Why The Onion Took Over Infowars

In the aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook mass school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, rightwing commentator Alex Jones peddled bogus conspiracy theories about the tragedy. The Sandy Hook families sued Jones for defamation and emotional distress, and in 2025 a court ordered Jones to pay them nearly $1.5 billion. Jones filed for bankruptcy, and as a court began to sort through his assets, the new owners of parody newspaper The Onion stepped in to take over his far-right platform, Infowars. We’ll talk to Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion, about the acquisition and what he plans to do with a “new” Infowars.

Guests:

• Ben Collins, CEO, The Onion; former senior reporter, NBC News; former senior editor, The Daily Beast

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. You may have already seen last month The Onion’s launch of its parody of Alex Jones’ conspiracy-riddled platform, Infowars.

Tim Heidecker (clip): Hi, everybody. Welcome to the new Infowars. I’m your host, Tim Heidecker. We have officially taken over Infowars now. We are in charge of Infowars. This is a new dawn, a new era. We’re turning the page and we’re forgetting the past, but we must always remember the past leads us towards the future.

Mina Kim: So here, we learn what the new dawn, new era of Infowars under The Onion will actually look like. What it means that a disinformation platform infamous for Alex Jones calling the 2012 murders at Sandy Hook Elementary a hoax is now under the leadership of a satirical news outfit famous for its mass-shooting headline, “No Way to Prevent This, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

I’m joined now by the CEO of The Onion, Ben Collins. Ben, welcome to Forum.

Ben Collins: Thank you so much for having me.

Mina Kim: Really glad to have you on. Well, before this acquisition by The Onion of Infowars, you had covered Alex Jones as a journalist, right?

Ben Collins: Yeah, I covered the rise of all these grifters sort of taking over our government and world. I was a disinformation and extremism reporter. I beat on the night of the 2016 election to watch Infowars and call people about what they were saying. Roger Stone was on there completely unfazed and being like, “Yeah, we’re about to take over.” And Alex Jones was shocked that they had won.

And you’re going to remember that Alex Jones once had Donald Trump on his podcast, and Donald Trump said, “I will never let you down,” to Alex Jones. Now, obviously, that has fallen apart since then, but that’s what I used to cover: how these people turned America’s tragedies into power and, in Alex Jones’ case, for a very long time, a lot of money.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Talk about how Alex Jones operates and the impact his conspiracy theories can have.

Ben Collins: Sure. So the way he operates, in terms of making money, is pretty simple. You take the most recent tragedy that took place, say the opposite happens and the government is responsible for it. The only way to protect yourself is to take these iodine pills or, you know, these boner pills or something, and everything will get fixed. And you buy them at a subscription rate, and he makes millions of dollars. And it worked for a long time.

But he honestly kind of came up against his match, which is these families who had nothing left to lose. And they banded together and they said, “This is enough.” Like, only in America do you lose your child in the worst way possible, and then you have to move because you’re being taunted by a psycho trying to make money off the backs of them.

So, frankly, they are American heroes, the Sandy Hook families. I’m so glad that we are finally getting this, at least the Infowars name taken away from him, but eventually he’ll have to pay up for real.

Mina Kim: Yeah, the anguish that Alex Jones’ conspiracy about Sandy Hook and the harassment campaign, as you say, that it created for the families — that really had a profound effect on you, didn’t it?

Ben Collins: Yeah. You know, my friend’s girlfriend was shot and killed on live TV. That’s how I got into this beat and all. Her name is Alison Parker. She was a news anchor, and she was killed in Roanoke, Virginia. And her killer live-streamed it on Facebook Live. This was in 2015.

And now so much of that is sort of de rigueur in American life, where people are live-streaming mass murder, whatever. But it wasn’t at the time, and it really did affect me. And I think it affected a lot of people. Like, once you know somebody, it’s pretty rough. You can’t let go of it.

And I just didn’t want — I don’t know, in this case, he was kind of going to get away with it. He was just going to get in for his back for nothing and just move on. And we just decided that, after all of that these people went through, I think they deserved to win, and this — we’re providing that win right now.

Mina Kim: Right. Jones was ordered to pay more than a billion and a half, or almost a billion and a half dollars, to the Sandy Hook families for the defamation and distress. And he basically said he was never going to pay it. So when the opportunity to take over Infowars and to take it away from Alex Jones came, you took it. But I understand you sought the family’s blessing.

Ben Collins: Oh, yeah. You don’t want to make a joke out of something without their permission. You know, I met several of them in the past through my work, and I talked to them.

The thing that people forget about victims of mass shootings and victims of a lot of stuff in America that shouldn’t be happening is that they are people, and they have senses of humor. And they, you know, they want things to move forward. And they want to live big lives.

And I want to make sure that they’re okay with it. But I also wanted to let them know, like, this could be fun. Like, this could give you some amount of justice. And also, you know, you get to call a celebrity and give them little notes about how that guy’s voice sounds. So that’s what happened with Tim. And unfortunately, it’s a little bit too good.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Actually, we have a clip of an example of Tim, you know, doing exactly what you say, which is that Jones would peddle conspiracy theories and then he would create, you know, like a supplement or a cure or a process to be able to solve the issue that he’s creating the fear about.

