The Onion’s Latest Joke: Taking Over Infowars

Last year, I spent three months embedded with a capital defense team.

“Their client had been on death row for more than 30 years, and now, his execution date had been set.”

I followed along as the lawyers tried to prove something nobody had successfully done in three decades, that one of Texas's most notorious Cyril killers was actually innocent. The last 12 weeks, listen wherever you get your podcasts. From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. This is not a joke. The satirical outlet, the onion is set to take over in-forwards.

The site that is run by notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Yes, you heard that correctly. Last Thursday, the onion launched its own version of Info Wars. The infamous online hub of misinformation, created by Alex Jones. The takeover has been years in the making. American conspiracy theorist and internet broadcaster Alex Jones has been ordered to pay

Sandy Hook families more than one and a half billion dollars.

Because he perpetrated for years, the lie that this shooting was a hoax that the people were actors. After losing two defamation cases, Jones was ordered to pay more than a billion dollars to the families affected by the Sandy Hook school shooting. Breaking news tonight, Alex Jones has just moved to liquidate his personal assets to pay the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre. Unable to pay, Jones' assets, including Info Wars, were put up for auction.

He's no longer going to own Info Wars, which is this conspiracy empire he's really used to poison the public discourse. And then the surprise twist, the onion, the satirical news outlet has won a bankruptcy option to take control of Info Wars. The onion stepped in. The announced plans to convert Info Wars into a parody of itself and committed to sharing proceeds from the new venture with the Sandy Hook families.

Hi, everybody. It's Tim Heidecker here. I'm broadcasting now live. Thank you for joining me. We have major, major announcements to go through here. Now, after nearly two years, the onion parody of Info Wars is live. Make no mistake. We will be the new Info Wars. Today, we speak with onion CEO Ben Collins and comedian Tim Heidecker about what they plan to

do with Info Wars and why they fought so hard to take control of it. It's Tuesday, July 7th. Hi, Ben. Hey, I'm Rachel April. Nice to meet you. You too. Thanks for being here. Thanks for doing this at all. Yes, I'm early last week. I sat down with Ben Collins, the CEO of the onion.

I'll get a practice, my daily. Hmm. Hmm. An actor and comedian Tim Heidecker. Tim, am I allowed to ask you to just give me your Alex Jones impression?

“Yeah. I'm like a trained seal. We knew that was getting that. And frankly, that's what”

that's why we're talking about. You know, Collins and Heidecker were preparing for the onion 's imminent relaunch of Info Wars. The onion has been around for almost 40 years and became infamous for skewering everything from American politics to pop culture. In a lot of cases, people need catharsis, just like give people a, oh, you're not nuts. This feeling like you're just not saying this shit that's going on is insane, but you're not nuts. Collins, who became CEO

in 2024 after a decade as a reporter, has revitalized the onion in a short amount of time. And we've leaned into that as hard as we can. It's why we're the, I think fifth biggest newspaper in that space now. I started my conversation with Ben and Tim by asking why they decided to remake Info Wars. You know, I used to be a reporter and I was covering stupid stuff in the internet when I was a little wee baby reporter guy at the Daily Beast now 11 years ago. And my friend's girlfriend

was shot and killed on live TV on Facebook, actually. She was the first person, you know, by a guy wearing a GoPro. His burtals, it's really bad. And then like when you googled my friend's name, the thing that would come up was that he wasn't real or didn't exist and all this stuff. Like there was the internet had just started to show the cracks of where we were headed. So I started covering that for a living. You know, I wound up covering Alex Jones's trial and NBC News. And

I remember sitting there when the judgment came down. It became clear that he was going to

throw these people a billion dollars. And he said, I'm not paying any of this. You guys know

“you're not going to receive a penny of this. And I was like, hey dude, I think you got to pay money.”

Even after I got this gig, I didn't quite know about all the details and there's a great documentary about it. The truth versus Alex Jones. And I sat there watching that and just my blood boiled. I couldn't believe what he had subjected to those poor people too.

he used the parents of being actors. His listeners harassed them. Some of them had to move. Yeah. Alex Jones, as we know, was ordered to pay more than $1.4 billion in damages. His assets go to bankruptcy because he does not have that money. Can you just bend tell us what happens after that vis-a-vis your interest in the onion? Sure. We saw it was for sale in for us on like blue sky. There was somebody who clipped out a newspaper at because you

have to advertise a bankruptcy auction. Which sounds weird. But it said like, you know, get an auction. This is our new truck or whatever. So I started making some phone calls and I was like, was this mean? The info was just for sale. And they were like, yeah, it does. We get the IP if you

want it. And I should have figured out what to do. Because I had obviously never purchased something

at a bankruptcy auction. So I had to like learn some stuff and we were like, okay, well, we can

