A Texas bankruptcy judge blocked The Onion’s bid to purchase Infowars Tuesday, leaving the future of the infamous conspiracy site uncertain—and reigniting the national debate around founder Alex Jones’s accountability. In his ruling against The Onion, the satirical news site that had planned to turn Infowars into a parody after winning the site at auction last month, Judge Christopher Lopez cited concerns about the structure and transparency of the auction system. “I think there’s a great lack of clarity here,” Lopez said, adding that the auction “simply did not maximize value in any way,” however “well-intended.”
The fate of Infowars and its parent company, Free Speech Systems, has been hanging in the balance since 2022, when Jones lost a $1.4-billion defamation suit brought by several families of Sandy Hook shooting victims. For years, Jones had falsely claimed, on Infowars and other channels, that the 2012 school massacre was a hoax perpetrated by its victims’ relatives and other shadowy actors.
However, Jones’s loss in court and the resulting settlement forced him to liquidate his personal assets, including Infowars. Two groups of bidders ultimately made offers on the the site. The first was a firm affiliated with Jones, which bid $3.5 million in cash. The second was a group consisting of The Onion’s parent company, a first responder and eight Sandy Hook families, which placed a bid valued at $7 million, including $1.75 million in cash. On November 14, a court-appointment trustee called an auction for The Onion.
In his judgment Tuesday, Lopez essentially faulted that trustee for taking sealed bids and for failing to maximize profits from the sale, which are owed to Sandy Hook families and Jones’s other creditors. Notably, the families who bid on Infowars with The Onion essentially agreed to forfeit those earnings in order to acquire the site instead. In a statement, an attorney for the families told The New York Times that they “remain resilient and determined as ever to hold Alex Jones and his corrupt businesses accountable for the harm he has caused.”
Infowars is now up for grabs again, though the company is unlikely to return to the auction block. On Tuesday, Lopez instructed Christopher Murray, the trustee in the case, to come up with some alternate solution. In a statement, representatives for The Onion said they were “deeply disappointed” in the bankruptcy judge’s decision, but that they would “continue to seek a path towards purchasing InfoWars in the coming weeks.” Jones, for his part, also seemed prepared to fight another round: On X, he has posted a steady stream of celebratory messages and livestreams since the ruling was released. “I want to thank everyone who has stood with myself and the Infowars crew as we weathered the total deep state assault in the last nine years,” he wrote Wednesday morning.
