Infowars shutdown dig

US Bankruptcy Trustees work for the DOJ

ALL pb

>>21983196 Alex Jones’ Infowars has been purchased by leftists at The Onion with the SOLE intention of shutting it down and SILENCING Jones

>>21983414, >>21983435 Infowars shut down

>>21983439 Playbook = Project Veritas → O'Keefe Media Group

>>21983456 Purchased by the Onion in a fake bankruptcy auction.

>>21984316 Sandy Hook families and Everytown for Gun Safety helped The Onion buy the outlet

>>21983710 Jeff Clark on Warroom.Points out that the bankruptcy trustees running the infowars 'auction' shitshow is part of the Department of Justice. name drops Tara Twomey

>>21983801, >>21983813 where have I heard that name before? KEVIN M. EPSTEIN. UNITED STATES TRUSTEE (REGION 6 and 7)

>>21983870 Texas bankruptcy courts looks pretty fucked up and corrupt

>>21983904 bankruptcy courts in the Southern District of Texas are still a hotbed for intense litigation

>>21983994 Class of '94 Texas Law list. Epstein, Kevin M., ‘94

>>21984063 Follow the wives and the brothers? Lisa andJeff

>>21984072 that middle name

>>21984126 a Lisa Dickstein Epstein (Kevin's spouse?) follows Scott Weiner, the pedo state rep from Kamala's hometown

>>21984334 Lisa works for Jewish Community Relations Council. Part of the Jewish Federation of San Antonio

>>21984546 Partnership2Gether is a program of the Jewish Agency and The Jewish Federation of North America

>>21984567 Who are our Partners? Why Hungary? 13 Facts About Hungarian Jews. extended deep into what is now Ukraine and Romania on the west, Slovakia on the north, Austria on the east, and Serbia on the south

>>21984589 Hungarian Jews today (and their descendants) are predominantly Ashkenazim

>>21984612, >>21984620 Schwartz Soros(black), Weissman (white), Rothchild (red).Jewish Hungary Was Recreated in the US and Israel.

>>21984656 Austin to Celebrate 25-Year Anniversary with Partnership2Gether in Israel

>>21984686 What is PARTNERSHIP2GETHER Brochure. The Jewish Agency For Israel.

>>21984746 Jewish Agency for Israel: Former Mossad agent to speak about Israel’s daring ‘Operation Moses’ mission.

>>21984839 So theDOJ trustee fag's wife is connected to an Israeli spy outfit?. Russians shut down Jewish Agency For Israel because of spying

>>21984910 Jewish Agency board includes Wilf. Owner of NFL and Soccer team. Vikins and Pride

>>21984926 and Major General (Res.) Doron Almog

>>21984939 and these fags

>>21984480 Alex Jones website 'Infowars' is only one layer of a thick Onion of fake news

>>21985243,MUST-WATCHBannon Joins Alex Jones For Final Moments Of InfoWars Before Democrats Shutdown Site. Steve Bannon interview with aj and the story of the auction of infowars

>>21987097 If you want to follow Alex Jones, try the following:

>>21987201, >>21987262 You know what's funny about this. The judge in the Infowars hearing rejected the sale of Infowars to The Onion.

>>21987328 ‘RIGGED’: Judge Overseeing Infowars Case Orders Hearing into How the Onion ‘Won’ the Auction

fresh

>>21986979 Judge Overseeing Infowars Case Orders Hearing into How the Onion ‘Won’ the Auction

>>21987441 Steve Bannon Responds To Democrats Shutting Down InfoWars Live. McCabe and Weissman are wetting themselves

>>21988030, >>21988123, >>21988152, >>21988433, >>21988074, >>21988138 Anons opine: Will there be a Sandy Hook DECLAS during Pres. Trump's term?

>>21991134

whadyaknow

Liddle Faggot Ben Collins is CEO of the Onion

The Onion’s purchase of Infowars is a grand comedic gesture, with a wise guy from Massachusetts at the helm

By Aidan Ryan Globe Staff,Updated November 15, 2024, 16 minutes ago

The Onion’s most cutting joke of all time might have come on Thursday, when the satirical news site announced it plans to acquire Infowars, the website run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that has spread disinformation on everything from mass shootings to outlandish claims that the government controls the weather.

Behind the deal is the relatively new leader of the Onion, Ben Collins, a Massachusetts native, former star NBC News reporter, and self-described “Masshole” who said he saw the opportunity to buy Infowars out of bankruptcy as the kind of in-your-face dare that he was born to take.

Ben Collins was photographed in 2002 at his home in Byfield when he wrote sports columns for a nationally syndicated kids sports website and for the site of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks. He is now CEO at The Onion.

Ben Collins was photographed in 2002 at his home in Byfield when he wrote sports columns for a nationally syndicated kids sports website and for the site of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks. He is now CEO at The Onion.Wilson, Mark Globe Staff

“My whole family will fight you in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot,” said Collins, who grew up in Salem and later Byfield, in an interview. “The ‘Massholeness’ informs, probably, this decision to an extent that I don’t want to really think about without a lot more therapy.”