“look at this and I think we can pull this off. So we get excited to bid on this thing and the bidding”

is on, I think November 14th of 2024. And what happens on November 5th of 2024 is Donald Trump is elected president of the States. So people are wondering, like, should we do this as to say, say, thing to do? Dan Bungino, who became the deputy director of the FBI, got to start an effort. There were so many people tied up in those worlds. So people were spooked and we just had to make a decision. And I just realized that it can't imagine other people had the gumption or just like time and their

lives to take on Alex Jones's harassment campaign. So I was like, okay, you know, I'm man, my word, but we're going to go through this and we put down her bid. And then we won and then Alex absolutely lost his mind. I remember him calling Steve Bannon on air and being like, Steve Bannon being like, what the fuck is going on? Like on the phone on air on your fore as it was like he was panicking.

The funniest part is he had never heard of the onion until we bought it. You're kidding, he said that.

Well, you could tell like he was like the this newspaper, the onion and he just never heard of it. Just to clarify here, so basically the point of the bankruptcy is that whatever gets sold, everything's supposed to go to the family is that's got that judgment, right? So at this point when you were trying to purchase his assets, his company was the idea to take it over and give money to the families in some way. Yeah, that was the immediate argument when I presented my team. I was like,

you know, we could spend $2 million on Facebook ads and make $2.1 million in onion merch or something

“or we can do this really good thing and hope people come along for the right. And that's what we decided to do.”

And we look, we, uh, I have no idea if I would do it again, but I think I would because it's been this gigantic pain in the ass in my life and it's been very scary and we've had the dogs called on us from him and all of his weird psychos. Alex Jones has come after both of you personally. I believe. Oh, the best possible way. I find it incredibly amusing for the most part. Yeah, because he's discovered my body of work. Like you said, he didn't know the onion and then he found

him an Eric stuff from 15 years ago. And you know, if you haven't seen some of that, it is pretty out there as pretty weird. But it's all coming from a place of absurdity and a place of silliness, but he took it all out of context and basically thought that we were some kind of the literal demons from from hell. Yeah. So you make a bid for the onion. It goes through some legal wrangling in the courts. Now you have, I believe celebrated the takeover. I know that you guys are treating it like a

“fate of complete or about to launch. But what is the current status just to be clear? Like you”

have not officially taken over in the sense like you can't go into Alex Jones's studio. That's correct. Right now in Austin and like start broadcasting from there. Yeah. So last August, there was an emergency stay put in place where it says like the receiver cannot sell these assets until we rule on this. There's here is the guy in charge of dispensing all of these assets. And then Alex Jones said that he was going to shut everything down. Alex Jones's goal, by the way, is to render these assets

value lists so he can buy them back for pennies. I don't accept that because that means these families

will never get anything. So we went to this receiver and we said, well, lease all of this stuff

for you. I know you can't sell it, but it doesn't say anything about this. And the receiver is like, yeah, I guess it's a good point. My goal is to keep the value of the assets up and make the families happy. And so we're moving this forward. And part of why we're trying to do this is to keep the value of this asset alive. By making fun of this thing, we were reminding people like, hey, it has value on the planet Earth and has value to us. And we would love to take this over and give these families,

they didn't receive a penny from this guy. And it's been four and a half years since the judgment in ten years since they sued him. So they need this cash and we would love to get them some. How did the families react when you first told them that you wanted to take this horrific tragedy and make it into a comedy website? The first call was weird because I was like, I work at the onion. I used to cover this stuff. So a couple of these families knew who I was. And they were like,

let me think about it. And then they came back and they were like, now that I thought about it,

we can't do this to any other family ever. Yeah. This like double whammy of American life that

is you just lost your kids in a tragedy and now I tell everybody they never really lived or they're,

they're still alive and they graduated from high school. It's a thing that these people say now. And I, the strength of these families is absurd. Like you've met these people,

