Last Thursday, Tim Heidecker killed himself on a YouTube livestream so that he could continue his war against Alex Jones in hell.
This is the new era of InfoWars, the far-right conspiracy-riddled media empire of Jones, now under the leadership of The Onion, which is fighting to buy the outlet and has already replaced Jones in a parody version with boundary-pushing comedian Heidecker.
“People keep asking, ‘What’s the strategy?’ I’m like, ‘We’re building a f–king cult, obviously.’ And it’s working,” Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion, told TheWrap.
That’s not just blind optimism on Collins’ part. Since last month when The Onion launched Real InfoWars, the brand has over 218,000 followers on Instagram, 140,000 subscribers on YouTube and 73,000 followers on TikTok with posts routinely racking up hundreds of thousands of views. Six different posts have scored over a million views on Instagram alone.
The Onion’s attempted acquisition of InfoWars may have started as a joke designed to humiliate Jones, but it’s on its way to becoming one of the most interesting media and entertainment stories of the year. Under the leadership of Collins and comedian and creative director Heidecker, the new era of InfoWars is morphing into a refreshing punk rock hub of bizarro alternative comedy, a sort of Adult Swim for the digital age. It’s an approach that goes against every expectation of modern media, one that embraces physical print, a word-of-mouth following and wild, vulgar swings like ending every phone call with “f–k you” while denouncing major media empires and AI.
In doing so, The Onion has turned what could have been a one-note joke into a real business opportunity. Ad sales for the parody news outlet are up, especially from advertisers who want to support the satire hub but are skittish about directly supporting anything connected to the fraught InfoWars. And, shockingly, newspaper subscriptions are higher than they’ve been in years. At over 83,000 subscribers, The Onion is now among the top five biggest newspapers in the United States when it comes to physical subscriptions. Collins has even seen someone with a tattoo of the logo for the rebranded InfoWars.
And — most importantly to Collins and the entire Onion team — the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary victims are getting paid by a version of the organization that has terrorized them for over a decade. Jones and InfoWars owe the families $1.4 billion in damages after a court ruled they were liable for defamation. The InfoWars parody launched last month by sending the families $100,000 in merchandise sales with plans to send them more in the future.
“We’ve been raising a lot of money for the families, which is really good. This truly f–king hideous InfoWars elf shirt that we have made a lot of money for us, and I don’t know what to do with that,” Collins said. “The most important thing is we have the full support of the families here and, at the end of the day, we may be the only way they get money, which is f–king brutal. So we have a true duty at this point to keep going.”
InfoWars hasn’t just boosted ad and merchandise sales for The Onion. In its success, the new InfoWars is starting to overshadow Jones’ legacy.
“Our goal of erasing the memory of this guy is working. It’s driving him insane, and now he’s fighting with the president,” Collins said, referring to a recent video where Jones called for Donald Trump’s impeachment. “In terms of performance, we’re happy. The question is how do you keep this up forever?”
InfoWars’ horrendous past
Founded in 1999, Jones built the original InfoWars by peddling conspiracy theories. Hoaxes around chemtrails and 9/11 were among Jones’ favorites, but nothing rivaled his obsession with the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, when a gunman murdered 20 students and six staff members. For years, Jones claimed the shooting was a hoax, cultivating an audience who harassed and sent death threats to the families of these victims.
In 2022, a jury awarded the relatives of 10 of the families who lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting over $1.4 billion in damages after they sued Jones for defamation. The InfoWars founder has refused to pay these families, stonewalling the courts and refusing to provide financial documents until a Texas court ordered that all InfoWars assets be liquidated.
Enter The Onion. Since 2024, the satirical news organization has been trying to take control of InfoWars with the express purpose of using it to ruthlessly mock Jones and his empire. Jones has repeatedly tried to block the sale of his former website to The Onion, and ownership of the website has been in limbo since April as the case has moved to the Texas Supreme Court. But Jones’ legal fight didn’t stop The Onion.
“If anything, it sped us up,” Collins said. “It made it so we are even more compelled to do the right thing.”
On July 2, the new InfoWars livestream debuted its first two shows: “The Jim Haggerty Show” and “Emergency With Tim Heidecker.” Both shows parody Jones’ aggressive style as Haggerty (played by actor Brad Holbrook) and Heidecker angrily rant to camera while spewing nonsense about CIA secrets and hawking questionable substances.
