When Infowars, the website founded by right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones, came up for sale two years ago, an unlikely suitor stepped up. The Onion, a satirical news outlet, planned to convert the site into a parody of itself.

That sale was scuttled by a bankruptcy court. Now, The Onion has reemerged with a new plan: licensing the website from Gregory Milligan, the court-appointed manager of the site.

On Monday, Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’ Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.

The licensing deal has been agreed to by The Onion and the court-appointed administrator. But it is not effective until Guerra Gamble approves it, and Jones could appeal any ruling. That means the fate of Infowars remains in limbo until the court rules, probably sometime in the next two weeks. Jones continues to operate Infowars.com and host its weekday program, “The Alex Jones Show.”

Jones had no immediate comment.

The battle over Infowars has been a long and fraught saga, and Jones — a notorious peddler of lies and invective — has used his bully pulpit for more than a year to crusade against The Onion’s efforts to take over the platform. The site is in limbo because of a series of defamation lawsuits against Jones filed by families of victims of the mass shooting in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, which Jones falsely claimed was a hoax.

People who believed his lies that the shooting was staged subjected the families to years of online abuse, harassment and death threats.

In 2018, the families of two Sandy Hook victims sued Jones for defamation in Texas, where Infowars is based, and relatives of eight other victims sued him in Connecticut. In 2022, a jury in Texas awarded the parents of one victim $50 million.

Jones declared bankruptcy later that year. A trial pitting him against the parents of a second victim was delayed indefinitely by that move. Later that year, a jury awarded the families and a former law enforcement official who sued Jones in Connecticut a total of $1.4 billion.

Jones appealed the Connecticut verdict, the largest defamation award in history, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In October, the justices declined to hear the case.

To help satisfy Jones’ debts to the Sandy Hook families and other creditors, Judge Christopher Lopez of U.S. Bankruptcy Court ordered in mid-2024 that a court-appointed trustee sell off equipment, intellectual property and other assets owned by Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company.

In late 2024, a sealed-bid silent auction drew only two contenders: The Onion’s parent and a company associated with Jones. The trustee and the families chose The Onion’s bid, despite its potential to yield less cash than the rival company’s. Jones and his lawyers cried foul, and Lopez intervened, saying that the process was opaque and that The Onion’s bid was not obviously superior. He rejected plans for a do-over of the auction, instead directing the families to seek a liquidation through Guerra Gamble’s court in Texas, where the first defamation case was heard and won.

In August, Guerra Gamble ruled that a court-appointed administrator would take over and sell Infowars’ assets, reopening the door to The Onion. “We’re working on it,” Ben Collins, CEO of Global Tetrahedron, wrote on social media on the same day as Guerra Gamble’s ruling.

The Onion’s proposal, worth $486,000 in its initial six-month term, does little to satisfy the enormous damages awarded to the Sandy Hook families. The families have been fighting to collect since Jones filed for personal and business bankruptcy. Jones is expected to lose access to his studio and equipment as part of the deal, Collins said.

The Onion plans to turn Infowars into a comedy site with satirical echoes of the fringe conspiracy theories that Jones is known for. Tim Heidecker, one of the comedians behind “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, has been hired to serve as “creative director of Infowars.” He said he initially planned to parody Jones’ “whole modus operandi.”

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

“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,” Heidecker said in an interview. During a recent trip to Philadelphia, he traveled to the Liberty Bell to film a video in character as the new creative director of Infowars.

“The goal for the families we represent has always been to prevent Alex Jones from being able to cause harm at scale, the way he did against them,” said Chris Mattei, the lawyer who argued the Connecticut families’ case in court. The deal with The Onion promises “to significantly degrade his power to do that.”

The Onion also plans to sell merchandise and share the proceeds with the Sandy Hook families.

“We are excited to lie constantly for cold, hard cash, but this time in a cool way, and we’ll make sure some of it gets back to the families,” Collins said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Benjamin Mullin and Elizabeth Williamson/Alexandra Coggin
c. 2026 The New York Times Company