The idea for The Onion to buy Infowars began, naturally enough, as a joke.

Last June, the satirical website’s new CEO, Ben Collins, aw that a federal bankruptcy judge had ordered Alex Jones to liquidate his assets at auction to pay off the millions he owes to Sandy Hook families he defamed. “That’d be one of the funniest jokes of all time if we pulled this off, if The Onion bought Infowars,” Collins said on Thursday afternoon. “Then I was like, ‘What if we actually did it?’”

He then called the lawyers representing the families that successfully sued Jones for falsely claiming that the mass shooting that claimed the lives of their young children was a government hoax. “The families got pretty excited about it,” Collins said. “It was a real bid that would take it out of Alex’s hands.” Next, he had to make sure it would actually be funny. “We started asking around in our network of hundreds of comedy writers in the Onion Hall of Fame, as we call it, what the new site would look like,” he said. “And we just got really excited.”

A few months later, on Thursday morning, Collins tweeted that his audience should........

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