So let’s hear a clip of Tim Heidecker — and I feel like I have to possibly say it’s Tim Heidecker impersonating Jones because he sounds so much like him.

Tim Heidecker (clip): We now have a scientific, technological system by which we can take your urine and ship it to us, and we’ll be able to turn — extract the gold minerals. And as you know, our body is made up of many minerals and salt and different minerals, including gold.

Mina Kim: So you say this is an opportunity to have a little fun and also a little justice for the families. Talk more about the justice part. What is the justice?

Ben Collins: We’ve been able to take this thing and just sort of lay bare what this whole ruse is, which is, you know, you get people really scared. And then once you get them scared, you can convince them of pretty much anything. And, you know, Alex used it to sell supplements, but he also used it to tell everybody that pretty much every mass shooting in American life didn’t actually happen.

And what comes with that is two things, right? It comes with a lot of power. Like, you get to meet the president, you get to be friends with him, all this stuff, which is what Alex wants. But it also makes you miserable.

And deep down, Alex is a miserable guy. That’s what we want to outline here with this show. You see Tim’s version of Alex — you know, he loses his horse, Horace, the only thing he cares about, in his divorce. And his ex-wife calls in and yells at him and tells him how big of a coward and idiot he is.

Like, it’s a big character study in, like, you can go down this path. You can make a lot of money in being a ruthless idiot. But also, you’re a pathetic psycho. And that’s what we were able to tell the first six weeks of Infowars so far.

Tim did, in fact, die in the last episode by taking too much of his laxative supplement, but I won’t give too much away to the people who are watching.

Mina Kim: Well, let me invite the listeners into the conversation. Listeners, are you an Onion reader? And if so, why? Do you have a favorite piece or headline from The Onion? What do you hope to see on The Onion’s version of Infowars?

You can tell us by emailing [email protected], finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at @KQEDForum, or by calling 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

And, of course, if you have any questions or want to tell Ben anything, the CEO of The Onion, feel free to call to do that as well.

This listener on Bluesky writes, “I’ve been aware of Infowars for many years. It is one of the original fake news websites, no more credible than the Weekly World News. What it had in common with The Onion was that stories in neither were believable.”

I do want to ask you about, like, why does Infowars fit well with The Onion?

Ben Collins: It allows us to go after a kind of omnipresent media that is, frankly, beneath The Onion itself. Like, The Onion, we’re allowed to, you know, we have to look like The New York Times. We have to go after absurdity from the lens of, like, the most — almost like lunatic officialdom, right?

This is the opposite, right? There is a target there that would be beneath The New York Times to talk about or something like that, and we need to — they are everywhere, and we still need to talk about them.

So that’s a big thing that we talked about, is how, for example, how could we go after trad wives? Like these people who are sort of these women who are giving away all of their rights to fit in in right-wing culture.

And in Episode 4 of Infowars, on the Haggerty Show, which is the other show on Infowars so far, we had a trad wife on who locked herself in a cage and pissed at people because that’s what she was told to do.

So, like, that is, in fact, beneath The Onion. It is not beneath Infowars. Like, the thing that’s beneath Infowars is, like, the top of a sewer. We can’t degrade it any further than it already has been.

Mina Kim: And the value of that — I’m sorry, just what would you say that is?

Ben Collins: Oh, we’ve got to do it. Yeah. Like, this many people being this crazy from the algorithm and not making fun of them at a professional level — like, we’ve made it 10 years without that. We need the pros to go after these people.

So that’s what the point of Infowars was: to get the world’s best satirists on this, between The Onion and Tim, to take a crack at these folks and really do full-on studies. And the Haggerty Show is about making composite characters of these folks today.

There’s a guy on tonight’s episode of Infowars, anywhere you want to watch it, 5 p.m. Pacific on YouTube specifically, if you want to go there. Right? It airs Thursdays.

Mina Kim: Yeah, that’s right.

Ben Collins: There is a guy, for example, who thinks he can live forever. And I think we’ve seen that guy out in 50 trend stories in the world. You’re not going to believe this, but he cannot, and you should watch to find out how he loses the battle.

Mina Kim: Right. The world’s death rate is steady at 100%. Yeah. But I guess also what I like is the point that you make that you’re not necessarily going after the people, but you’re going after the ill that the people are embodying, essentially.

Ben Collins: Yeah. I mean, the reason Tim died is because, like, Alex Jones is kind of a one-note guy. He’s kind of boring. But the larger sickness here is pretty pervasive. And we have to make fun of all those things that have popped up in American life. And there’s unfortunately a wealth of it right now.

But it is — it’s very commercialized. It’s a very lucrative business to convince people that they are, you know, they’re one pill away or they’re one Zoom class away from fixing all the problems in their life. When, in reality, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Mina Kim: Well, let me play a little bit from your very first show that aired on July 2nd. This is basically the, you know, summary of what Infowars will be.

Clip: The government, politicians, the media — they’re silencing the truth. Because the truth is dangerous. They don’t want their secrets revealed. This is exactly the kind of conversation they don’t want us to have. We could be killed. Or worse.

Mina Kim: More on The Onion’s recent takeover of Infowars with CEO of The Onion, Ben Collins. Stay with us.