“He’s done nothing but hide his assets and be as big a piece of s–t as possible to these families,” Collins said. “Alex Jones has spent the last month in a $3,000 per night hotel in Hawaii called the One Hotel. I don’t know where he’s getting this money. His version of being $1.4 billion in debt is richer than I will ever be, and it’s f–king frustrating that we don’t have laws. I think a lot of the people involved in this process view all of this as a pocket veto by some scared person in the courts here. If he’s just going to get away with this, we’re going to continue to make fun of him. Like, if there are no laws anymore and these people don’t get paid, the very least we can do is say that this guy is the biggest piece of s–t on Earth every week for a while.”
Before The Onion even launched Real InfoWars, Jones fought against the idea of his site’s new potential owners. “They’re gonna misrepresent that they’re us to confuse people and quote, ‘Rip people off like Alex Jones did.’ They’re gonna make money. The whole thing’s about defaming me. You can’t take something over and then act like you’re somebody, even if you say it’s a parody,” a shirtless Jones said on a livestream in April. “They’re body snatchers. They may try to take our clothes, we’re still the Infowars.”
Originally, the plan was to ruthlessly mock Jones using his own website for 10 weeks as a middle finger to the conspiracy theorist. But a little more than a month in, Real InfoWars already has a bigger audience than the original InfoWars ever had. Now Collins and creative director and Heidecker have a new goal for the brand: move beyond mocking this “one-note guy” and completely erase the memory of what InfoWars used to be.
InfoWars 2.0
In a little more than a month, InfoWars’ current shows have already gone a long way in changing the public’s perception. Jim Haggerty has developed a cult following, and fans of “Emergency” have latched onto several parts of Heidecker’s show, such as his pet Horace the horse, an off-putting elf mascot that appears in the introduction of many episodes and Edi Patterson’s Chesapeake, Heidecker’s vulgar and hate-filled ex-wife.
“This is an open call to Edi. If she would like to take over the studio as Tim’s ex-wife, please give us a ring. We are available,” Collins said.
But The Onion’s longterm plans go beyond its current roster of alternative comedians. The company has been working closely with Mia DiPasquale, who worked in the casting department for Nathan Fielder’s wonderfully offbeat “Nathan for You,” to hire several creators to build out the InfoWars roster, including the quirky lo-fi musician Dev Lemons and the king of AI videos Husk.
InfoWars also has another show that will likely premiere in the coming weeks and is eyeing a midterm special.
“What we’re trying to realize is how does it actually work now? The beauty of being truly independent is we can do whatever we want, basically, and we want to build a mass audience. A good way of doing that is building our channels as much as possible right now,” Collins said. “We’ve been allowed by this audience to take massive risks. We have plans for some of those risks, but the currency of the internet right now is novelty, surprise and having fun. That’s what we plan on doing until the end of the year, at least.”
Collins likened the current creative landscape under Trump to the end of George W. Bush’s presidency.
“We were like, ‘I’m kind of tired of being upset all the time,’ and people just started making s–t again. That’s how you end up with Adult Swim. Actually, that’s how you end up with all this stuff that was so weird because that’s the actual counter to all the fascist propaganda. It’s not being mad at the fascists. It’s making your own thing,” Collins said. “Right now with so much media capture, the lane’s wide open. So we’re just taking it.”
Heidecker’s vision for the new InfoWars is to pair creators, comedians and artists who have talent but not an audience with people who have both talent and an audience. But even as InfoWars is expanding into something beyond Jones mockery, it’s still not dismissing its morals. As the brand expands, The Onion hopes to send more money to the families of the Sandy Hook shootings and set up a specialized payment model for creators who partner with InfoWars.
“We are also doing it on hard mode. If you use AI, you’re not working with us. It’s just not happening. If you have at one point worked with f–king Palantir, you’re not working with us,” Collins said. “But I think it also hopefully gets us some credibility with creators that we are doing what’s best for them and not necessarily just to make as much money as possible.”
Part of that approach is so that Collins and his team can sleep at night. But jokes aside, whether the new InfoWars becomes a decades-long household name or if it’s a blip that will be forgotten by next year, Collins is focused on the broader ramifications of what they’re doing.
“Your children and your grandchildren and the people you’re not related to will judge you based on your character at this point, so that’s what we’re doing,” Collins said. “We are playing the long game over here at The Onion, as we’ve always done.”
