Alex Jones owed the Sandy Hook families more than $1.4 billion for calling the shooting a hoax and turning his audience on them for years. He has paid none of it. A court ordered it. He ignored the court. He moved his show to a different website and kept going.
The Onion bought the Infowars brand at auction, built a parody version using the same shock loops and supplement sales and rage triggers that made Jones' audience feel like something was always around the corner, and is opening by sending $100,000 to the families from merchandise revenue. Their attorney says every dollar Jones makes until the end of his life will be claimed by the families. Jones has been left, in the words of one of those attorneys, with an iPhone and a fancy microphone.
Robbie Parker's daughter died at Sandy Hook in 2012. He plans to read from his book about grieving and fighting Jones in the Austin studio where Jones used to sit. Not because it will change what happened. Because it is the one thing left available to them that Jones cannot take away.
The Philadelphia Phillies fired manager Rob Thomson, sources told ESPN. Don Mattingly will take over as interim manager. First on the news was @MattGelb.
‘My grandmother told me about the Holocaust and about never again. This isn’t never again’
A legend
A Jewish activist protest at Rutgers University after they invited an Israeli soldier.
The Onion CEO Ben Collins on why he needed to see through the takeover of Infowars from Alex Jones:
"I just wasn't going to drop this. And I didn't want to make it so our most grievous sin as a country — which is mass shootings of kids in school — where financializing that and getting away with it is fine. If we can't draw a line there, then there is no line anymore."