Inside the Onion’s quest to turn Infowars into a comedic revenge story
The CEO of the satire site that took over Alex Jones' outlet says $100,000 in proceeds will be donated to the Sandy Hook families.
It’s not easy to parody Alex Jones, but that’s not stopping the Onion from trying.
The right-wing conspiracy theorist behind Infowars, Jones has spent years promoting stranger-than-fiction ideas, arguing that chemicals in water turn frogs gay, the U.S. government deploys “weather weapons” against its own citizens, and that yogurt maker Chobani imports “migrant rapists.” (Chobani sued for defamation, and Jones apologized upon settling the lawsuit.)
Days after a gunman killed 20 students and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Jones falsely claimed the massacre was staged.
The insidious lie cost him dearly: Jones was ordered to pay roughly $1.5 billion to the families of the victims in a landmark defamation case forcing him to declare bankruptcy.
The satirical news site the Onion is trying to capitalize on the rare opportunity. For Ben Collins, CEO of the Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, the idea to buy Jones’s signature site began as a bit.
On the social media site Bluesky, he saw a reposted newspaper ad marketing the Infowars assets.
“I thought, ‘huh, this would be the funniest thing of all time if we pulled this off,’” he said. “It was, and is, but it’s also become the world’s biggest pain in the ass.”
Since 2024, the Onion has been locked in a legal battle to take over Infowars and transform it into a parody site. Infowars assets are still largely tied up in bankruptcy court, preventing the Onion from absorbing the URL. Still, it’s moving forward with launching its site on Thursday, which will live at theonion.info.
“There is a whole world of like grifters and weirdos who have not been made fun of, and have taken over like the United States,” said Collins. “We need to make fun of this more efficiently, and we need professionals to do it, and what better way to do it than to do a hostile takeover of where it all started.”
As a reporter at NBC, Collins covered a unique beat in his prior life: “disinformation, extremism, and the internet.” He even wrote about Jones’s defamation trial.
Now, he’s left the confines of a real news organization to run a fake one.
Collins enlisted comedian Tim Heidecker, best known as one half of the comedy duo Tim and Eric, as the creative director of this parodic Infowars. He’s also the face of it, performing as a caricature of Jones — complete with his signature rasp, cadence, and penchant for selling questionable nutritional supplements.
Jones did not respond to a request for comment.
The Onion has faced roadblocks to taking over Infowars: In 2024, a judge prevented the Onion from buying Infowars at a bankruptcy auction. Instead, its assets were transferred to a court-appointed receiver. So the Onion struck a licensing deal with the receiver to pay $81,000 a month for the Infowars.com domain and brand. But in April, a Texas appeals court halted any transfer of Infowars assets, again thwarting the Onion.
Collins said he never expected the legal proceedings to take this long: “We thought it was going to be like Storage Wars, and it wound up being more like a dream that you have when you’ve taken too much NyQuil.”
A version of the site viewable before launch featured a video of Heidecker addressing viewers as “infowarriors,” mimicking Jones, and taking a fake call from President Donald Trump. The site’s homepage was full of fake ads imploring readers to buy oxygen capsules and another obvious troll of the embattled Jones: “Turn your gold into piss. Liquidate your assets today.”
There’s an extra motivation for Collins: helping the Sandy Hook families.
The Onion has said it’s worked closely with Sandy Hook families and is donating $100,000 to the families through proceeds from the site. The company called the gift “the first of many.”
“No one else was going to get these families money, and he owes them,” Collins said about Jones. “He still owes them 1½ billion dollars, and we want to get them some cash.”
Chris Mattei, a lawyer for the families who sued Jones in Connecticut, said the families appreciate the Onion’s commitment, though he said it’s never been about the finances for them.
“The families we represent actually never cared about money at all,” Mattei said. The verdict let them “prove to the world in an open courtroom that Alex Jones was a fraud” and “demonstrate to the world the type of real-world harm that online misinformation can cause.”
Collins emphasized that he wants the families to be at the heart of this effort — because they’re the ones who have suffered because of Jones’s false claims. “There’s a few sacred things that we really got to protect if we want to have like a society still,” Collins said. “And these [families] are some of them.”