“they are the strongest people. I think I've ever met my entire life. And then we had this like really”

beautiful phone call with them, maybe a month ago. Where the two of you, it was us and the uninwriting staff. Yeah. But everybody. Yeah. And then I think like six or seven of the families. And I don't know, a bunch of people left overtly crying in the office. It was weird to go into a thing where we thought we were going to say thank you for letting us do this. And they were like, no, no, no, no, I don't think you're going to thank you for doing this. But I want to go back

to this idea that one of the reasons the family supported you and one of your goals is to

neuter Alex Jones. Because Alex Jones, he might not have infewers, but he is up and running on the platform rumble. He is doing his thing. He still has people that are watching him. It is nowhere near the millions of people he had on YouTube before he was kicked off of YouTube. But nevertheless, he is starting to do the same thing he's done before, right? And we don't know how big he's going to be. So I just sort of wonder, like, if he's already out there, like still doing his thing, like,

what, how will you determine whether this effort is successful? That's a good question. I mean, I tuned in the other day just because I hadn't done the impression in a while and I wanted to listen to his voice. And I literally opened it up and he was talking about Charlie Kirk faking his own death. I was like, right. And we're doing a little bit of a similar take on that, on our parody of it. I mean, he is extremely diminished from where he was six years ago, 10 years ago.

It has like 6,000 views per stream. Like this is not it's small. It's small. It's a small audience. And I agree with you that he can build it back up, but that's America. We should also note that the core of Alex Jones is a pills selling machine. It is just to be really clear about what you mean here is that he has a part of his business where he sells products to people. And in some cases, those products are too solve issues that he brings up on his show that might not be actual evidence-based

“issues. A nuclear war is imminent, therefore, by my iodine. Stuff like that, right?”

I also just have to point out that you guys see, I think it was New York Magazine, but I can't remember, somebody years ago did a quiz. Is this product from Alex Jones or is this product from Guenath Peltro? Right, sure. And it was very hard to tell the difference. I don't want to make it seem like it's singular to Alex Jones. No, no, but I mean, she's not advocating for the harassment of parents. I think that's the difference. You can do whatever you want to sell products.

Once you start selling products on as a direct response immediately after a mass shooting answer to meeting the people who are victims of that mass shooting. That's to me, I don't know if I'm crazy here, is a step too far. The two of you have a done a very good job of articulating. I think what you think the core of Alex Jones's product empire and also website is, you've also explained a lot about the onion and what sort of makes the onion the onion.

Can you help me understand how does Info Wars fit into the core DNA of the onion?

So the onion in my opinion has always been the best to going after the dominant mode of

media at the time. We always go after the way people actually get their information. And this was a, you know, a shot across the bow. It's a little bit bigger than what we usually do in the sense that we're directly going after the information or people who are trying to make

“you feel bad about everything you do so you can buy a supplement. But that's how everything operates.”

You see like, you know, RFK who is carrying around sour crow and talking about peptides and all these other things, like the current disjure addiction of people who subscribe to things in the internet. So like to me, it was an obvious opportunity to take this model that was event, like really not invented but perfected by Alx Jones and say, "But just late all bare." After the break, we talk about what it is like to make comedy in this political environment.

We'll be right back. I'm Danny Blum, a journalist at the New York Times. I spend a lot of my time reporting on GLP1 medications. People call them weight loss drugs. They are doing so much more in the body and there's a lot of hope pinned on them. I am spending part of truly every single workday making sure that I am up to date on the latest science. I really want to make sure that I am talking to the

leading researchers, keeping an eye on trial results, and that I'm talking to people who are on these medications to learn more from them to translate the really messy and murky and shifting

answers to some of the questions that people have, especially about something as vital as

“a medication they're taking. That's what you get when you subscribe to the New York Times.”

If you already subscribed, thanks. If you'd like to, go to mmytimes.com/subscribe. I want to talk about comedy not just in four words comedy, but just sort of more broadly comedy in the Trump administration. A lot of comedians have said, and I've heard you guys

discuss this, that satire is really hard in the Trump administration, which is I've never

quite understood exactly why, and I feel like it's not the perspective that you guys have taken, and so I wonder if Tim, you can explain what you think the opportunity is for comedy, that other comedians who say that are missing. Sure, I mean, you try to get to very universal human feelings. I'm not trying to just go like, "Haha, look at Trump's orange complexion." I want to get into like, what is it about being a human being that gets you to the

place where you're doing that to yourself, and I want to try to do that in a entertaining or funny way.

“I think it's also okay to, at this moment in time, it's enough to just go, like whatever the”

debacle is this week, whatever the insanity is, I think it's enough right now, you can just go, I think that's crazy, and if you can try to do it in a funny, witty way, at least people out there looking for signals that they're not alone can get something to get like, okay, I'm not crazy, that's crazy. I want to ask you guys though, like, the way you are describing what you're doing does not sound ideological, but just to push back a little bit, like, I went to the onion

website earlier today, and there's like a zillion headlines about Trump and RFK junior, can Pakistan, and I'm, yes, somebody who's read the onion, I know that you made fun of Biden, I know that you make fun of Democrats, I get that, but there's something called the Babylon B, which for people that don't know,

