Peddler of far-right conspiracies Alex Jones still fighting tooth and nail in court to keep his Information wars media network. But it won’t stop The onion– who sought to acquire it after the bankruptcy – to use this toxic brand as a weapon against him.
The weekly satirical newspaper Information wars The parody livestream airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET, starting tonight.
The show, simply called Information warswill be available on a number of video platforms, including Twitch, YouTube and Instagram, under the handle @realinfowars. Tim Heidecker remains the creative director (and Jones impressionist) of the project, continuing his mission to transform Information wars in a house for experimental gonzo comedy which ridicules internet culture and, of course, the fever dreams of crazy American political commentators.
So what can viewers expect from The Onion’s version? Information wars?
Warning: the following contains spoilers for the first episode.
A macabre death, on the one hand. Jeff Lawson, owner of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, told WIRED that “it’s perhaps not surprising to say that we’re killing Alex Jones pretty quickly.”
Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion, offers more details. “In the first episode, Alex Jones pops like a balloon,” he says. We see “clear and convincing video showing Alex Jones exploded after eating too many Whataburgers.” This bomb derails Heidecker’s project. Information wars-style show, which is called Emergency. “The rest of the episode is spent trying to determine (A) if he’s still alive, even though he exploded in his car, and (B) if he was dead a long time before he exploded in his car, if there’s a body double driving around him.”
The onion first won a bankruptcy auction For Information wars in late 2024. He did so with the support of the families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, who had successfully sued Jones for his repeated lies about staging the massacre and won judgments totaling more than $1 billion, pushing Jones into financial ruin. But a federal judge I kept this agreement due to a technical problem in the tender process.
In April, The Onion announced another matter take control of Information warsAssets that would allow him to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees to Sandy Hook families. Jones appealed; a few days later, a Texas appeals court suspended the sale.
While the acquisition is stuck in limbo, The Onion is moving forward with Information wars parody programming on its own channels.
“Legally, we have to say it’s a straight parody of Alex Jones and all that bullshit, until we’re allowed to take over all his stuff,” Collins told WIRED. “But in the meantime, we’re having a lot of fun.” Jones’ lawyers did not respond to requests for comment from him; messages to Information wars email accounts were returned as undeliverable.
Lawson calls the seizure of Information wars name “karmic justice” for the Sandy Hook families, who I have not received any settlement money yet by Jones. The Onion plans to initially donate $100,000 from product sales directly to families, Collins told the Associated Press.
THE Information wars parody also serves commercial and cultural needs, Lawson says.
“We kind of realized at some point that we needed a satirical product that was natively a satire of the Internet,” Lawson says. “But the problem is that the Internet is so hard to satirize because there is no single Internet. To do satire, you need a common understanding of a medium that you’re breaking.”
When Collins designed the stunt acquisition Information warsthey began to see an opportunity to target an all-too-common digital format: “Those bragging assholes who have a million listeners [and] I’ll say and do anything to make money,” Lawson says. “It’s these podcasters, they’re what you can satirize, the Joe Rogans and the Alex Joneses.”
The idea, Collins says, is to ridicule the internet’s conspiratorial brain rot that has infected the entire social media ecosystem. “It helps us understand how stupid everything is and how people talk now,” he explains. “People are constantly trying to figure out the big secret that runs the world, but in reality the big secret that runs the world is right in front of us, and it’s the big fucking asshole government that we live under.”
Besides Heidecker, the live broadcasts will include other familiar faces and voices. Tim Robinson of I think you should leave And The chair company calls “Tim from Ohio” in the first episode, leading to debate over whether Bozo the Clown was actually several different people. Fictional news anchor Jim Haggerty (Brad Holbrook) also returns, having abandoned his anchor job at Onion News Network to spout crackpot paranoid views while advertising products like “Hog Water.”
And one crazy opening theme is provided by comedian-musician Nick Lutsko, who has often gone viral with songs make fun of Jones and other right-wing figures. This song is immediately derailed when Lutsko’s idea for a cartoon “Information wars The “Elf” mascot is rejected by company executives, but he still continues to force the character back into the theme.
“It’s kind of like an ‘Avengers, round up’ kind of thing for everyone who’s been making fun of these assholes for years,” Collins says. “I think that if [this cast] have always been direct counter-powers to Trumpism and that we would probably not have Trumpism.” Lawson adds: “I worry about democracy, and I think satire is the answer to that, being able to point out things that we look around us and say, ‘This isn’t right.’
Collins says he’s excited to connect with The Onion audiences on more interactive platforms, like with last year’s 20-minute mockumentary, Jeffrey Epstein: bad pedophilewhich featured live chat. The success of this project helped pave the way for Information Wars fraudulent channels. “That’s kind of how we realized we should do this more, because everyone went wild,” Collins says. “It’s very rare to see people react in unison to pedophile jokes like this.”
Beyond the laughs and fun of being interested in MAGA influencers, Collins says that by using the Information wars this name and format are part of The Onion’s strategy in the ongoing struggle for ownership of the company. As Jones continues to delay legal proceedings by every means available, the Sandy Hook families say he has dejected Information wars‘ value to avoid seeing it liquidated to cover part of its enormous debt.
“We don’t want this to happen because these families didn’t get anything and we want to give them money,” Collins says. “Part of the way we make fun of this thing is that we maintain its value,” he says. This could prove helpful in The Onion’s legal efforts to finalize a sale, which Collins considers “inevitable.”
“One day we’ll have Infowars.com and we’ll have access to this great studio,” Collins says.
Does he expect Jones to watch the live streams? “Oh, definitely,” Collins says, observing how Jones’ reach was greatly reduced without Jones’ support. Information wars name that he could soon lose permanently. “He needs influence, baby.”
Additional reporting by Brian Kahn