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The Onion buys Infowars

nytimes.com

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Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#641

Post by anigbrowl »

quantadev wrote: post #547
jjulius wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>CNN has called all conservatives Nazis for years, and they are liars. This is a very disingenuous take. There's a litany of footage of Alex Jones saying everything he said about Sandy Hook being fake and speaking ill of those impacted family members - do you have a litany of footage of CNN anchors/staff calling all conservatives Nazis?

Despite that MOST of the country voted #MAGA, the Democrat MSM has been calling MAGA every kind of slander they could think of including Nazi and Fascist. They really ramped it up during the election, but most Americans saw thru it and knew it was lies.

Hey everyone a MAGA person is complaining about people saying mean things!

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#642

Post by oblio »

The_Blade wrote: post #459
iancmceachern wrote: post #451

Prediction: Over the next decades the onion will slowly become not a, but the only, source of real news as all the other sources become more like info wars.

"And now with the State of the Onion address, President Swift!"

She'd probably be a better president than Trump, I imagine she's already a better businessperson than he is.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#643

Post by drawkward »

bena wrote: post #600
drawkward wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flagging you from the left here. Harris outperformed Biden among only two demo groups[1]: -College educated whites -People with income > $100,000 Please, consider the possibility, that the Dems are now the party of wealthy elites, and that the diverse coalition making is happening on the R side of the aisle. [1] Edit for sourcing: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/13/opinion/obama-ezra-klein-...

That's comparing Democrats with Democrats. Which groups did Harris outperform Trump in?

Correct, my point and the point of the article I am citing is that there are outflows of vorers from the Democratic base (I hesitate to say party, because, clearly these people aren't Democrats as much as at-best-former-democrats) leaving the Democratic party to be more and more white, wealthy, and educated.

I believe we are seeing the beginning of the end of the Democratic party as we know it.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#644

Post by oblio »

sincerecook wrote: post #558
jiayo wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's more like polite society has become less relevant. The pussy footing around and talking out of both sides of your mouth just doesn't work anymore.

> The pussy footing around and talking out of both sides of your mouth just doesn't work anymore.

It took me a while to parse this, are you saying that lying doesn't work anymore???

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#645

Post by akira2501 »

josefresco wrote: post #87
consumer451 wrote: post #18

Tim Onion's (Ben Collins) statement on Bluesky: [0] > Hi everyone. > The Onion, with the help of the Sandy Hook families, has purchased InfoWars. > We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website. > We have retained the services of some Onion and Clickhole Hall of Famers to pull this off. > I can't wait to show you what we have cooked up. Next post: [1] > Does anybody need millions of dollars worth of…

The funniest thing would be to keep running the site as-is but swap out the insanity for stuff that reads like insanity but is legit or morally sound. The audience might not notice, and could (IMHO) easily be duped into supporting good causes!

> The audience might not notice, and could (IMHO) easily be duped into supporting good causes!

What a deranged fantasy this is and yet how often it shows up. The audience will notice. Those who don't and eventually discover your duplicity will never forgive you for it. What you propose is disgusting and amoral, as it has no value, and is designed to mollify yourself by bulling people you clearly perceive as being beneath you.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#646

Post by ptek »

ackbar03 wrote: post #214
plorg wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The auction included all of the InfoWars and several associated corporations' assets, including the studio and the supplements business. At one point the settlement administrator was trying to get Alex's Twitter handle. I believe he's been doing some half-ass scheming to create essentially the same company but in his parents' name, and I doubt he has a problem getting listeners back.

... Infowars had a supplements business?

>... Infowars had a supplements business? Yeah check out an advert for CAVEMAN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-ZqD9-W1_8 . I used to like Infowars 10+ years ago (I'm from New Zealand) when the site was a news aggregate site so you could read the sources. Now that it is him just talking I don't visit the site that often. I remember walking around in a small township in Norway (just under 10,000 people) and seeing a Infowars sticker on a road light. So yeah he used to have massive reach, I don't know if he still does.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#648

Post by troyvit »

bmitc wrote: post #237
bilbo0s wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps The Onion should ask - who gets most promotion of this? Well, we’re all talking about the onion. And I, personally, haven’t read onion content in a long, long while. So this kind of put them back on the radar for me. But I could be one of only a few people who fell out of onion readership? More likely is that they believe the next four years will provide them a lot of comedy fodder and they’re setting their p…

While their stuff is brilliant at times, I don't actively seek it out because it leaves me pretty depressed and anxious. The parodies are almost indistinguishable from real events these days.

I even felt that way reading The Onion's article about this and then listening to Alex Jones' rant on Xitter. They sounded like they came from the same writer.

Re: The Onion buys Infowars

#650

Post by jfengel »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #625

In one sense this is funny, in another it's justice, but I think from a broader perspective this is just more of the same tit-for-tat nonsense that moves the needle in the wrong direction. My hypothesis is that the U.S. didn't become more divided because of moron sites like I.W. but rather because of our collective reaction to them. These groups are far easier to ignore when we stop trying to silence them.

I don't think the causation runs either direction. At most, I'd say that a site like InfoWars reflects the division, rather than either causing it or being caused by it.

Divisiveness in the US goes much deeper than that, and long predates both the Internet and that kind of radio program. You could perhaps pick the early 70s as a starting point, with the US deeply divided by Vietnam and Civil Rights, at exactly the same time as real government conspiracies (Watergate, COINTELPRO, MKUltra) came to light.

I'd actually trace it back further than that, through McCarthyism, the Civil War, and back before the Revolution. But there's a fairly direct course between the divisiveness of the 1960s and where we end up today.

I really don't think it would have helped anything to ignore Alex Jones.

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