'Beautiful joke': The Onion finally reaches another deal to take over Infowars

The satirical news outlet plans to license the Infowars website and its associated intellectual property from Gregory Milligan, who was appointed by a bankruptcy court to manage the website, for $1,800 a month if a Texas judge approves that agreement, and Jones could appeal any ruling, reported the New York Times.

"The battle over Infowars has been a long and fraught saga, and Mr. 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 Times reported. "The site is in limbo because of a series of defamation lawsuits against Mr. Jones filed by families of victims of the mass shooting in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, which Mr. Jones falsely claimed was a hoax."

The families of two Sandy Hook victims sued Jones for defamation in Texas, where Infowars is based, and the families of eight others sued him in Connecticut, and the conspiracy theorist filed for bankruptcy after a Texas jury awarded the parents of one victim $50 million.

The bankruptcy filing indefinitely delayed the second trial in Texas, and a Connecticut jury awarded $1.4 billion to the other families and a former law enforcement official who had sued Jones, whose appeal of the ruling all the way to the Supreme Court, although the justices ultimately declined to hear the case.

The Onion's parent company, Global Tetrahedron, won a 2024 bankruptcy auction to buy Infowars, but a judge voided those results, saying their was a lack of transparency in the deal.

If the licensing agreement receives court approval, The Onion plans to turn Infowars into a comedy site satirizing its conspiratorial origins, and comedian Tim Heidecker has been hired as creative director.

“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,” said Heidecker, one of the creative forces behind “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.

The Onion will also sell Infowars 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,” said Ben Collins, chief executive of The Onion's parent company, Global Tetrahedron.