It’s an idea that feels, first and foremost, like a joke: Global Tetrahedron, the company that now owns and publishes The Onion, former sister publication of The A.V. Club, announced back in 2024 that it was attempting to score the rights to Alex Jones’ long-running disinformation dispensary InfoWars in a bankruptcy fire sale. And yet, CEO Ben Collins has made it clear over the last two years that he’s completely serious about this potential acquisition, which has been backed by families of the survivors of the Sandy Hook school shooting (whose successful defamation suit against Jones, after he accused grieving families of being paid “crisis actors,” precipitated the sale), by gun-control advocacy group Everytown For Gun Safety, and by comedian Tim Heidecker, who’ll serve as both creative director and initial on-camera star for this effort to turn Jones’ former online pulpit into a very literal mockery of his eternally bloviating self.
The path to The Onion’s InfoWars has been less smooth than any involved would have hoped, as Jones has launched various legal challenges in an effort to block efforts to either buy InfoWars outright,or simply license its name from its current court-appointed stewards. But Collins, Heidecker, and their team have been undaunted, launching a heavily improvised “Emergency Broadcast” that served as a trial run for the comedian’s throat-eradicating take on Jones back on May 1, before announcing they’d be moving forward with a full launch of the new InfoWars on July 2. Collins sat down with The A.V. Club this week to talk about that launch, Heidecker’s on- and off-camera roles on the project, and—possibly the most pressing question hanging over this entire thing—what the new InfoWars actually looks like, long-term, once the simple pleasures of laughing at Jones’ miseries wear off.
The A.V. Club: Give us a quick timeline of how “The Onion buys InfoWars” went from a funny idea for people to laugh about on social media to an actual, working project.
Ben Collins: In 2024, I saw that [InfoWars] was for sale on Bluesky. That’s the thing about bankruptcies like this, is they have to advertise them in some way—the trustee has to advertise that the stuff is available. The advertisement listed, like, Alex Jones’ armored tank and all these other things. I didn’t know if InfoWars itself was for sale, or if it was just stuff. Because if it was for sale, it could provide us an avenue. That whole year, we were asking, “How do we poke around to expand into video in a way that doesn’t take away from The Onion?” The Onion, as you know, is the most important, most precious thing on the planet. We don’t want to ruin that. And we had just successfully brought back the paper. It was immediately a huge success.
So we wanted to keep that going exactly as is, but we wanted to also go after the way the world talks now, which is exclusively through gambling and scams. So, why not go after the progenitor of the gambling and scam ecosystem known as InfoWars? We started to ask around for a sponsor, and Everytown was with us at the beginning, and we were like, “We can put in a bid on this, and it wouldn’t be the most insane thing to do.” And we were all extremely naive to the bankruptcy process, where we thought, like, we would just put in a bid, and we would win or lose. And we did: We put in a bid, and we won.
The thing that was hairy, though, is that this was nine days after the 2024 election. So when we won, it was insane. Alex Jones immediately freaked out, called everybody in his orbit, Steve Bannon, all these people, and was able to scare everybody involved in the process. The judge freaked out a little bit, too, and just removed it from his court, said basically, “Go figure this out in state court.” And at that point, no one in the country wanted to go against somebody perceived as an ally of Donald Trump. And they’re no longer allies, by the way. It sounds like they had a sort of fallout over, I don’t know, if Charlie Kirk is alive, was the most recent thing. Alex is going to keep saying that dead people are living and living people are dead until he is.
We had talked to [the Sandy Hook families] over and over again, sticking with it. There are just some people in American life that you just don’t want to let down. But after we won the auction, that’s when it became real. That’s when Tim reached out, and that’s when the world decided this is an important thing to do. And everything’s sort of been charmed since then.
AVC: In terms of Tim, what is his role in the day-to-day operation of the site? And in the future of the project?
BC: When we hired him as creative director, we didn’t know that he had an Alex Jones impression. The last time he did it was like 10 years ago, he did the RNC in 2016, I think. So that was a long time ago. But he just busted it out on a call once and that was history. We hired him to be a creative director the old-fashioned way. He knows every great comic that I know and love, and knows how to make things that spiral way out of control, like On Cinema, and anything he’s done on Adult Swim. So he was just the perfect brain for it.
In the day-to-day, today they are shooting the first episode of Emergency Broadcast with Tim and some special guests, but that’s going to be a six-episode run. That has a very finite ending, as you’ll see. It’s heavily scripted. And has a very, very finite and explosive series of events in it. So him doing an Alex Jones impression was never the point. The point of it was to get these people all throughout Hollywood that had been left behind by this really rough nightmare scenario for people with a brain who like comedy, and get them a space again. Because there’s no place for interesting, artful comedy right now. And we need to provide that.
AVC: A lot of Heidecker’s work is focused on this kind of mocking portrait of American right-wing masculinity. What do you see as the overall satirical target of the new InfoWars?
We live in the final boss of this hyper-masculinized grift economy. It’s not even masculinized. It’s this performative, over-the-top GI Joe-style grift economy, where everything you put in your body is a temple, even though you end up looking like a fucking bowling ball. The most insane, over-the-top stupid shit. And we live in that world. We live in the endgame of this where we have a Health And Human Services Secretary that carries around sauerkraut in a fucking Ziploc bag everywhere he goes. The guy eats the ingredients to diarrhea every day, because that’s what he read on a blog. And that’s what he heard on YouTube and TikTok from a guy who he thinks looks more jacked than him. This world that we’ve inherited is one that leaves you desperate for some answer that you can solve within yourself by buying a supplement or hating the right kinds of people or, you know, exterminating whole swaths of people that don’t look like you. And that is the InfoWars mantra.
