The sale of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s media empire is a major blow to one of the defining independent media brands that has ushered in a new era of fringe thinking, with conspiracy theories once relegated to the edges of the internet becoming mainstream.

And while Jones’ Infowars brand is now owned by the satirical news site The Onion, media researchers and conservative media pundits say its legacy will live on thanks to the far-right media ecosystem it helped inspire and which continues to thrive.

“Right-wing media is robust and only getting more robust,” said AJ Bauer, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Alabama who focuses on conservative news. And now that some are emboldened after Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, “this could be a race to the bottom when it comes to disinformation and the radical right.”

The Onion, which has repeatedly excoriated Jones on its website, acquired Infowars in a bankruptcy auction Thursday with the support of several families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, who successfully sued Jones after he repeatedly called the massacre is a hoax.

The Infowars website was quickly shut down after Jones confirmed during a broadcast on X that The Onion had won the auction for assets of his company, Free Speech Systems. He later returned to broadcasts from another studio and told his audience that he had been forced to leave the Infowars facility in Austin, Texas, and needed his help with legal donations to combat the “bogus bidding process.”

The Onion said in a statement that it plans to “end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation” and “replace it forever with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor.” The company is partnering with anti-violence organization Everytown for Gun Safety, which said it will be the exclusive advertiser on the revamped Infowars site.

Jones, 50, founded Infowars in 1999, first broadcasting from his home before turning it into a small media empire that grew an audience with his incendiary rhetoric, including 9/11 in recent decades an ‘inside job’ and claimed the government was using chemicals to make people gay.

But behind the conspiracy-laden comments was an innovative business model that differed from that of Jones’s contemporary, conservative radio mogul Rush Limbaugh.

Jones “was a pioneer,” says Reece Peck, an associate professor of media culture at the City University of New York-College of Staten Island. “He was already broadcasting through his website while doing his syndicated radio talk show. When YouTube came on the scene, he leaned in. Then he was copied by everyone who came after him.”

The rise of platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and others that initially had lax moderation rules and embraced algorithmic recommendation systems provided fertile ground for Jones and a new generation of far-right voices that gained popularity, especially as they began to coalesce around Trump.

And Trump’s embrace of often baseless conspiratorial rhetoric — from questioning President Barack Obama’s birthplace to claiming widespread election fraud — has given Jones and others an air of legitimacy, bonding them and often emboldening them.

“Your entire future depends on Trump’s success and our success,” Jones said Thursday.

Jones’ following reached its peak in the mid-2010s, Peck said, when he “demonstrated his clownish behavior, taking off his shirt and yelling during broadcasts.”

Peck said Jones can also be credited with creating conflict with political opponents and using those divisions to push positions. But while Jones secured a high-profile interview with then-candidate Trump in 2015, the subsequent fallout from the Sandy Hook lawsuits has hampered him financially and damaged his personality.

YouTube and other social media platforms began removing Jones’ videos in 2018 after they were flagged for violating content rules regarding violent and explicit content. He was suspended from Facebook and Twitter, significantly reducing Infowars’ reach.

“The question of whether he has influence may depend on whether the politically powerful see him as useful or not,” Peck said, “and if politicians don’t go on his show, I think that indicates his influence is waning or not consists.”

But Josh Owens, who worked at Infowars from 2013 to 2017, said Jones’ legacy lives on in the way the conspiracy-minded media has made a big deal of undermining any sense of “objective truth.”

“It doesn’t seem to matter what’s real or what’s not real. People are going to believe what they want,” Owens said. “And I think Alex Jones played a big role in that.”

For further evidence of that legacy, Owens, a former Infowars video editor, need look no further than the current American political landscape.

Jones “has been far more wrong than right, but he has constructed this story and this world where it doesn’t matter,” he said. “You see Trump doing the same thing.”

“Just a complete erosion of trust and truth,” he added.

In addition to Infowars, there continues to be a sizable and thriving world of pro-Trump media that often traffics in conspiracy theories, with few restrictions, especially as major social networks have rolled back some of their moderation policies, which once sought to prevent the spread of false claims and extreme limit rhetoric. . And some on the right have even managed to build or buy their own platforms – most notably Elon Musk with his purchase of Twitter and the rise of the video platform Rumble.

Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics at the University of Oregon, said the loss of Jones’ original Infowars seems like a way to hold him accountable.

However, she said there are other influencers who, like Jones, will find their place in a changing media ecosystem in which audiences are turning away from traditional news sources and turning to social media and podcast personalities for information.

“What’s going to happen to Infowars ‘Onion-ified,’ and what’s going to happen to the kind of internet conspiracy theorists that Alex Jones represents?” Phillips asked. “There will be a fertile ground for them as always.”

“Infowars may be gone,” she added. “Not Alex Jones.”