Jokes aside, the planned purchase has a very serious side to it: The deal was backed by families of victims in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which Jones repeatedly claimed was a hoax, costing him $1.5 billion in legal damages. Terms of the purchase were not disclosed.

“The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” said Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie died in the Sandy Hook shooting, in a statement from his lawyers to the Associated Press.

And, Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control and against gun violence, will be the exclusive launch advertiser for the new Infowars.

The acquisition is just the latest development at the 36-year-old humor publication, which has been a rare bright spot this year in media. After bringing back its print edition and its Onion News Network online video product, Collins sees Infowars as another growth opportunity.

His plan is to reboot Infowars into a ClickHole-like parody of the conspiratorial corners of the Web that it once anchored — referring to the BuzzFeed spoof it created in 2014 — with a particular focus on the dubious business of “health” supplements, which were a major revenue source for Infowars.

“Literally the Hall of Fame of Onion and Clickhole writers are doing the million monkeys at a typewriter thing right now, trying to figure out the best way to handle it,” he said.

Collins didn’t disclose the financial terms of the acquisition. The Onion won an auction to buy Infowars in bankruptcy court. A judge ordered a hearing for next week after Jones and his legal team protested the process, the Associated Press reported.

Before it became the internet’s favorite satire publication, the Onion started as weekly print paper in 1988 at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Its website launched in 1996, kicking off its era of internet virality with stories including “Mr. Autumn Man Walking Down Street With Cup Of Coffee, Wearing Sweater Over Plaid Collared Shirt.”

But The Onion has also tackled, bluntly, some of the darker realities of American society, a theme that has led some people to refer to it as the most accurate publication in the country. A prime example is “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” which the publication has run 37 times after mass shootings.

Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones spoke to the media after arriving at the federal courthouse for a hearing in front of a bankruptcy judge in June in Houston.

Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones spoke to the media after arriving at the federal courthouse for a hearing in front of a bankruptcy judge in June in Houston.David J. Phillip/Associated Press

That darkness is something Collins knows well. At NBC News, he worked the “dystopia beat” covering disinformation and online conspiracies, which included everything from the right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now known as X. He even reported on Jones and Infowars.

After he left NBC, a joke about buying The Onion turned into a reality when he teamed up with Jeff Lawson, the billioniare cofounder of the communications company Twilio, and others to acquire the outlet in April from G/O Media, a private equity-backed venture that had acquired it in 2019.

>>21991178

>whadyaknow

>Liddle Faggot Ben Collins is CEO of the Onion

Reminder that Liddle Ben Collins is an old butt buddy of Mark Cuban

With Collins as chief executive, the Onion’s new leadership immediately recognized the outlet’s union, didn’t lay off any staff, and helped revive the outlet’s print edition, which is published monthly and distributed to subscribers nationwide.

Collins believes that as the world gets dumber, and darker, the Onion has a crucial role to play.

“I think the best satire rips off the facade and reveals the wiring underneath,” Collins said. “And that’s what we’re going to do with it.”

But rest assured, the humor isn’t going anywhere.

“We’re The Onion. It’s going to be like 99 percent stupid . . . jokes,” Collins said.

While disinformation-reporter-turned-satire-publication-CEO might not seem to be the most natural path, those who know Collins said it’s a natural fit for his love of journalism and humor. He graduated from Emerson College in 2010 with a degree in print journalism.

Ben Collins (right) spoke with Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks in 2006.

At Emerson he cohosted a radio show, wrote a music column for the student newspaper, the Berkeley Beacon, and worked as a co-op for the Globe’s sports department.

“Ben is one of the funniest people I know,” said Mark Leccese, a former Emerson journalism professor who taught Collins. “The Onion is a perfect spot for him.”

Collins also cohosted a sports and humor radio show with Chris Hurst, another Emerson alumnus who is a former Virginia lawmaker and now a reporter at WTSP-TV in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“I’m kind of in awe, frankly, that the guy I used to chop it up with talking Sox and Celtics and making fart jokes is now a leader in the media industry,” Hurst said in an email.

A copy of the satirical outlet The Onion.

A copy of the satirical outlet The Onion.Jill Bleed/Associated Press

Collins became interested in covering disinformation after Hurst’s girlfriend, reporter Alison Parker, was murdered while reporting on air in 2015, and he talked to people who were spreading conspiracy theories about the shooting online, the Berkeley Beacon previously reported.

Now, Collins will oversee a website that was brought to its knees by its insistence on peddling misinformation around mass shootings.

“It’s only fitting for Ben that he returned to his roots, so to speak, by leading a humor website, but he hasn’t stopped fighting against injustice, using his power at The Onion to ironically and yet also appropriately buying Infowars,” Hurst said.

Katherine Ognyanova, an associate professor of communication at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said the acquisition was “good news for democracy” and hoped The Onion’s ownership will be effective at communicating the material on the new Infowars is satire.

“In any case, it’s going to be a better outcome than having someone who is sympathetic to Alex Jones’s viewpoints,” Ognyanova said.

Collins said he remembers picking up copies of The Onion when growing up in Massachusetts, adding that it showed him that you could tell jokes for a living and there was a world beyond his “one stoplight town” of Byfield.

