The Onion announced a deal last week to take over the conspiracy-fueled website Infowars as part of founder Alex Jones’slong-running bankruptcy case, the result of a lawsuit filed by the families of Sandy Hook victims.
The families of the victims of the 2012 elementary school massacre successfullysued Jonesfor damages exceeding $1.3 billion for spreading lies about the deadly incident, which prompted years of harassment from his followers.
After a judge blocked its first attempt to buy Infowars at a bankruptcy auction in 2024, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, announced its latest bid last week, adding that Tim Heidecker, a veteran of Adult Swim and the absurdist duoTim and Eric, would take over as the site’s creative director.
Read more:How The Onion Covers Politics
“You can’t just shut something like this down and pretend it never existed,” Onion CEO Ben Collins said in a statement. “If you want accountability to mean anything, you have to replace it with something better, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.”
A court-appointed receiver controlling Infowars' parent company, Free Speech Systems LLC, is seeking approval for the deal in a Texas state court. The deal would see The Onion licensing the company’s intellectual property, including the Infowars trademark and associated domains, for $81,000 a month.
The satirical media company hopes to turn Infowars into a parody of its former self, while sharing profits with the families of the Sandy Hook victims.
TIME spoke with Heidecker about his plans for the site and how he intends to deal with an angry Jones.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q: First of all, congratulations on the new role as creative director. I know you have a very successful career as a podcaster and a comedian. Do you have any experience running a global hate factory?
TH: No, just at home with my kids.
Q: Can you run me through your plans for Infowars, if you eventually do get to take over?
TH: Yeah, I think we're thinking about this in sort of phases. I think there'll be a transition phase where we're doing kind of Onion-style parody, satire, reflecting back the absurdities of Infowars and the right-wing media culture. Not so much the political stuff, but sort of just the hacky supplements and trying to bilk your grandparents out of their life savings kind of style.
We want to kind of let that run its course, and play in that sandbox for a little while. Then we just think that that's going to get old, but we'll have built this little brand, or sort of re-established a brand and turn it into a destination for good comedy— a new streaming site, a new comedy platform.
Q: You have history with Alex Jones; you have even appeared on Infowars very briefly in the past. What did you think of the content that they put out in the past? Are there any moments that stick out in your mind?
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TH:I give him credit for being a fascinating, entertaining broadcaster, but with some vile scruples to go along with it. He can draw you in and suck you into his world, and sometimes that can be pretty entertaining when he's ranting and raving and screaming and crying and tearing his shirt off. It's just good old-fashioned pro wrestling in a lot of ways. That's my take on him.
Q: Did you happen to catch his reaction to the news? He appeared briefly on Infowars when the news broke that you guys were taking over.
[Editor’s note: Jones appeared on a live broadcast of Infowars with his shirt off. “Now they’re running around saying they’ve hired a guy to talk like me, that they’re going to pretend to be me and spread lies to discredit me,” Jones said on the broadcast. “Just because you’re wearing my shirt don’t mean you’re me, so let’s be 100 percent clear about that.”]
TH:Yeah. I mean, we certainly clocked that and enjoyed watching that. He did what we thought he would do. He spends a lot of time reading from the news, which doesn't seem very exciting to watch, and then he was just being very full of bluster. We know we have very, very competent, very measured, intelligent people on our side who know what they're doing, and have been very, very thorough and careful and considerate about this whole process. So I'm tending to mostly tune out whatever threats or whatever he's saying he's going to do. I'm not really taking it too seriously,
Q: I know there is a legal battle going on at the moment, but they've announced the role. How confident are you that this will go through, and how far along in your plans are you with the new Infowars?
Confidence is high, I would say. I'm just kind of going off of what people here are telling me, lawyers and the counsel, and everybody feels very good about it. We're starting from scratch. We started a few months ago. When you're starting anything new, you really are starting with nothing and just ideas and a vision and it takes time to materialize a lot of that stuff, but we're pushing forward. We’ve got a development person on, a production person on, we're taking meetings. It's a lot, but we've got some things in the works. We've already got a lot of copy written, and the site is ready to go. And so there's a lot that's been done, but a lot still left to do.
Q: Infowars doesn't just do media. It has these side businesses selling all kinds of enhancement pills and brain enhancement stuff. Are you guys going to be carrying on that line in the new iteration?
TH:We have a little bit of merch, and the merch angle is fun on a meta-comedy level, but it's also going to benefit the Sandy Hook families and start getting them paid what they're owed. And it's a fun thing to think about, you know?
And the other thing, the main thing we're pushing, really, is subscriptions to the magazine for The Onion. That's one of the main drivers of this. And with all this attention we're getting from TIME magazine and everybody else, that's how we're trying to maximize this, this experience right now, which will go on to make this a profitable enterprise and provide nice, healthy budgets for young creators to make interesting things for the world.
Q: Forgive me if this is a boring question, but are you going to be taking over the actual studio and the property there, or was it just kind of the license?
TH:I'm not moving to Texas. Hell no.
Q: Are you prepared for the possibility that Jones won't leave the studio?
TH:Well, that's for him, that's for the law to figure out. Perhaps there are squatter’s rights in Texas, I'm not sure. But we don't need his crap, you know? If we have to deal with it, we maybe put it on eBay or something. But that's not really the point, to get our hands on his cameras or anything like that. It's really about the name and the website and the brand and the archive, too, because there's probably lots of great stuff to be mined in from his bloopers.
Q: I didn't realize that. So you get all of the archive material, too?
TH: Everything under the sun. It's really funny when you look into it, because there's all kinds of domain names that he owns, and crazy stuff that, I guess, we can just start sorting through.
Q: You'll have access to this audience that's been there forever, this kind of captured audience that he has. Do you have any message for them, the loyal Infowars readers who have been there for years?
TH: No. I mean, I think they're going to either see the light that they've been conned over the many years by this guy and that he is a complete cartoon character, or they're just going to follow him along to his next venture, whether that's another site or it's just him on the side of the road with a cardboard sign saying the world is ending.
