The Onion has peeled off an odious layer of hatred on the internet, but it – and its allies – is late to the political food fight at the core of the modern internet.

On Nov. 14, the satirical publication seemingly succeeded in its bid to purchase InfoWars, an alt-right digital outlet created and defined by its tendentious host, an anti-immigrant, conspiracy-baiting, homophobic professional provocateur by the name of Alex Jones. The 50-year-old Texan is perhaps best known for promoting the theories that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax, plotted and executed by unconscionable and malicious government forces to promote gun control policies.

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Those theories cost the victims’ families dearly, with a decade of harassment from Jones’ followers and emotional strangulation culminating in several lawsuits against Jones by victims’ families. The parents ultimately won, securing an initial judgement of over $1.4 billion in damages, leading to the eventual auction of Jones’s assets. Since the bid, Jones-affiliated First United American Companies disputed the proceeding, arguing that the Onion’s initial bid of $1.75 million – later bolstered with additional funding from families of Sandy Hook victims – was half of First United’s own $3.5 million bid. InfoWars has since described the auction as an operation by the alleged “deep state” to destroy the company.

After the purchase, The Onion CEO Ben Collins launched a media tour to elucidate the reasoning behind the decision. Besides perhaps being “the funniest thing in the world,” Collins said in an interview with ABC that he wanted to put Jones in the rearview mirror and create a space to laugh at a media ecosystem filled with hate. By mocking InfoWars and other alternative media publications, he believes the revamped site can highlight just how misguided its content once was.

The Onion is co-opting humor and memes to fight extremism, in this case via the hostile takeover of Alex Jones’ provocative and powerful platform. But this cataclysmic reshaping of Jones’ popular and proactive platform is just one small battle in a larger proxy war for political spaces on the internet – a war that The Onion and its fellow left-leaning platforms are losing.

The Onion has been derided in conservative circles as Liberal propaganda. This is perhaps a result of The Onion’s greatest hits, including its more-than-annual headline of “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” which pops up with the same regularity as the United States’ school shootings.

So conservatives made their own satire sites, with The Babylon Bee becoming a standout home for millions of people to read content that uses satire as a thin veneer for content punching down on immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and Muslims, among others. Their bias is more overt and more antagonistic, boasting headlines such as “Satan Devastated After Kamala Loses Election” and “Trump To Round Up Illegals With Taco Trap.” Founded in 2016 amid Trump’s rise to power, it was well-positioned to feed off the enthusiasm of a growing Make America Great Again movement.

And before long, it caught the attention of the richest man in the world: Elon Musk. This mediocre Wario impersonator and soon-to-be friend of Donald Trump was horrified when a transphobic story from the Bee violated Twitter’s policies on transphobia, leading to its account becoming suspended for 12 hours. According to the Bee’s CEO Seth Dillon, Musk reached out after the suspension – the same day he began saying that he may have to purchase Twitter.

From this point forward, the story has been told a million times. Musk would go on to buy the platform, leading to a proliferation of extremist content that has turned Twitter – now X – into a space that many people are actively leaving for bluer skies. Musk has turned a space he saw as too extreme and tuned it more to his liking, spurred by the erasure and expansion of a kind of comedy he has come to enjoy.

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Across the internet, spaces are looking less like The Onion’s vision for InfoWars and more like Musk’s vision for Twitter. InfoWars is a rare example of a step in the other direction – the people celebrating The Onion’s recent acquisition are losing a much larger war. But it stands as one of just a few examples of the overt transformation of a digital space against hate speech. It should be the first of many such proxy victories – something extremist voices learned a long time ago.

The Onion may have rightfully earned coverage for its stupendous joke. But without further aggressive actions to push out reactionary and extremist forces in social platforms, Musk, The Babylon Bee and their compatriots will always earn the last laugh.