A lawyer representing some Sandy Hook parents said that Alex Jones was “trying to keep the bloated corpse of a media organization alive” (AP, 4/30/26).

Silence had never sounded so sweet, blankness had never looked so beautiful. A visit to the far-right conspiracy outlet Infowars website had no “Jesus Returns”–sized headlines about government-tainted water turning the frogs gay, or fresh anti-vaccine claims. No promotions for host Alex Jones’ supplements, either, or videos of him screaming gibberish about politicians eating babies. Just a white screen and two very small words: “Off Air.”

Jones’ media career, anchored in his hysterical performance, is still hanging on for dear life. As AP (4/30/26) reported, Infowars

is facing liquidation because of the more than $1 billion in defamation lawsuit judgments Jones owes relatives of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting for calling the Connecticut massacre a hoax.

The news service explained that the new deal would give the satirical news outlet the “Onion temporary authority to use Infowars’ trademarks, copyrights and intellectual property while a state receiver in Texas works toward liquidation.”

The judgment against him in the defamation case signaled that a society that values truth over lies finally drew the line at a media empire profiting and inciting hatred at the expense of more than two dozen murdered children and their families.

‘Unprecedented legal stalling’

NPR (4/30/26): “Jones says he is still being forced to leave his Infowars studio, and plans to move to a new one Thursday night and rebuild under new ownership.”

The transfer has not been completely ratified, which is why the site is now blank. The Onion expected the deal to be finalized at the end of April, “letting it license the Infowars brand name and turn the show into a mockery of itself,” with proceeds going to the Sandy Hook families (NPR, 4/30/26). But as NPR explained, “Jones won a reprieve from a Texas appeals court, and the families’ attorneys filed their own appeal to the Supreme Court of Texas,” leaving control of Infowars “in limbo until the higher courts weigh in.”

Onion CEO Ben Collins (Threads, 4/29/26) offered fighting words:

This newly insane, unprecedented legal stalling does nothing but delay our deal with the receiver to take control of InfoWars. We now expect new traps in Alex Jones’ amoral war to deny paying the Sandy Hook families, but we’re freshly surprised by the US legal system’s appetite to put up with it.

And the court process hasn’t stopped the Onion from taking on the Infowars name and hiring comedian Tim Heidecker to turn the site into a parody of itself (Rolling Stone, 5/2/26).

Difficult to overstate

Alex Jones (2/21/11): “They tell your kids they gotta love Justin Biebler [sic], and then Biebler says ‘hand in your guns,’ ‘pass the Cyber Security Act,’ and ‘the police state is good,’ and then your children are turned into  mindless vassals—who now, they look up to some twit, instead of looking up to Thomas Jefferson, or looking up to Nikola Tesla, or looking up to Magellan.”

Jones’ danger to the public is difficult to overstate. He’s hardly the first American provocateur to take to the airwaves and present fiction as fact. But few others have matched Jones’ reach or level of fame. During Trump’s first term, social media bans against Infowars appeared to do nothing to stop its metastatic growth, with the Infowars website seeing more than a million page hits a  day.

Few have matched Jones’ ability to turn rancid delusions into mainstream talking points, influencing a xenophobic, racist and transphobic political movement that has taken power in the United States.

“The reason there’s so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation,” he said in June 2010 (NBC, 8/7/18). “I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children.”

“These wicked globalists are so threatened by human potential they poison the water, the vaccines, the food to turn us into a bunch of slugs, a bunch of lobotomized sloths so they can control us,” he declared in 2011 (Alex Jones Show, 2/21/11).

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Jones declared at the Million MAGA March (Newsweek, 12/12/20): “World government is here, and the system is publicly stealing this election from the biggest landslide and the biggest political realignment since 1776.”

Jones is not solely responsible for the fact that a growing sector of the American public believes anti-vaccine pseudoscience (Gallup, 8/7/24; Scientific American, 4/26/26), paving the way for RFK Jr.’s anti-human policies (FAIR.org, 12/5/24), but it’s impossible to ignore his contribution to this mess.

While Trump recently turned on Jones along with a number of other right-wing media personalities, like Tucker Carlson (KOMO, 4/17/26), Jones’ act—along with Carlson’s—is inseparable from Trump’s rise (New Yorker, 6/23/16; New York Times, 11/16/16, 4/20/22; Frontline, 7/28/20).

Bucking the trend

“Right now, our industry is afraid of the wrong things,”  60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi told the National Press Club (Guardian, 4/30/26). “We’re afraid of offending power. We’re afraid of losing access. We’re afraid of another baseless lawsuit. But what we should all be afraid of is silence.”

The Trump administration destroyed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (FAIR.org, 10/1/25) and it installed Kari Lake, a fanatical Jones wannabe, to run the US government’s international propaganda broadcaster Voice of America, although a court recently found her administration to be unlawful (All Things Considered, 3/8/26). The Ellison family takeover of CBS has been a catastrophe for the storied network (Zeteo, 4/29/26; USA Today, 4/30/26), especially its flagship news show 60 Minutes (Guardian, 4/30/26).

All of this has been a part of the contraction in media under an administration that has no time for journalism that holds government and corporations accountable. One arm of the right’s media machine folding into the Onion, which skewers US foreign policy and corporate greed better than most bona fide corporate media, would be a small victory against this anti-democratic trend.

If anyone thinks it’s unfair for a media outlet to be turned into a parody of itself, well, it’s already happened to the Washington Post under the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

None of this will bring true justice to the Sandy Hook parents, but to the rest of us it provides some catharsis, giving hope that not every change to the media landscape needs to be for the worse.

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