“It’s been one of the most static, good things in my entire life,” Collins said of the publication. “I’m 36 and The Onion is 36.”

The planned acquisition of Infowars sparked glee online from journalists and other readers. Meanwhile, Jones was angry about the decision and said on social media he would challenge the sale. The outrage only adds to the jubilation.

“Ben wants to do what’s good and what’s funny,” Leccese said. “The Onion buying Infowars is both good and ridiculously funny.”

https://archive.ph/vkDyg

>>21991178, >>21991180 Ben Collins embraces his fake news history. Now CEO of the Onion

top kek

'Award winning disinformation journalist'

ooook

How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

The new owners of the satire site rescued it from content farm hell. Now, they’re relaunching its newspaper.

By Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, host of the Decoder podcast, and co-host of The Vergecast.

Aug 22, 2024, 10:00 AM EDT

Today, I’m talking withBen Collins and Danielle Strle, the new CEO and chief product officer of The Onion. And this episode’s kind of a wild ride.

The Onion is a comedy institution. It launched in 1988 in Madison, Wisconsin, as a parody newspaper, and over the years, it’s become hugely influential. You’ll hear Ben describe The Onion’s role as writing the dumbest possible sentence about what’s going on on a day-to-day basis — a task that means The Onion often publishes the sharpest headlines in media, even if The Onion itself is literally fake news.

But like everything else in media, The Onion went on a pure nightmare hell ride in the 2010s. It was acquired by Univision in 2016, which didn’t really know what to do with it. So it was remerged into the Gizmodo Media Group, which is what the remnants of Gawker were called after Hulk Hogan sued that company into bankruptcy. Gizmodo Media, in turn, was sold to a private equity firm and rebranded as G/O Media in 2019. The O presumably stood for The Onion.

Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!

We could do an entire episode on the calamity of G/O Media, but the short version is that it’s spent the last five years systematically selling everything off.That’s how Ben and Danielle came to be in chargeof The Onion alongside CMO Leila Brillson and Scott Kidder, the part-time CFO. Before this, Ben was an award-winning disinformation reporter at NBC News, and he made an offhand joke on Bluesky about buying The Onion. You’ll hear him describe how that led to a series of meetings and plans and, ultimately, to Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson bankrolling the deal.

I love stories like this, and I really wanted to know how that actually came together, how Ben and Danielle see The Onion working now, and what the business model is going to be. And really, what has it been like to grab a bunch of friends from a group chat and start a company together that now runs something as important as The Onion?

On top of all that, The Onion just relaunched its print edition, and I really want to know how that even works in 2024. Where do you get something printed? How do you estimate how many copies to print? And how do you do all of that on top of migrating the entire Onion website to WordPress?

There’s a lot going on in this episode, but the one thing I want to call out is just how much fun Ben and Danielle seem to be having. That’s a rare quality in media right now, and it’s infectious. In fact, I’ll just go out and say it because I think you’re going to hear it in the episode: I’m rooting for them to succeed. I have all the same memories of reading The Onion as anyone else, and I hope they figure it out.

Okay, The Onion’s Ben Collins and Danielle Strle. Here we go.

>>21991218

>How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Ben Collins, you are the new CEO of The Onion. Danielle Strle, you are the new chief product officer. Welcome to Decoder.

Danielle Strle: Pleasure to be here.

Ben Collins: We’re really excited.

I am very excited to talk to you. Danielle, you just told me this is your first podcast ever, so this is going to be real fun.

DS: I’m excited.

All right. Let’s start with this. You are the new executives of The Onion. It was previously owned by a thing called G/O Media. I’m not even going to try to explain the genesis or the name of G/O Media, but now you have a new company called Global Tetrahedron that owns The Onion. Explain how we got here.

BC: Back in January, I was reading Adweek. I was writing a very… I don’t know if the book was bad, but the process of writing the book was miserable. I was writing about Nazis on the internet and stuff. You know those people?

Yeah.

BC: I’m sick of those people. Terrible. I was reading Adweek, and I saw The Onion was for sale, and this was around the time where things were just shuttering. Sports Illustrated and Jezebel just shuttered — and it was from the same company, G/O owned Jezebel — or things were being turned into AI slop farms or Elon Musk was buying it. Worst-case scenario.

I posted on Bluesky. I said: “The Onion’s for sale, who wants to help me buy this thing? I have $600.” Leila Brillson, who’s in Chicago where The Onion is based, emailed me, and she was like, “But seriously, how do we do this? It’s an institution. We can’t let this thing die. It’s important to keep this thing alive.” I was like, “Let me just make some phone calls.” The first person I called was Danielle because she just knows. She ran product for Tumblr when that turned all of our children weird in America. Every single one of them.

DS: In the best way.

BC: In the best way. Not like JD Vance weird, like David Bowie weird.

https://www.theverge.com/24225592/the-onion-new-owners-print-newspaper-digital-media-gawker-ben-collins-decoder-interview

>>21991218

>Today, I’m talking withBen Collins and Danielle Strle, the new CEO and chief product officer of The Onion

>>21991225

https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social