It seemed like a joke when, in the middle of April, The Onion’s new CEO Ben Collins announced that the satirical outlet had taken control of Alex Jones’ media outlet Infowars. It still sounded like a canard weeks later when Tim Heidecker claimed that he’d be the new host of The Onion’s Infowars—especially since judges in Texas stated that Collins’ hilariously hostile takeover had to cease immediately as Jones won an appeal to slow its roll.
And yet, come July, there was Heidecker all but foaming at the mouth in his spot-on Jones impersonation, loudly weaving in and out of Infowars’ patented roid-rage advertising and butting up against the silly, righteous outrage of the fictional character Jim Haggerty. “The new Infowars is a chance to build a place for ambitious, specific, internet-native comedy and to make something genuinely new out of a very broken piece of media history,” Heidecker shared in a statement to FLOOD about his new weekly Thursday YouTube collab with The Onion shortly after the (re)launch. “The premiere is just the beginning.”
I’ve appreciated everything that Heidecker has committed to multi-media, from his genuinely weird Adult Swim network stuff with Eric Wareheim, to his On Cinema faux-film review series with Gregg Turkington, to his solo weekly call-in show Office Hours Live, to his relatively earnest folk music career. But Infowars may be his and even The Onion’s most fully realized work yet, with its manically intense, too-real-to-not-be-surreal, hot-piss take on Jones’ post-apocalyptic MAGA-dom.
Talking to Collins about his takeover of Infowars and his newly minted relationship with Heidecker, it seems as if he thinks so, too—this, coming from a guy who left his reporting job at NBC News in 2024 when he saw the freshly re-elected Trump’s litigious writing on the wall, up close and personal. “I’d already been suspended from my job for covering Elon Musk, I don’t know, brusquely, correctly,” says Collins, the network’s one-time disinformation and extremism reporter. “I saw all of my news colleagues losing their jobs or getting subpoenaed. I saw friends who worked at universities, studying how information moved, having their work criminalized by Jim Jordan’s weaponized Congressional committees. My job covering rich guys and the ways in which they were messing with the world was over.”
When you can’t cover the news accurately and truthfully, the next best thing is to cover it satirically. The Onion was a beacon of laugh-out-loud light to the child-aged Collins. “I picked it up first at the time of the Iraq War, only to see that The Onion were against the war, like I was, at a time when the only other people against the war was the Dixie Chicks and The Daily Show,” he recalls. “Their writers simply had the funniest way of dealing with things. They were an informative part of my life.”
Though its website never ceased its quality or slowed its roll, the close of The Onion’s print edition in 2013 was anathema to readers such as Collins: “A country without The Onion is pointless.” His love of and reverence for the outlet’s caustic wit and satirical sniper’s focus was great enough that he brought it back into print in 2024, once he had the means. “When I found out that it was for sale, not only did I want to bring it back, I wanted to get it so that it didn’t fall into the wrong hands.” Currently, Collins can happily state that, mere weeks before his second anniversary of ownership, the paid newsprint subscription edition currently has over 83,000 subscribers, and ships out over 100,000 copies monthly to booksellers and newsdealer around the world. “People want this thing,” he says.
“I’d already been suspended from my job for covering Elon Musk, I don’t know, brusquely, correctly... My job covering rich guys and the ways in which they were messing with the world was over.”
Unlike his love affair with The Onion, though, Collins did not have fuzzy feelings for Infowars or Jones’ insistently diabolical disinformation campaign. Yet when Jones lost his bilious broadcast menace in filing for bankruptcy when forced to pay over $1.4 billion in defamation lawsuits to the families of the Sandy Hook massacre that he wronged—monies he promised that he’d never pay out—Collins didn’t want to see Infowars repurchased by Jones. After seeing an ad for Infowars’ sale on Bluesky (along with an opportunity to buy Jones’ armored truck), and knowing friends affected by the Sandy Hook tragedy, Collins hit up its auction, worked out investors, and became the owner of a not-so-shiny bit of secondhand misinformation media—just days after the 2024 presidential election. “When we first bid, we didn’t know that the auction would come after the election; and we certainly didn’t know that Trump would win,” says Collins. “But it was either Alex Jones or us to take over Infowars. We’re masochists.”
Collins and Heidecker must be masochists as, despite a Texas’ judge’s orders to halt their moving forward with anything related to airing a new Infowars or selling off merch (which they are), the new IP owners have ignored the courts, reanimated the Frankenstein’s monster, started what Collins calls “our one-to-one parody,” and dared everyone to stop them (“This is happening,” Heidecker told Variety last week). Collins didn’t exactly have a “frontman” in mind for this current edition of Infowars. After considering the Onion staff’s stretch into Infowars’ low-hanging fruit (“Nothing is lower than Infowars,” Collins says, “it’s the basement layer of hell”) and all-things alt-right, Collins heard from Heidecker, who had his own ideas about what spittle-spewing MAGA mocking could look like. “I really did want to up our game when it came to Infowars, and Tim is the right man to do it,” says Collins. “When your favorite comedian’s favorite comedian calls you, you let him do what he wants to do with it.”
“Tim miraculously and precisely identifies the next nightmare that’s about to ruin our culture, and always manages to parody that relentlessly... He’s just forever been this huge part of American life and humor.”
Speaking to Heidecker’s qualifications, Collins continues: “He has this 14-hour-long loop of his parody of Joe Rogan where, anytime someone’s ready to make a salient point, Tim changes the subject—which is exactly what Rogan does. No one but Tim has bothered to do that parody. His Bill Maher parody podcast is also masterful. Tim miraculously and precisely identifies the next nightmare that’s about to ruin our culture, and always manages to parody that relentlessly. Whether you know all of what Tim does or not, he’s just forever been this huge part of American life and humor.”
So here is Collins and Heidecker’s still-new-car-smelling Infowars, now on its fourth week, with Brad Holbrook reprising his Jim Haggerty bit, radical-right segues from comedians Harris Alterman and Skyler Higley, long commercials for doomsday readiness and vitamin supplements, and interruptive phone-ins from Tim Robinson as “Tim from Toledo” comparing Alex Jones to James Bond. When it comes to nonfiction, Collins’ even promises that a beloved, well-known Chicago comedian whose identity he’s sworn to conceal will soon appear on Infowars in what might be the “worst-ever impersonation” of Barack Obama.
With all that, Collins now has a piece or two of America’s non-news media outlets most dedicated to the left and right of information and disinformation. What could he possibly do—or buy—for an encore? “I always had a soft spot in my heart for Red Lobster,” says Collins with a soft laugh. FL
