| Bari Weiss homage to herself --------------------------------- |
And Weiss herself has turned out to be the queen of the far-right clowns and grifters of the Intellectual Dark Web, ascending to lead CBS in order to aid and abet the evil that is the Trump administration.
One of the clowns mentioned in that foundational article by Weiss was Alex Jones:
Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).
Pinker may be on the opposite end of the Intellectual Dark Web spectrum from Jones, but it's clear that Weiss considers them all part of the same spectrum.
The spectrum of people who lack a conscience, I would say.
But Jones is particularly evil, and second only to Trump in his ability to lead idiots, psychos and freaks into doing horrible things, most especially to attack the poor grieving parents of the children murdered at Sandy Hook.
So it is a wonderful thing that the people who own The Onion have made the evil Jones its target, buying what was left of Jones' Info Wars after Jones was sued almost to oblivion by those same parents he attacked.
It's shocking still, that Jones was able to perpetrate his pure evil for as long as he did, and only defamation lawsuits were able to partially stop him - although it appears that Jones has started up again:
There is an excellent article in the Ringer called The Most Inspiring Media Story of the Year about the Onion take-over of the Jones empire of pure evil:
In December 2012, the 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza murdered 26 people, 20 of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.1 By the following April, Jones was spreading the narrative that this event—which remains the second-deadliest school shooting in United States history—was a hoax, perpetrated by the government to advance a gun-control agenda. Jones pushed the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory for years, milking it for attention and ratings. His listeners, hopped up on his claims that the shootings were staged by actors who were hired by the anti-gun lobby, tormented, stalked, and harassed the bereaved parents of the dead first graders. One conspiracy theorist claimed to have urinated on the grave of a 7-year-old murdered in the attack; parents received letters from people threatening to dig up their children’s coffins to prove they were empty. Meanwhile, Alex Jones funneled money to help fund January 6.
The Sandy Hook parents sued Jones, and finally, in 2022, a court ordered him to pay $1.4 billion in damages for defamation and for the infliction of emotional distress. In 2025, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, forcing the liquidation of Infowars and its assets to help cover Jones’s enormous debts.
And now, with the support of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has agreed to a deal to turn Infowars into a parody website, making fun of precisely the kind of spittle-flecked conspiracy bellowing, interspersed with ad reads for dubious muscle powders, that Jones used to amass his fortune. The deal still has to be approved by a Texas judge, which is admittedly a terrifying sentence; nevertheless, and I’m speaking objectively, this is clearly one of the greatest things that has ever happened in the history of the world.
The world is finally pushing back against the evil that has been hatched by the Intellectual Dark Web, including the full spectrum, from Steven Pinker to Alex Jones.





