It’s reaping season for Alex Jones’s pan-conspiracist outfit down in Austin, Texas. After years of sowing misinformation and hate through the vaudevillian rants of its owner, Infowars filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday.
According to court filings, the website’s frequent shilling of overpriced dietary supplements was not enough to stave off financial trouble. Infowars claims it has as many as 48 creditors and up to $10 million in estimated liabilities — with estimated assets of $50,000 or less.
It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to decipher why Infowars may be filing for bankruptcy right now. Last September, Jones lost two defamation lawsuits filed in Texas by parents of children who were killed at Sandy Hook; Jones and Infowars had claimed the 2012 shooting, in which 20 first-graders and six educators were killed, involved paid “actors” in a staged attack designed to strip away Second Amendment protections. Months later, Jones lost another defamation suit, this one in Connecticut. By filing for bankruptcy protection, all civil litigation will be paused while Infowars and its related businesses reorganize their finances. A trial to determine how much Jones owes victims’ families is scheduled to begin later this month.
“Alex Jones is just delaying the inevitable: a public trial in which he will be held accountable for his profit-driven campaign of lies against the Sandy Hook families who have brought this lawsuit,” attorney Christopher Mattei, who represents the families in the Connecticut suit against Jones, told the Associated Press.
Broke or not, the website, propelled by Jones’s carnival-barker persona, has rooted itself in the firmament of far-right conspiracism in America. Hours after a man shot ten people on a Brooklyn subway last week, a convertible appeared near the scene of the crime with a homemade sign on the hood reading, “A.J. Is Right.”
