BREAKING: Alex Jones announces that The Onion has bought Infowars after secret auction

The left-leaning satire site, The Onion, has bought out Alex Jones' Infowars in a bankruptcy auction, according to the New York Times. Jones announced the buy-out and said that it was done through a secret bidding process.  

Jones promised earlier this week that he planned on the continuation of the "Alex Jones Show,” per the Times. On Thursday, he posted comments in reaction to the news of the purchase, saying that "Infowars is being shut down" and said that it was done "without a court order" through a secretive auction. 

Jones said that with Infowars' bankruptcy, "They changed all the bidding rules, made it secret two days ago. I had a bad feeling I told you that. Just like they tried to shut us down back in late May without a court order. There's going to be injunctions filed."

The Times reported that the bid to purchase Infowars was sanctioned by the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, were sued for defamation by the families of the victims in the shooting for over $1 billion. 

After the 2012 shooting, Jones claimed that it was a hoax and that the victims "were actors hired as part of a scheme to get more gun control laws in place." He later apologized for the claims and said that the massacre was "100 percent real" in making comments to a jury. 

“We thought this would be a hilarious joke,” the chief executive of The Onion's parent company Ben Collins said. “This is going to be our answer to this no-guardrails world where there are no gatekeepers and everything’s kind of insane." 

In September, a judge in Houston ruled that Jones' company could be auctioned off in order to compensate for the creditors of Free Speech Systems. Chris Mattei, who is a lawyer for the families of the shooting victims, said that the families and The Onion did a "public service" by divesting Jones of his assets in the company.