Far-right conspiracy peddler Alex Jones is still fighting tooth and nail in the courts to hang on to his Infowars media network. But that won’t stop The Onion—which has been seeking to acquire it out of bankruptcy—from weaponizing the toxic brand against him.
The satirical outlet’s weekly Infowars parody livestream airs on Thursdays at 8 pm ET, starting tonight.
The show, simply called Infowars, will be available across a number of video platforms, including Twitch, YouTube, and Instagram, under the handle @realinfowars. Tim Heidecker remains the creative director (and Jones impressionist) for the project, continuing in his mission to turn Infowars into a home for gonzo experimental comedy that lampoons internet culture and, of course, the fever dreams of America’s crazed political commentators.
So what can viewers expect from The Onion’s spin on Infowars?
Warning: The following contains spoilers for the first episode.
A grisly death, for one thing. Jeff Lawson, owner of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, tells WIRED that it “may not be a surprise to say we kill off Alex Jones pretty quickly.”
Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion, offers more detail. “In the first episode, Alex Jones is popped like a balloon,” he says. We see a “clear and convincing video that Alex Jones has exploded from eating too much Whataburger.” That bombshell derails Heidecker’s Infowars-style show, which is called Emergency. “The rest of the episode is spent trying to figure out (A) if he's still alive, even though he has exploded in his car, and (B) if he's been dead for a long time before he exploded in his car, if there's a body double that's going around as him.”
The Onion first won a bankruptcy auction for Infowars in late 2024. It did so with the support of families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, who had successfully sued Jones over his repeated lies about the massacre being staged and were awarded judgments totaling more than $1 billion, pushing Jones into financial ruin. But a federal judge stuck down that deal due to a technicality in the bidding process.
In April, The Onion announced another deal to take control of Infowars’ assets that would allow it to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees to the Sandy Hook families. Jones filed an appeal; days later, a Texas appeals court paused the sale.
While the acquisition is stuck in limbo, The Onion is moving forward with Infowars parody programming on its own channels.
“Legally, we have to say this is a direct parody of Alex Jones and all this bullshit, until we’re allowed to take over all his stuff,” Collins tells WIRED. “But until then, we're having a lot of fun.” Jones’ attorneys did not return requests for comment from him; messages to Infowars email accounts were returned as undeliverable.
Lawson calls the seizure of the Infowars name “karmic justice” for the Sandy Hook families, who have yet to receive any settlement money from Jones. The Onion plans to initially give $100,000 from merch sales directly to the families, Collins told the Associated Press.
The Infowars parody also meets business and cultural needs, Lawson explains.
“We kind of realized at some point we need some satirical product that is natively internet satire,” Lawson says. “But the problem is the internet is so hard to satirize because there is no one internet. In order to make satire, you need a shared understanding of some medium that you break.”
When Collins conceived of the stunt acquisition of Infowars, they began to see it as an opportunity to target one all-too-common digital format: “These blowhard assholes who have a million listeners [and] will say and do anything to make a buck,” Lawson says. “It's these podcasters, they're the thing you can satirize, the Joe Rogans and the Alex Joneses.”
The idea, Collins says, is to ridicule the conspiracist internet brain rot that has infected the entire social media ecosystem. “It allows us to like break down how fucking stupid everything is and how people talk now,” he explains. “People are just constantly trying to find the big secret thing that is running the world, but in reality, the big secret thing that's running the world is right fucking in front of us, it's the big grafty fucking asshole government that we live under the thumb of.”
Besides Heidecker, the livestreams will include other familiar faces and voices. Tim Robinson of I Think You Should Leave and The Chair Company calls in as “Tim from Ohio” in the premiere episode, leading to a debate as to whether Bozo the Clown was actually several different people. Fictional newscaster Jim Haggerty (Brad Holbrook) returns as well, having abandoned his anchor job at the Onion News Network to spout paranoid crackpot views while advertising products like “Hog Water.”
And a delirious opening theme is provided by comedian-musician Nick Lutsko, who has frequently gone viral with tunes mocking Jones and other right-wing personalities. This song is immediately derailed when Lutsko’s idea for a cartoon “Infowars Elf” mascot is rejected by corporate higher-ups—but he keeps forcing the character back into the theme anyway.
“This is very much like, an ‘Avengers, assemble’ sort of thing for everybody who's been making fun of these assholes for years,” Collins says. “I do think if [this cast] had been direct foils all along to Trumpism that we probably wouldn't have Trumpism.” Adds Lawson, “I do worry about democracy, and I think that satire is the answer to that, being able to point out the things that we look around and say, ‘This isn't right.’”
Collins says he’s excited to connect with The Onion’s audience on platforms that are more interactive—as with last year’s 20-minute mockumentary, Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile, which featured a live chat. The success of that project helped to set the stage for the Infowars spoof channels. “That's kind of how we knew that we should be doing this more, because everyone went wild,” Collins says. “Very rarely do you get the ability to see people react in unison to pedophile jokes like that.”
Beyond the laughs and the pleasure of dunking on MAGA influencers, Collins says that using the Infowars name and format this way is one piece of The Onion’s strategy in the ongoing wrangling over possession of the company. As Jones has continued to delay court proceedings by any means available, the Sandy Hook families claim he has driven down Infowars’ value to avoid having it liquidated to cover part of his enormous debt.
“We don't want that to happen, because these families have gotten nothing, and we want to give them money,” Collins says. “In part, by making fun of this thing, we keep the value of it up,” he says. This could prove helpful in The Onion’s legal push toward finalizing a sale, which Collins sees as “inevitable.”
“One day we will get Infowars.com, and we'll get access to that awesome studio,” Collins says.
Does he expect Jones to be watching the livestreams? “Oh, definitely,” Collins says, observing how Jones’ reach has been significantly diminished without the Infowars name that he could soon finally lose for good. “He needs the clout, baby.”
Additional reporting by Brian Kahn