowars host tormented Sandy Hook families and helped elect President Donald J. Trump. His role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack is now of growing interest to congressional investigators.The day President Donald J. Trump urged his supporters to “be there, will be wild!” at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Alex Jones spread the message to millions.“This is the most important call to action on domestic soil since Paul Revere and his ride in 1776,” Mr. Jones, the Infowars broadcaster, said on his Dec. 19, 2020, show, which airs live online and on a network of radio stations. Mr. Jones, whose lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting fueled years of threats against the 26 victims’ families, urged his listeners to take action.A little more than two weeks later, Mr. Jones joined his followers at the Capitol as a behind-the-scenes organizer — a crucial role in the riot that is under increasing scrutiny by congressional investigators.It is part of a reckoning Mr. Jones faces on multiple fronts. He is still fighting a half-dozen defamation lawsuits filed by the targets of his false claims, including the relatives of 10 Sandy Hook victims. Late last year the Sandy Hook families won four default judgments against him after he for years resisted court orders, and in upcoming trials, juries will decide how much he must pay them.For Jan. 6, Mr. Jones helped secure at least $650,000 from a Publix grocery-store heiress, Julie Fancelli, an Infowars fan, to underwrite Mr. Trump’s rally on the Ellipse the morning of the attack, $200,000 of which was deposited into one of Mr. Jones’s business accounts, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack said. The night before the riot Mr. Jones was at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, where Trump aides and allies had set up an outpost. He has longtime ties to at least a half-dozen people arrested after the riot, including the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes, still a regular guest on Infowars, and Joseph Biggs, a former Infowars employee and Proud Boys leader.The House committee has subpoenaed Mr. Jones, and included a three-page list seeking his related communications and financial records. The panel is also seeking Mr. Jones’s communications with Mr. Trump, his family and anyone from the White House or Congress in the days before the riot. Questioned by the panel this year, Mr. Jones invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times, and is trying to block the committee’s demand for records in court.Whatever the outcome of the Jan. 6 investigation, Mr. Jones’s journey from Sandy Hook to the assault on the Capitol is a reflection of how conspiracy theories in the United States have metastasized and corroded public discourse in the digital age. A defender of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and a former regular on RT, the Kremlin-funded international television outlet, Mr. Jones espoused such extreme views of American democratic society — he has cast airport security screenings as a plot to usurp Americans’ freedoms — that in 2011 RT stopped inviting him on air.But after Mr. Trump appeared live in an interview on Infowars’ website in December 2015, Mr. Jones traveled from the fringes to become part of a newly radicalized Republican Party. Infowars grossed more than $50 million annually during the Trump presidency by selling diet supplements, body armor and other products on its website, records filed in court indicate. During and after the Jan. 6 riot, Infowars promoted its merchandise alongside graphic videos, including footage by an Infowars cameraman of the shooting death of a pro-Trump rioter, Ashli Babbitt, by a Capitol Police officer during the attack.Mr. Jones did not respond to messages seeking comment. His lawyer, Norm Pattis, said his client had done nothing wrong on Jan. 6. Video footage from the Capitol that day shows Mr. Jones using a bullhorn to try to discourage people from rioting.“Over many years Infowars has become a go-to source for people deeply suspicious of the government, so it should come as no surprise that many of the attendees at the rally had passed through Infowars’ doors,” Mr. Pattis said. “But that doesn’t mean any of them are guilty of criminal conspiracy or misconduct.”Dan Friesen, whose podcast, “Knowledge Fight,” explores Mr. Jones’s place in America’s conspiracist tradition, said that people should not be shocked by what happened on Jan. 6, given Mr. Jones’s history. “This kind of flare-up just seemed inevitable,” he said.A Trump campaign rally in Dallas in 2019.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressMr. Jones owes some of his core conspiracy themes to Gary Allen, a speechwriter for the former Alabama governor George Wallace who in the 1960s and 1970s was one of the far-right John Birch Society’s most revered writers and thinkers. As a teenager, Mr. Jones found Mr. Allen’s 1971 “None Dare Call It Conspiracy” on his father’s bookshelf, and came to share Mr. Allen’s view that a cabal of global bankers and power brokers, not elected officials, controlled American policy. Mr. Allen, who died in 1986, sold his theories by mail order in books, filmstrips and cassettes, a marketing model later adopted by Infowars.Mr. Jones got his start in broadcasting in the early 1990s with simultaneous shows on the Austin radio station KJFK and on Austin community access TV. In 1993, a siege by federal law enforcement ended in an inferno at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, killing about 80 Davidians and four law enforcement officers. Mr. Jones asserted, evidence to the contrary, that the sect and its leader, David Koresh, were a peaceful religious community marked by the government for murder. He raised $93,000 from his listeners to rebuild the compound’s church.The deed made Mr. Jones a celebrity among “patriot” militia members, including some involved in armed standoffs with the federal government. In 1995, Mr. Jones pushed bogus claims that the government plotted the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, including 19 children. The perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, had also expressed rage at the Branch Davidian compound’s destruction.Mr. Jones and his wife at the time, Kelly Jones, founded Infowars around 1999, when they began producing feature-length, conspiracy-themed videos that they sold by mail or gave away, urging people to pass them around and spread the word.After December 2012, when Mr. Jones falsely claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting was a government pretext for draconian gun control measures, traffic to his website surged. In 2013, at a gathering in Dallas marking the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Mr. Jones met Roger J. Stone Jr., a Trump friend and adviser shunned by mainstream Republicans.Mr. Stone, who saw a valuable new constituency for Mr. Trump in Infowars’ disaffected audience, joined the show as a host and brokered Mr. Trump’s December 2015 interview with Mr. Jones. In that interview, broadcast on the Infowars website, Mr. Trump joined Mr. Jones in casting America as a nation besieged by “radical Muslims” and immigrants, and predicted he would “get along very well” with Mr. Putin. He ended by praising Mr. Jones’s “amazing reputation.”The next year Mr. Jones was a V.I.P. invitee to Mr. Trump’s speech accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where the Infowars broadcaster stood on the convention floor with tears streaming down his face as Mr. Trump spoke.Mr. Jones on the first day of the Republican National Convention in 2016.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThe Trump era also brought Mr. Jones new scrutiny. In 2017, he dodged a lawsuit by publicly apologizing and removing from Infowars his shows promoting Pizzagate, the lie that top Democrats were trafficking children from Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizzeria. The conspiracy theory inspired a gunman to enter the restaurant and fire a rifle inside. No one was hurt, but the episode shocked the capital and many Americans. By 2019, Mr. Jones had been barred from all major social media platforms for violating rules banning hate speech.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3The potential case against Trump. More