David vs. Goliath. Rocky Balboa vs. Apollo Creed. The Onion and Tim Heidecker vs. InfoWars and the Texas court system.
It’s an underdog story we all know. Our hero, the preeminent satirical newspaper, The Onion, embarked on a mission in 2024 to take over the alt-right conspiracy bullhorn InfoWars after its founder, Alex “Turn the Freaking Frogs Gay” Jones, lost everything in a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit from the families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. Jones called false flag on the tragedy for years and paid the price, and now, after a hard-fought legal back and forth, The Onion will operate InfoWars as an inclusive, internet-forward comedy platform with the goals of nurturing young talent and generating cash for the Sandy Hook families in place of the $1.4 billion Jones will never pay. The new InfoWars hits screens everywhere on July 2, and Onion CEO Ben Collins and InfoWars creative director Heidecker will finally breathe easy knowing their years-long mission to seek justice through comedy is finally accomplished.
But that’s not quite the end of this tale. Thanks to a snag in a Texas appeals court, The Onion technically isn’t allowed to operate as InfoWars. After the initial 2024 bid for InfoWars was rejected in bankruptcy court, Collins reached a licensing deal with the appointed manager, Gregory Milligan, to license the site and its affiliated properties. But hours before the agreement was set to go through, a Texas appeals court approved Jones’ appeal to halt the ruling, effectively putting the whole thing on pause until a lower court can make a new order.
Fortunately, none of this has stopped Heidecker and Collins from charging ahead anyway. Aside from an aggressive media blitz promoting the acquisition, The Onion is already selling InfoWars merch. Heidecker also came out swinging with the first episode of “Emergency,” which sees him behind the news desk doing a spot-on Jones impersonation. The future of InfoWars is still very much uncertain, but as Heidecker told Variety, their defiance will hopefully carry a crystal message to the Texas courts: “This is happening,” so “give it to us.”
Just days before July 2, Heidecker, the comedian behind “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!,” “On Cinema at the Cinema” and the “Office Hours” podcast, sat down with Variety to discuss what to expect from InfoWars on launch day, if The Onion expects legal repercussions and his approach to political satire in the wild world of Donald Trump’s second term.
I read that you were the one to first contact “The Onion” CEO Ben Collins after he announced the plan to scoop up InfoWars. How did you feel when you first read about the takeover, and what compelled you to reach out?
Obviously, on “Office Hours,” we tend to goof on [Alex Jones] and use his soundbites a lot. And I’ve done parodies of the Rogan stuff, and Bill Maher, and Tony Hinchcliffe, and all those people. It’s just the waters I swim in of stuff I satirize, and I didn’t really know anybody at The Onion, but I’m a big fan. I thought I could be of assistance, and it would be fun to get the raw footage that they might eventually acquire. I just wanted to hear what they had in mind and see if I could be involved in some way. And I do what I think is a pretty serviceable impression [of Alex Jones]. But I didn’t hear back, so I thought it was dead in the water.
About a year later, their marketing director reached out, sort of cold-called me, and was like, “Hey, would you be up for talking to us about this, because it’s back on the table?” I didn’t know this, but their initial bid had sort of fallen through, and so then they found another path, and at that point, maybe they did get my message and just clocked me. According to them, internally, I think I was the only person who had the respect or support of the staff of The Onion, which kind of blew me away. I always forget that The Onion is recycling people. There’s new people coming in there all the time, and they’re younger and younger as I get older and older, so the new generation of Onion staff are people that might have gotten into comedy from stuff that I’ve done. Then we got to talking and started brainstorming what it would mean to have InfoWars, and just kept the conversation going until it got real.
As I’m speaking to you, there are only a couple of days until the launch of the new and improved InfoWars. What’s the feeling inside the war room?
What we decided was, because the Byzantine machinations of the Texas court system are so impossible to predict and work with and work around, we are just plowing forward without a full resolution of the situation. The one thing we don’t have, which is annoying to me, is InfoWars.com. We don’t have the DNS login passwords, but we feel comfortable. And the thing is, nobody does, it’s in limbo, and it will be ours. It will eventually resolve itself. It just takes time. The slow march of the justice system is very frustrating for, I’m sure, most people who have dealt with it. But we feel comfortable saying we are InfoWars. We are presenting ourselves as such on other social media channels. It will launch on YouTube as InfoWars and be a sister company or a little brother to The Onion.
Is The Onion prepared for or expecting any sort of legal repercussions?
I defer to the lawyers, but they’re saying go for it. There’s nothing [Alex Jones] can do within the law. It’s in the receiver’s hands, and I think part of this strategy is to force the hand of everybody and say this is happening, so get it off your plate now, and give it to us, and we can start actually making money for these families.
With your prior conservative caricatures, I think you do a great job at reflecting and reacting without overreacting, which only gets more important as the headlines get crazier and crazier. What is your approach to tackling political satire?
I’m not really super interested in doing straight, clapter-style, didactic, “this is how you should think about something” material. For me, I see something that is aggravating or frustrating or infuriating, and I want to see if I can reflect that back to an audience in an entertaining, funny, absurd way that reminds people or confirms to people that what they’re seeing is crazy, or what they’re seeing is annoying, or frustrating, or infuriating. Then, I also think it should always also be going at deeper human flaws or problems that we all understand and see. A lot of these guys are dealing with self-esteem issues or narcissism, you know, deep things that are psychological and human. These are broken people, and those are obviously interesting characters for me.
