The Onion just bought Alex Jones' conspiracy-pedaling platform Infowars, according to reports.
CNN correspondent Hadas Gold delivered this apparently real news Thursday morning confirmed by the New York Times and an editorial from the satirical news outlet's owner Bryce P. Tetraeder, CEO of Global Tetrahedron.
"Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market," wrote Tetraeder.
"And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice."
Gold and the New York Times report that the Onion ate InfoWars with backing from several families of victims of the Sandy Hook mass shooting who successfully sued Jones for nearly $1.5 billion in defamation damages.
Jones, who notoriously spread a conspiracy theory claiming their children's deaths had been faked, was forced to declare bankruptcy and liquidate assets.
The Times reports the Onion bought Infowars in a bankruptcy auction. Jones confirmed InfoWars was being shut down and taken over by the Onion in a video comment.
"I don't know what's going to happen," Jones said. "They want to silence the American people."
On Thursday, Tetraeder provided Onion readers with answers — in classic Onion style.
"InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses," he wrote. "With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal."
Tetraeder praised InfoWars for what he described as their commitment to inducing rage and radicalizing vulnerable Americans. He then took two direct jabs at Jones by boasting of the price he'd paid for Inforwars and quipping he'd forgotten his name.
"No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds," Tetraeder wrote. "And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars."
The future looks uncertain for Infowars but Tetraeder had a slew of suggestions for possible future investments, among them business school scholarships for promising cult leaders and a program to pair orphans with factory jobs.
"As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately," Tetraeder wrote. "We plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal."
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
