A Texas bankruptcy court judge brought Infowars back from the brink of death on Friday, a surprising ruling which conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones attempted to use to—naturally—make more money. This time, Jones is promoting a supplement company owned by his father.
Judge Christopher M. Lopez issued a split ruling last week, saying that Jones can follow through with a plan his attorneys had requested and liquidate most of his assets to pay the nearly $1.5 billion judgment he owes to the families of children and staff members killed at Sandy Hook after repeatedly calling the mass shooting a “hoax.”
Though Jones lost by default in defamation cases brought by Sandy Hook families in both Connecticut and Texas, the families have yet to see a dime of the money owed to them; Friday’s hearing was one piece of a long-awaited day of reckoning for the man they said was the single biggest driver of lies about their dead children and hatred, threats, and harassment directed toward their families.
But the judge rejected a bankruptcy plan that would have also liquidated Free Speech Systems, the parent company of Infowars, the 25-year-old media empire that made Jones into the foremost face of conspiracism in America. The network will live for now, although it remains unclear how long. Jones responded to the crisis in his usual way: by shilling supplements, albeit this time with a curious twist.
As the bankruptcy proceedings have dragged on—and on and on—Jones has used his one true talent to powerful effect, urging his viewers to send money to an entity not directly owned by him, and thus not answerable to the Sandy Hook families and his other creditors.
In recent weeks, Jones has been promoting a new supplements site, Dr. Jones Naturals, on air. He says it’s owned by his father, David Jones, a dentist. Alex Jones has been urging people to spend their money there in addition to, or instead of, at Infowars’ in-house store. “My dad is a sponsor, and he has a warehouse that’s not under their control, full of products ready to ship to you,” Jones said on-air last week. A representative for Free Speech Systems also testified in court that Infowars had stopped ordering supplements for its in-house store several weeks ago, expecting an imminent shutdown.
The things on offer from Dr. Jones Naturals don’t differ greatly from the things Infowars sells itself; there’s the usual bouquet of colloidal silver products, a longtime faux cure-all in the natural health world, along with something oxymoronically called Rocket Rest, a product called Top Brain, and, for the completist, a set of products called the Patriot Pack. There’s also a pack of “super silver lozenges,” where the product photo shows an expiration date of 2022.
“It’s an obvious fraud on the bankruptcy court,” Chris Mattei, an attorney for the Connecticut families, tells WIRED, referring to Jones’ directing people on-air to his father’s supplements website. “He’s not supposed to divert assets.”
This isn’t the first time the families have credibly accused Jones of diverting Infowars’ assets to businesses owned by family members. When the company first filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2022, lawyers for the Texas families accused Jones of “conspir[ing] to divert his assets to shell companies owned by insiders like his parents, his children, and himself.” One of those companies was an entity called PQPR Holdings, an alleged Infowars vendor that claims to supply virtually everything in its online store. Other shell companies, the lawyers alleged, were holding companies that the lawyers said were “directly or indirectly” owned by Jones, his parents, or his children, and which in some cases bore their initials. (The fight over PQPR continues in bankruptcy court.)
For both sets of families, the concern about Jones allegedly looting the company on his way out the door remains very real. Lawyers for the families made clear during the hearing that they were ultimately looking to preserve the value of the company to create an equitable distribution of Jones’ assets to his many, many creditors, and, of course, prevent him from carrying out what they allege is the latest fraudulent scheme he’s using to keep money hidden.
In the hearing, Jones’ assets were ordered dissolved. Though he will be allowed to keep his house, other personal assets, like his gun collection, could also be up for auction. But since the court rejected a bankruptcy plan for Free Speech Systems, the families can now try to collect the judgments they won in state court. The Connecticut plaintiffs had asked the judge to pave the way for an “orderly wind down” of Jones’ business affairs, as several lawyers put it, while the Texas families favored a plan to keep the company operational for now, with their lawyers arguing that they could better pursue claims for their clients that way.
Besides hawking his dad’s business, in the leadup to the hearing, Jones also milked every bit of content and attention from Infowars’ possible imminent nonexistence that he could. He sat down for laudatory interviews with both Tucker Carlson and Russell Brand that aired on Infowars and loudly ruminated on what he called “the twilight” of the network and “the countdown to the end of this place.”
Jones’ last week of broadcasts was a greatest-hits of weird characters from across the conspiracy-verse. Besides Brand and Carlson, Mikki Willis, the filmmaker behind the viral faux-documentary Plandemic, also showed up with friends to promote a new project, as did Stew Peters, an antisemitic far-right broadcaster who has recently been named the communications director of an armed national militia. Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes also hosted a segment where he ranted about Black Lives Matter.
On Friday morning, Jones posted a video on X of himself driving down a Texas highway toward the courthouse, declaring that “the Democratic party and the Deep State” were trying to take control of his assets and social media accounts.
“This is real tyranny,” he declared, adding that if Trump is reelected, “he’s going to put them all in prison.”
Jones also claimed on-air last week that an Infowars shutdown would only make him more powerful. “You make it bigger by shutting it down, dumbos,” he declared. After the verdict, in an “emergency broadcast” over the weekend, Jones called the hearing “absolutely epic” and denounced allegations that he was “stealing money” as “fake.”
The verdicts against Jones, Mattei told WIRED last week, were “a cathartic moment of validation. And Friday if the judge rules that the company needs to be liquidated will be another moment where they feel like they’ve done everything they could do to protect others. They didn’t lay down.”
But that is, of course, not what happened. “It’s just Biblical,” Jones exalted over the weekend, speaking to one of his frequently replaced junior hosts. “It’s almost like God is really just being entertained by all this and is just wanting to see the fight continue.”
While the families have clearly fought hard, Friday’s split ruling is, instead, a signal that their fight is, for now, not even close to over. And as Jones and Infowars keep covering their own unlikely survival, they’re still hawking both their in-house store and Dr. Jones’ Naturals.
“We’re selling it for $12 and change,” Jones said at one point during the “emergency broadcast,” extolling the virtues of a certain supplement. He paused for a moment. “My dad is.”
