At long last, InfoWars is ours

I saw OP and went to infowars dot com to have a look. I scrolled a bit, clicked some links, looked at the store, had a good laugh at the comedy of this ironic site.

Now you’re telling me the site is not a joke from The Onion? Reality is stranger than fiction.

Maybe you're not highbrow enough for this...

Somehow I don't think the confidence is meant to be taken at exactly face value.

Does that mean their use of the branding and claims of ownership could be illegal or would it be covered under the first ammendment?

> Mr. Heidecker has been working on his impression of Mr. Jones. But eventually, when that joke gets old, Mr. Heidecker said that he hoped to turn Infowars into a destination for independent and experimental comedy.

> “I just thought it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity,” Mr. Heidecker said in an interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWQN5-Top6g

You could say that all day and people would not like you, but no one could do anything about it.

What Alex Jones did was deny reality. He suggested that the victims did not exist. He suggested the event did not happen and the grieving parents were government-hired actors. He riled up his listeners and effectively sent them after people. He did this in spite of knowing what he was saying on his show was not true. That was a large part of things, that Alex Jones was aware he was spreading misinformation.

Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion".

Timeline:

1. Alex Jones hosts guests on his show questioning if a mass school shooting was a falsified event.

2. The controversy drove a massive increase in traffic to his videos.

3. This encouraged Mr. Jones to host additional guests who made direct claims that parents of the slain children were actors hired by the US government.

4. Those parents received intense harassment and death threats. Many had to move away from their homes.

5. The parents sent many requests to the Infowars show asking Mr. Jones to stop claiming they were actors; Infowars did not stop.

6. The parents sued.

7. Infowars failed to comply with standard evidence discovery requests.

8. After many attempts by the court to achieve compliance, the plaintiffs moved for a default judgement. The court accepted.

9. At the award hearing, plaintiffs provided evidence that Mr. Jones moved assets out of Infowars to a company owned by his parents specifically to evade paying the judgment.

10. The jury at the award hearing awarded the plaintiffs about $1B in damages. Rationale was to discourage Mr. Jones from continuing to libel family members impacted by mass shootings.

The award hearing was exceptionally dramatic and theatrical. The defense was repeatedly caught in lies and accidentally sent evidence to the plaintiff's lawyer, revealing Mr. Jones's perjury.

To quote Jones:

“We’ve clearly got people where it’s actors playing different parts of different people. I’ve looked at it and undoubtedly there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it.”

That isn’t even phrased as a “what if” — it’s asserting that Sandy Hook was staged. It’s framed as a truth, not a possibility, and the jury found that Alex Jones knew it wasn’t true when he was saying it.

Why so large? A few reasons. First, this was for 26 families, so a substantial number of people. Second, we’re not just talking emotional damages — we’re talking harassment that these folks received as a result of Jones’ lies. Third, a big chunk of the damages were punitive. Alex Jones has a history of lying to expand his audience, recklessly ignoring the effects of those lies. A judge decided that the verdict needed to be big enough to discourage Jones from continuing to lie.

(Arguably that didn’t work.)

It's dangerous to say false things and have a lot of money. People in power will use it as an excuse to take your money away, unless you're allied with them, of course.

True though, you could be held liable if you used what you thought was real evidence to ruin someone's reputation, only to find out that it's false. I think it's on you to be careful of that.

This is the part where it becomes impossible to have an honest discussion.

Jokes aside, The Onion is basically spending a giant pile of money to burn the website down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-onion-became-one-of-th... ( https://archive.is/hEJhg )

It is growing and containing its messaging that has been going on for over a decade about gun violence.

From the article:

> But on the topic of gun control and gun violence, it is a political issue that Onion staffers clearly, perhaps even deeply, care about.

> Joe Garden, a former Onion writer and features editor who started working at the publication in the ’90s and left in 2012, told The Daily Beast that while most of the editorial staff tended to lean reliably liberal, their political satire was governed by being “against things that we thought were stupid.”

> And as mass shootings increasingly became a tragic and appalling feature of the Obama era, it also became a subject that The Onion could not avoid covering all too routinely. “As more and more shootings happened, it became something that—as an organization that comments on the news—we couldn’t not write stories about…and it kept on growing and growing and growing to the point where [the problem of gun violence] just seemed overwhelming.”

> “Any mass shooting is horrible, but when they just start happening just a few months [apart], it’s mind-boggling,” Garden continued. “And it’s terrifying that so little has been done about it.”

This is very much in continuing that messaging and mission in the way that they know how.

Edit: if you have the time, watch their youtube series Sex House, Helcomb County Municipal Lake Dredge Appraisals and Dr. Good (approx 75 minutes each). There's no nudity, gore or cursing, just some very clever themes about the parallels between television and hell that are still relevant right now, if not more so.