In news that sounded as if it had come straight from the satirical publication itself, The Onion acquired conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars out of bankruptcy on Thursday with help from the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting victims and the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety.
While Ben Collins, The Onion CEO and former disinformation reporter, tells Vanity Fair that the takeover is “maybe the funniest joke of all time,” the move has also garnered a sense of “poetic justice” for John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown. Jones was forced to sell Infowars and all of its property in a court-ordered auction after using his platform to spread rampant misinformation about the 2012 shooting, repeatedly referring to the tragedy as a “hoax.” When Jones lost the defamation lawsuit the families of the victims brought against him in 2022, he was ordered to pay $1.4 billion in damages to them.
Everytown will be the exclusive launch advertiser for the reconfigured Infowars, which is set to transform into a parody of its former self, mocking those who spin conspiracies and blasting the message of gun violence prevention. I spoke with Collins and Feinblatt after news of the acquisition broke. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Vanity Fair: How and when did the idea to acquire InfoWars out of a bankruptcy auction come to fruition?
Ben Collins: We all read the news that it was for sale back in June, and we all thought it would instantly be a very funny joke, maybe the funniest joke of all time. I think that has now proven to be correct, which is great. We’re excited that everybody also believes that it was, but we had to get down to business and figure out how to actually pull it off. From my previous life as a disinformation reporter, I knew some of the Sandy Hook family lawyers. I called them and was like, What is this process? What happens exactly? Because I obviously have never purchased an insane website in a bankruptcy auction before. Over time, the families themselves decided it would be a good idea to join, to be a part of this thing, and they thought it was funny too. As time went on, Everytown has long been a fan of us and vice versa. They’ve been fans of us since we published a story called “No Way to Prevent This, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” We’ve printed it 37 times verbatim, and it is, unfortunately, the most plaintive emotional plea that we have as a country, expressed in art about the gun violence epidemic that we have. Outside of the raw joke of it all, we also started recruiting some Onion and Clickhole hall of famers, and they’ve all come up with incredible ideas.
John, how do you view this collaboration?
John Feinblatt: Ben got it right. We’ve both been so concerned and devoted to this issue of gun safety and addressed it in very different ways. We’ve got at Everytown the facts, the research, the storytelling at our fingertips, and they’ve got the audience and a new way of messaging, particularly to Gen Z. We felt like we both had assets that if we couple them together, we’d each be stronger.
