After almost three decades, thousands of hours of broadcasts and countless conspiracy theories, the lights went off at Infowars last night.
“And all glory goes to Jesus Christ and our heavenly father,” Alex Jones said Thursday during his final appearance at the helm of his popular show, flanked by a dozen men holding plastic flutes of what appeared to be sparkling wine.
Jones, at times slurring his words, chugged his glass, raised his arms to the sky and flexed his muscles, vowing to keep broadcasting despite the loss of the Infowars brand — holdings tied up in legal proceedings over more than $1 billion in defamation judgments owed to the families of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“The hell we’ve been through has only made us stronger,” Jones ended, asking his crew, “Would you have it any other way?”
And that was it. The Infowars website, once a repository for the country’s most outlandish and harmful conspiracy theories, attracting billions of views and raking in millions of dollars, now reads: “Off Air.”
Jones spent the days leading up to his final show attacking The Onion, the satirical news website expected to take over his assets after a yearslong court battle, and bemoaning the loss of his network and supporters. The Onion has been aggressively pursuing the Infowars brand and property since 2024, with plans to turn it into a website with comedic stories and videos that play on Jones’ style of conspiracy theorizing and grift.
In the waning days of his Infowars broadcast, Jones likened himself to both a dog’s chew toy and a starving dog. An Infowars shutdown clock counted down the hours until he would be forced out of his studio and the website would go dark.
“Good riddance to the world’s worst rubbish,” The Onion’s CEO, Ben Collins, wrote in a text to MS NOW. “The second this man is disallowed from abusing these courts, from paying out the $1.4 billion he owes to these families, we are ready to take over with something that will make you forget about what was ever there before. We have a deal with both the Sandy Hook families and the court-appointed receiver, and we look forward to taking over this hellhole imminently.”
“War is over, if you want it,” Collins said, quoting Yoko Ono and John Lennon.
The legal journey that ended Infowars has been complicated, and is far from over. It began with a series of defamation lawsuits filed in Connecticut and Texas by family members of Sandy Hook victims, who argued Jones had damaged them with years of claims that the school shooting was a hoax. Jones lost, and was slapped with a historic billion-dollar judgement, but he has so far made good on his promise not to pay the families. He and Infowars filed for bankruptcy in 2022, and in 2024, a judge ordered the liquidation of his assets.
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That’s when The Onion, helmed by Collins, a former NBC News reporter on the disinformation beat, came forward with a bid, supported by many of the Sandy Hook families. The Onion initially won, but a judge granted Jones’ request to block the sale, arguing that another offer by a company that happened to operate Jones’ online supplements store had been higher. But in April, there seemed to be a workaround — Jones’ estate had run out of money and instead of buying it in an auction, The Onion could just pay rent in a licensing deal. On Wednesday, a Texas appeals court stopped the transfer again, temporarily blocking the asset handover.
And so it seems Jones, unable to pay the rent, left on his own accord.
“Maybe in court, we win, we get back in there or something,” he said in a video posted to X on Friday. “I don’t think it’s probably going to happen.”
Jones’ last few guests included a self-described researcher who talked about aliens among us and multiple white supremacists. Jones spent his final hours waxing nostalgic about Infowars’ biggest hits since its 1999 founding as a repository for his conspiracy theory VHS tapes, and ranting, as ever, about topics ranging from the war in Iran to what he framed as his constant persecution.
As he long has, Jones accused the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook of “playing the victims” and courts of rigging the cases against him that ordered millions of dollars in judgments in their favor. It was all a plot against him, Jones said, waged by Democrats, the media, the courts, the victims and an unknown crew of others.
Fittingly, Infowars programming ended not, as he had promised Friday, with “hours of all the Sandy Hook documentation that was run by the CIA and the feds,” but with commercials. In the final hours of Infowars, Jones hawked his products: daggers etched with slogans like “liberty or death” and various drawings of Jesus; supplements he said would help his audience energize and chill, think and sleep, decalcify their pineal glands and maintain their erections, among other feats of the gummies, pills and powders; and T-shirts and faraday bags that block electromagnetic signals.
He begged his listeners to buy his wares, to donate to his cause, and to follow him to the next venture: Alex Jones Live. His new show starts today.
Brandy Zadrozny is a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW. She was a previously a senior enterprise reporter for NBC News, based in New York.