But now we’re living on the other side of it. Now the sauerkraut bag guy is running the Health Department of the United States. We have the most extreme immigration policy ever concocted in the United States. And it’s run by a series of people who used to listen to Alex Jones talk about how the invaders from all these other countries are coming in through the border. We are living in that endgame. And no one is actually going after it because people are afraid of the government. And, I mean, I’m not saying we’re not. Everybody’s afraid. We’re still going to do this. Somebody has to step up and make fun of these people as they are going about it.
AVC: There have been back-and-forths on the legal front with the sale and licensing. How clear are you to actually launch on July 2?
BC: Well, first of all, anybody is allowed to parody InfoWars anytime they want to. The very first run of shows here is a pretty direct InfoWars parody, one-to-one. It’s also worth noting that no one can access InfoWars’ studio right now, which is part of why we’re trying to shine a light on this. The receiver in charge of all of this has been locked out by the courts; if the studio was on fire, he couldn’t call the fire department. That’s the level at which he’s been locked into this box by a series of weird legal machinations. There is nobody in charge of these assets.
We have a legal right through both parody law, but also, more importantly, the creditors, the people that own this thing. The families, they’re on our side. They want us, desperately, to take this thing over and to get paid anything. This is just a way to hopefully get them some money until we can finally buy this outright.
AVC: The question a lot of people are going to have about this project is “The Onion buying InfoWars is a very funny idea. What happens after I’m done laughing at that initial joke?”
BC: It’s the most important thing. Tim and I are very much in the same boat here: You can’t just make fun of this one guy for even, like, two months. You’ve gotta move on from this thing. But there is so much grift and weird—the way we process information now is completely unprecedented. We live in a gilded age for gambling. Somebody has to make fun of that. We have a guy on deck to do that. The way people take in parenting information now, we have a guy on deck to do that. Alex is the entryway, in part, because we really want that name. InfoWars is a really good name for what’s going on.
But after the parody part has run its course, we want to expand this thing into a place where people can make a mirror world of our already fucked up mirror world we live in. And in the process, hopefully we can get some of the best young people in comedy all throughout this country and give them a legitimate crack at it.
AVC: Can you talk a bit about that first “Emergency Broadcast” video that went out back on May 1?
BC: That day, there was a weird court decision for that, and we’ve had many better ones since then. And Tim just really wanted to do this. Within a couple of hours of us announcing that, he was like “I really want to go on air and do this live.” So we set up a studio thing. He cranked that out within—they had beats written out, but that was relatively improvised. We woke up that morning and he decided to do it, and that night we were live on The Onion and Tim’s YouTube channel. The success of that was bananas, it was the number one post on Reddit and Bluesky. It was big on Threads—if that’s, is that a website still? Someone told me it was big on Threads, I don’t fucking know. Count Dankula of Russia Today really disliked it on Twitter, it was exactly what we wanted to happen, right? So that was what happened with twelve hours planning. We’ve been putting the work in since then, this is going to be even spicier.
AVC: It feels like there are multiple priorities at work here—money for the Sandy Hook families, an increased video presence for The Onion, and then these more satiric aims. Can you speak to where your main priorities are?
BC: For me, it’s always, I want to make the best possible thing. I want to get people who I trust to do great stuff, who have great processes to do the best stuff. I trust the merch money will come along for the families, and all these other things. It already has. I have no doubt about that. Ideas and characters and stuff will come out of that. People keep asking me, “What is the analog for this?” And I think most people think, like, oh, it’ll be like Adult Swim or Comedy Central or something like that. But I think of it like Marvel or something, where you can create worlds and characters and just give people space to do what they need to do with a little bit of budget.
And that evolves. Our goal is, every Thursday night this summer, with Tim’s show, with the Haggerty show [starring Brad Holbrook, who spent several years playing The Onion’s fake news anchor Jim Haggerty, now revived as a right-wing truthseeker] that airs at the same time in one big stream, to highlight these other talents as well. This is a really rough time in comedy. Just give them a little bit of money and a real chance to succeed with eyeballs, and we can create something cool. So that’s my goal. I just want something funny to happen. It’s been really rough, man. You know this. There’s really no place for non-roast comedy right now on any of these fucking networks. And I don’t understand it. I am tired of that shit. It draws a lot of negative polarization, hate-watching. But there’s no fucking fat on that bone, brother. There’s nothing there.
And it’s not because those people don’t want funny things to happen. It’s because the incentives in the industry right now, driven by Jeff Bezos at fucking Amazon or whatever, they would much rather give $75 million to Melania Trump than give $500,000 to a weird comic in Los Angeles. And we need to fix that. And we’re going to try.
AVC: You’ve talked about these two shows, Emergency Broadcast and then the one centered on The Onion’s Jim Haggerty. Can you be a bit more specific about what people are actually going to see once the launch arrives?
BC: So it’s going to be, again, Thursday night, July 2, at 8 p.m., right before Fourth Of July. So people can talk about it. It’s Tim’s show, it’s Haggerty’s show, and then there’s a bunch of other shorts I don’t want to bring up yet. I keep saying in meetings, The Simpsons was birthed out of The Tracey Ullman Show. These things existed in smaller spurts to start, and grew out of that. We’re going to have longer form stuff over the course of the summer. But in this direct parody mode, we’re going to really glow up Haggerty and Tim. It’s going to be everywhere you can watch anything. It’s going to be on Twitch. It’s going to be on YouTube. We’re going to have special guests. We’re going to do all the stuff that makes it a communal experience, if possible. And then, because of the surprises that exist in the show, it’s going to be everywhere shortly thereafter.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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