Everyone has a favorite Onion headline.
“Fall Canceled After 3 Billion Seasons.”
“Area Man Passionate Defender of What He Imagines Constitution To Be.”
My personal favorite ran on January 20, 2001, the day George W. Bush was inaugurated: “Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over.”
Add to those the following:
“Trump Taps Dog-Shooter to Run Homeland Security.”
“Part-Time Fox News Host and Accused Sexual Predator Tipped for Secretary of Defense.”
“Vaccine Skeptic with Worm-Eaten Brain to Head Up Health and Human Services.”
“Putin Fan and Alleged Russian Asset Announced as Director of National Intelligence.”
If you Google “Trump breaks satire,” you’ll get a plethora of articles attesting to the fact that the president-elect is making it difficult to satirize him because he seems to do it himself. If he is just trying to troll comedians, getting back at the likes of Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert for decades of ridicule, could he be any better at it?
The Onion has been at the center of this vortex, and I think they’ve handled the sewage sandwich far more adeptly than Saturday Night Live’s toothless sketches. (Remember SNL actually had Trump on as a host when he was running for president in 2015.)
So it’s a logical next step to start chipping away at the MAGA Industrial Complex from within, starting with taking over Alex Jones’s rabid anti-news site, Infowars.
He didn’t stop until some of the parents got together and sued him.
- With the glacial pace of justice, it took another two years for the court-mandated auctioning of his assets to finally take place, and last week The Onion announced that they had purchased Infowars in that sale.
What’s next for InfoWars remains a live issue. The excess funds initially allocated for the purchase will be reinvested into our philanthropic efforts that include business school scholarships for promising cult leaders, a charity that donates elections to at-risk third world dictators, and a new pro bono program pairing orphans with stable factory jobs at no cost to the factories.
That is, if the sale actually goes through. The AP reported that a company “affiliated” with Jones is trying to stop The Onion’s acquisition of the IP.
Company affiliated with Alex Jones seeks to disqualify The Onion’s Infowars bid
First United American Companies is alleging fraud and collusion
A company affiliated with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones asked a federal judge on Monday to disqualify a bid by the satirical news outlet The Onion to buy Jones’ Infowars at a bankruptcy auction, alleging fraud and collusion.
The company, First United American Companies, which is affiliated with a Jones website that sells dietary supplements, was the only other bidder at the recent auction, offering $3.5 million. In a filing in federal bankruptcy court in Houston, a lawyer for the company asked the judge to declare it the winning bidder instead of The Onion.
The lawyer, Walter Cicack, claimed that the bankruptcy trustee overseeing the auction improperly colluded with The Onion and families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut in naming The Onion the winning bidder. Cicack also alleged the trustee violated rules for the sale set by the judge and said the company’s cash offer was twice the amount of The Onion’s.
The bankruptcy auction was held last week as part of the liquidation of Jones’ assets, including Infowars. Proceeds from the sale will go to Sandy Hook families and other creditors. Jones filed bankruptcy in 2022 after he was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in defamation lawsuits filed by the families for calling the 2012 shooting that killed 20 children and six educators a hoax staged by actors to increase gun control.
Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion’s parent company, Chicago-based Global Tetrahedron, issued a statement Monday through a spokesperson.
“We’re obviously disappointed he’s lashing out by creating conspiracies, but we’re also not surprised,” he said, referring to Jones.
The bankruptcy trustee appointed to oversee the sale, Christopher Murray, declined to comment Monday. A lawyer for the Sandy Hook families, Christopher Mattei, also declined to comment.
In a response filed in court later Monday, Murray called the allegations “baseless.” He said the motion by First United American to disqualify The Onion was “a disappointed bidder’s improper attempt to influence an otherwise fair and open auction process.”
Murray also wrote, “Having failed in its prior efforts to bully the Trustee and his advisors into accepting its inferior bid, FUAC now alleges, without evidence, collusion and bad faith in an attempt to mislead the Court and disqualify its only competition in the auction.”
Monday’s filing by First United American Companies included the formal bid submitted by The Onion, revealing that it offered $1.75 million for Infowars along with certain incentives by Sandy Hook families who won their defamation lawsuit against Jones. The families agreed to forgo up to 100% of their share of the Infowars sale proceeds and give it to other Jones creditors.
With the families’ offer, other Jones creditors would get a total of $100,000 more than they would get if First United American Companies bought Infowars, according to The Onion’s bidding document.
Murray told the bankruptcy judge during a court hearing Thursday that the families’ incentives made it a better offer than the one by the Jones-affiliated company.
“The creditors ended up significantly better off,” Murray told the judge, adding that one of his responsibilities was to maximize value for creditors.
Judge Christopher Lopez, who said he had questions about the sale process and concerns about transparency, ordered a hearing to see exactly what happened with the auction and how the trustee chose The Onion. The date of the hearing has not been set.
Jones has been criticizing the sale process on his show and social media sites, calling it “rigged” and a “fraud.”
Over the weekend, Collins posted a series of comments about the auction on X.
“Long and short of it: We won the bid and — you’re not going to believe it — the previous InfoWars folks aren’t taking it well,” he wrote.
Collins said last week that The Onion planned to turn the Infowars website into a parody site, taking aim at conspiracy theorists and other social media personalities while promoting gun violence prevention efforts.
Cicack also said in Monday’s court filing that the trustee improperly changed the auction process “from a live auction to a secret process.” Cicack said that after sealed bids were submitted Nov. 8, it was expected that there would be a round of live bidding on Nov. 13.
But instead, he said, Murray decided to ask the two bidders to submit another offer as their final and best proposal, which they did. Murray then chose from those final bids without holding a round of live bidding. He alleged Murray violated the auction rules.
- The point Tetraeder has already made is that non-crazies could learn a thing or two by tearing a page off the crazies’ playbook.
“The EPA is designed to protect the environment.”
“Fluoride in drinking water improves your teeth.”
“Vaccines can stop smallpox and polio.”
And craziest of all: “The deep state is working for you.”
Those may not be as funny as what The Onion could come up with. But if people really believe a narcissistic, sociopathic, sexual predator and Hitler enthusiast will make a good president, they’ll believe anything.
J.B. Miller is an American writer living in England, and is the author of the forthcoming novel Duch.
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11/20/24
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