Have you had a chance to speak with any of the Sandy Hook families and get their response to all this?
We did one big Zoom with, I can’t say it was everybody, but it was a lot of the families, about a month or so ago. It was meant to be sort of a legal update, and then they wanted to express their gratitude that we were doing this. It was pretty heavy, but also very encouraging. These people didn’t ask for any of this. They’re just normal people living in Connecticut with normal lives, or had normal lives. They seem to have a good sense of humor and wanted something positive to come out of this whole nightmare that they’ve been living through. A nightmare on top of a nightmare, you know, like the incident itself is beyond a nightmare. It’s as horrible as you can ever imagine, and then compounding the way Alex and his ghouls treated them over the past decade is another nightmare on top of that. We had some laughs, and I expressed how meaningful it was that I could be a small part of this, and they said, “Go for the jugular, and don’t be afraid to make him feel pain here.”
You hear comedians say all the time, “Comedy doesn’t mean anything, etc,” which I think is usually a cop out for not wanting to take responsibility for their material. But I think this is an example of how comedy can mean community and justice and hope, which is really a wonderful thing.
Anecdotally, the people I run into in my life, I could see their excitement about it because it felt like positive news. It felt like somebody winning on our side, or like some kind of. I don’t exactly understand it, but I see it over and over again when I’m out and about. Especially people in my line of work, they see how funny it is, and they see how embarrassing it is for Jones, and they think it’s just an exciting, positive thing. I’m sort of in the middle of it, and I know internally how hard it’s been. It’s like after a pitcher has a great game, and you say, “That was an amazing game!” And then the pitcher is thinking, “That was really hard. I didn’t enjoy it the way you enjoyed it.” That’s sort of where I am at, because it has been a long, hard struggle just to get to where we are now, and we’re only just beginning. But it’s been encouraging to see that it’s so well received.
Has anyone from the comedy or film world reached out to send you a pitch for InfoWars?
I wouldn’t want to name names without them, but I would say some actual A-listers, some people who are in big things, were right away hungry and excited and offering their services if it was required. We’re backpocketing some of those people. Then, friends in comedy of mine that I’ve worked with before are always going to be down. I think the nice thing about this InfoWars parody is that, to mimic the show, it’s a lot of call-ins, it’s a lot of Zoom and that kind of stuff. So it’s a good way to like call somebody like Tim Robinson or something and be like, “Hey Tim, I’ve got an easy ask for you. Can you call, and can we goof around for 10 minutes?” It’s a nice vehicle for those kinds of people who are obviously very busy in their own work. We don’t want this just to be a platform for people who are firmly established and can do stuff anywhere. It is about emerging talent and people that you might not have seen or people that are starting some momentum on social media, but we want to say, “Come over here, we’ve got some money for you, we can present it in a more considerate way.” That’s our target.
On July 2, what can people expect from the InfoWars slate?
We’re launching with “Emergency,” which is my show, and “The Jim Haggerty Show,” which is The Onion’s show. It was a little before my time, but it’s really funny. It’s more like a Tucker Carlson world that they’re doing. Then we have some sort of interstitial stuff, like Vic [Berger] has been putting stuff together. I hasten to say what we have, because I don’t think it’s firmed up yet. There will be some sprinkles of things that we’re developing. I really want the launch to feel like a soft launch. We’re taking all our shots at Alex and that world this summer. Then we can cleanse ourselves of that, and in the fall, we can rebrand and not be banging the drum on the conspiracy world so much, and just opening it up to changing the meaning of the word InfoWars.
Once that shift happens, what kind of creators did you have in mind?
I think people who are using comedy to reflect how we use the internet, reflect the crazy world we’re living in, people who have a point of view that are certainly coming from a more diverse background than, say, your average guest on the Joe Rogan podcast. Just younger, hipper, more adventurous people that we think are funny, but are kind of designated as just like, oh, their stuff is just on Instagram, and you just kind of fly through it. But these people should be taken more seriously and [we want to] say, this is a new voice in comedy that should be in the canon, at some point.
You mentioned Tony Hinchcliffe before, who is at the top of the comedy mountain right now, along with guys like Shane Gillis. How would you like to see the needle move on comedy in the coming years?
I was at the premiere of “Maddie’s Secret,” John Early’s movie, and I just adored it. It made me laugh so much, so meaningful. Then after I’m at this party, and it’s like everybody there, I just want to go and give a big hug to, and say, “I’m such a fan.” It’s everybody you’d want to see more work from. Conner O’Malley’s there, and Nathan Fielder’s there, Sarah Sherman’s there. I was talking to Matt Carlin, our producer [of “Office Hours], who went with me as my date, I was like, “This, this is my comedy. This is the community.” I think all of us are doing the most interesting work, as opposed to whoever’s over there at the Comedy Store. Not to keep naming that place, but you know that crowd. I would never want in a million years to be palling around with them. I feel like I wouldn’t know how to fit in, and that’s fine; people have different cliques and stuff. But I look at that Kate Berlant, John Early world, and just go, “Yeah, that’s my scene.” Then the people we’re developing are people who think that way, too.
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