“I thought we’d be shut down last year,” Alex Jones marveled on-air in January. “I thought we’d be shut down last month,” he continued, exhorting his audience to consider buying one of the fundraiser items he was hawking to keep the lights on, which at the time included a $111 collectible coin and posters of Jones and Donald Trump.

“You guys have got us out of this over, and over, and over again,” Jones declared, as he once again asked his fans to give him money.

He struck the same note in March when, Jones, slurring his words, told right-wing streamer Tim Pool that his Infowars company was “getting shut down.”

“We’ve beaten so many attacks,” he added. “But now we’re shutting down in the middle of next month.”

During Infowars’ years in bankruptcy, Jones still found opportunities to create chaos and raise funds.

At the time, Jones didn’t elaborate on what “shutting down” Infowars come April might mean. But on Monday, one version became clear when the satirical news site The Onion said it had reached a deal with the bankruptcy receiver overseeing Infowars to take over the site. The deal, which still has to be approved by a judge, would represent a serious and perhaps final blow to Jones’ time at the company. A leasing agreement would allow The Onion‘s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, to assume control of Infowars’ website and studio for the next six to twelve months and transform the site into a parody of itself. In a mockup shared by Onion CEO Ben Collins, parody ads blared over Infowars’ style-content: “TURN YOUR PISS INTO GOLD,” a particularly funny one read. “TURN YOUR GOLD INTO PISS,” another countered.

It’s been a long few years for Jones, the bilious figurehead of Infowars, the conspiracy website he founded in 1999. Over the last two decades, the site has grown beyond anyone’s wildest expectations in terms of money, reach, and infamy, making Jones something of a household name—certainly in households concerned with claims about black helicopters, FEMA camps, and chemicals that are “turning the frogs gay,” as Jones infamously put it.

But eventually the infamy caught up with him: Jones was sued in both Texas and Connecticut for claiming on-air that the 2012 murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults, were a “massive hoax” and a false flag. It’s been years since Jones lost three related defamation lawsuits by default and had more than $1 billion in judgments rendered against him and Infowars.

To many, the court losses appeared like an immediate death sentence for the company. But Jones and Infowars continued—and continued, and continued—in large part by using the judicial system to his advantage. Both Infowars and Jones personally filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in 2022, setting the stage for an endless series of proceedings in a Texas bankruptcy court. Thus far, the Sandy Hook........

© Mother Jones