Satirical news outlet The Onion said Thursday it had acquired Infowars, a conspiracy-laden website whose owner made money by running stories that called one of America’s most notorious school shootings a hoax.
The Onion said it prevailed in a bankruptcy auction to buy Alex Jones’ Infowars site with the support of families of victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
The new Infowars, starting in January, will operate as a parody of its former self, The Onion said, with a anti-gun violence nonprofit founded after the 2012 shooting advertising on the site that once claimed the bloody attack was staged.
The massacre left 20 small children and six educators dead in a particularly gruesome chapter of America’s gun violence epidemic.
Families sued Jones in 2018 after he spread the claim that the shooting rampage was staged with actors.
Four years later they won a …