Onion Wars

"A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people."

-John Cleese

This morning, amidst the usual cascade of bad news, brought a headline that left me laughing out loud.

The Onion has purchased a license to use InfoWars, and turned it into satirical farce.

For those unfamiliar with InfoWars, the site has been a steady source of right-wing sludge for many years. Its principal, Alex Jones, has trafficked in conspiracy theories and outrageous falsehoods and was making quite a lot of money at it, by all accounts.

Then came the Sandy Hook Massacre, and his ill-advised decision to broadcast the yarn that the whole thing was staged by liberals to scare folks into going along with gun control. No one was hurt. It's all a hoax. Nothing to see here.

In turn, his followers, the same dimwits who elected DJT twice, started harassing the families who were in the midst of mourning the loss of their children. There were death threats, apparently, and these poor folks found their living hell amplified by Jones and his idiotic followers.

So some of the parents sued him for defamation, and won. Then some more. Before too long, he had over a billion dollars in judgments against him.

Which led to the next thing any good American does in that situation--he filed bankruptcy.

When one avails oneself of the protections of the bankruptcy court, the cover the law provides comes at a price. All of the debtor's non-exempt assets become part of the bankruptcy estate, and are held by the trustee for the benefit of creditors.

One of Jones's assets that seemed to have some value was InfoWars. As the trustee was seeking ways to monetize this piece of property, the Onion came along trying first to buy it, then to obtain a license for its use.

Don't know the Onion? It's been one of my favorite sources of satire for at least a couple decades, a fake newspaper featuring headlines like this.

Or my personal favorite, one the Onion's earliest front pages. Vulgar, but hilarious.

Jones wasn't amused at the prospect of the Onion buying his online masterpiece and turning it into an object of ridicule, but pending approval by the bankruptcy judge of the licensing agreement, the new overlords of InfoWars have wasted no time laying out their vision of the new site as a tableau of satire directed at the whole radical right-wing ecosystem. You really should give it a look.

https://theonion.info/

Their vision for the future is a pretty good summary of the present state of right wing podcastia:

Imagine a roaring arena packed to the rafters with pathological liars. High above you in the nosebleeds are podcasters, screaming that you’ll die if you don’t buy their skincare products. Below, on the floor, imagine demonic battalions of super-influencers physically forcing people into home fitness devices designed to dismantle your body bone by bone and reassemble you into a grotesque statue of yourself. Out of the throngs, an extremely sick looking man approaches you. He puts his hands on your shoulders. He explains that he is your life coach and that you owe him $800.

Such is the InfoWars I envision: An infinite virtual surface teeming with ads. Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object, free radical misinformation, sentences and images so poorly thought out that they are unhealthy even to view for just a few seconds. The InfoWars of old was only the prototype for the hell I know we can build together: A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery, their minds fully disintegrating on contact.

With this new InfoWars, we will democratize psychological torture, welcoming brutal and sadistic ideas from everyone, even the very stupidest among us. It will be like the Manhattan Project, only instead of a bomb, we will be building a website.

And scroll through the ads. They're a hoot.

Back to studying. Happy Wednesday.