Infowars

» see infowars.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Infowars was an Austin, Texas broadcast operation that reached the rest of the world in clip form, which is the only form it ever reached me in. i never listened to a show. i doubt i could have named the studio's address before i looked it up for this. the name still travelled far enough that writing it down here needs no introduction, and that gap between reach and audience is most of what it was.

it started in 1999, built entirely around one broadcaster, and it stayed that shape for twenty-seven years. it was radio before it was video, and eventually a website carrying both with a store bolted underneath. the store is the part people underrate. the money came from selling supplements and gear to the audience, not from advertisers, which is why it survived every platform ban that hit it after 2018.

what ended it was not a ban and not a bad quarter. in 2012 a gunman killed twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Jones spent years telling his audience the shooting had been staged. the parents sued him for defamation in Texas and in Connecticut, and in 2022 the two courts landed on damages totaling close to one and a half billion dollars.

that number is larger than the business ever was, which meant the case stopped being about broadcasting and became a collections problem. everything after 2022 is bankruptcy procedure. the interesting part of this obit is that the procedure worked, slowly, and that the thing being liquidated was a media brand rather than a warehouse.

~ the record ~

~ how the money ran out ~

Free Speech Systems, the company behind the show, went into Chapter 11 in 2022. Jones filed personally as well. in June 2024 a federal bankruptcy judge in Houston, Christopher Lopez, ordered his personal assets liquidated, which put his stake in Infowars on the block.

the auction that November is the part everybody remembers. The Onion bid for Infowars with the Sandy Hook families backing the offer, planning to relaunch the site as a parody of itself. they were declared the winner. that December Judge Lopez threw the result out over how the auction had been run, and the whole thing went back into limbo for most of another year.

~ what really happened ~

the ending, when it came, was administrative rather than dramatic. in August 2025 a Texas state court appointed a receiver over the Infowars assets, with a mandate to turn them into money for the families. a receiver does not need to win an argument with anybody. he just stops signing checks.

so the rent went unpaid and the satellite feed went with it. Jones was told to be out of the building by midnight on 30 April 2026. he signed off that Thursday night after twenty-seven years and the site went quiet over the weekend that followed. no final legal ruling, no verdict day. the lights were simply not paid for anymore.

~ the funny part ~

having failed to buy it, The Onion went back in April 2026 and rented it. the deal with the receiver was eighty-one thousand dollars a month for six months for the brand and the domains, with the proceeds going to the families. so the parody version launched on the real address, in the same weekend the real one went dark, funded by the judgment that killed it.

Jones started something called the Alex Jones Network almost immediately and says he does not own it. that is its own story and not this one. Infowars itself is a strange kind of dead. the audience never left and no competitor took it. a court took the keys and handed them to the joke.

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