it's very funny stuff. It is described as like the onion for conservatives, basically the

implication being that you guys have a liberal ideological bent, right, and I think that certainly in this moment, you could get that impression looking at the onion website. I want to understand, like, how broad are you trying to appeal in terms of an audience? I would just say that I don't think about an audience often, I just try to express what's inside of me out into the world, and it will be ideological a lot of the time, because I have a point of view,

but I will say, in-forwards, isn't going to be overtly political necessarily, and maybe not really at all. I mean, we're making fun of food influencers, and we'll be making fun of people that certainly voted for, you know, Mamdanian New York, you know, and our friends of mine. Like you've got, of course, look at the world around you and see things that you kind of cringet, even though you might ideologically align with them, and we're not going to be afraid to do that,

but we're not interested in punching down. We're not looking at making fun of swaths of people because we're essentially scared of them. The most recent take down requests for government politician is from a very prominent Democrat. You know, that's, we really do hammer all sides. The Democratic Party's really upset at us, because they think that we sank Joe Biden's 2020 for campaign. Because you didn't share him on, is that the idea? Yeah. Okay.

And I'm not going to ever step in on that sort of thing ever. I wonder, if you guys succeed, if the website takes off, besides the financial benefit of succeeding, whatever that looks like, whatever your metrics are, just what do you think you will have accomplished besides

learning Alex Jones, besides making him less offensive or powerful? I mean, creating another

place for quality art and media to exist. That is pretty damn independent. I mean, this is one of the few bashings of not this monopolized super companies that we're having to live with. So what we hope to have accomplished in, let's say, five years is we've retrained people's brains to think of employers, meaning something fundamentally different and separated from that

“goal. If you want to tell people about Charlie Kirk faking his own death or something,”

he's free to do it on the side of the highway. You know, everything about enforce was horrible, except the branding and the catchphrase they came up with. And their catchphrase is there's a war on for your mind, which is just a perfect sign. It's a beautiful sentence, right? And that will remain a thing that we do. Basically, like a mission statement or something to point at where there has been a war on for your mind for the last 10 years. There's no question about that. We have

lived through that and I would say normal people have lost in part because they didn't know they're

people get information. That's going to be the throughline that gets us through this. And like

characters and ideas and things are going to build out of that. We are constantly being inundated with a bunch of insane garbage and bullshit, frankly. And that bullshit had no counterweight

“and we're going to try. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think sorry to interrupt you, but I've been thinking”

over the years a lot about darkness and comedy and death and comedy. And it is a way to like survive the will chaos of the world on a very deep level like the comedians, the writers, whoever

creatives that go into those dark places are doing it at a service for themselves to sort of exercise

the fear of these real things. And then that gets received by an audience and I think it does a service to make them feel like, okay, this is something that happens and we have to laugh about it. There's obviously lots of things we could do about it, but it's just like making you feel like all this crazy shit is hanging over our heads. But we shouldn't be afraid of it all the time. Ben, Tim, thank you both so much for joining us. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

After we spoke to Ben and Tim, we reached out to representatives for Alex Jones,

test for comment about the onions takeover of info wars, but they did not respond. We'll be right back.

“Here's what else you need to know today. Calls mounted on Monday for the resignation of”

Grand Platter, the Democratic nominee for Senate and Maine after a former girlfriend accused him of rape. In an interview with Politico, the former girlfriend, Jenny Rassacot, described an incident during which Plattener let himself into her home and forced himself on her, despite her repeated pleas for him to stop. In a social media post, Plattener denied the allegations, and said he would take time to quote, "reflect" on the path forward. Both parties he

Maine as a battle in the midterms, and a deciding race over who will control the Senate.

“Promoted Democrats withdrew their endorsements of Plattener after the allegations surfaced on”

Monday, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, Representative Rokana and Senator Ruben Gaego. The Senate Democratic campaigner, which had opposed Plattener in the primary, also called for him to quit and pledged with hold financial support from his campaign if you remained in the race. Today's episode was produced by Caitlyn O'Keefe and Chris Benderiff. It was edited by Mark George with help from Ben Calhoun, Michael Ben Wall, and Paige Cowett, and contains music by Pat McCusker,

Alicia B. E. tube, and Marion Lesano. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow. I'm Gilbert Cruz. This week on the Book Review podcast, we celebrate America's 250th birthday with a story in Joe LaPore. You know, 18th century is a kind of carnival-esque world.

You pull off to celebrate. Plus, the books you won't be able to put down this summer. To me, a B.T. read is an escape, and it's a book that takes you someplace else. Listen to the Book Review wherever you get your podcasts.