Rachel Abrams: From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams and this is the Daily. This is not a joke. The satirical outlet The Onion is set to take over Infowars, the site that is run by notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Yes, you heard that correctly.

Rachel Abrams: Last Thursday, The Onion launched its own version of Infowars, the infamous online hub of misinformation created by Alex Jones. The takeover has been years in the making.

News Broadcast: American conspiracy theorist and internet broadcaster Alex Jones has been ordered to pay Sandy Hook families more than $1.5 billion because he perpetrated for years the lie that this shooting was a hoax, that the people were actors. After losing two defamation cases, Jones was ordered to pay more than a billion dollars to the families affected by the Sandy Hook school shooting.

News Broadcast: Breaking news tonight. Alex Jones has just moved to liquidate his personal assets to pay the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre.

News Broadcast: Unable to pay, Jones's assets, including Infowars, were put up for auction.

News Broadcast: He's no longer going to own Infowars, which is this conspiracy empire he's really used to poison the public discourse.

News Broadcast: And then in a surprise twist, The Onion, the satirical news outlet has won a bankruptcy auction to take control of Infowars. The Onion stepped in. They announced plans to convert Infowars into a parody of itself and committed to sharing proceeds from the new venture with the Sandy Hook families.

Tim Heidecker: Hi everybody, it's Tim Hideker here. I'm broadcasting now live. Thank you for joining me. We have major major announcements to go through here.

Rachel Abrams: Now, after nearly 2 years, The Onion parody of Infowars is live.

Tim Heidecker: Make no mistake, we will be the new Infowars.

Rachel Abrams: Today we speak with Onion CEO Ben Collins and comedian Tim Haidiger about what they plan to do with Infowars and why they fought so hard to take control of it. It's Tuesday, July 7th. Hi Ben.

Ben Collins: Hey Rachel Abrams. Nice to meet you.

Rachel Abrams: Nice to meet you, too. Thanks for being here.

Ben Collins: Thanks for doing this at all. Yes.

Rachel Abrams: Early last week, I sat down with Ben Collins, the CEO of The Onion.

Ben Collins: I got to practice my daily h [laughter]

Rachel Abrams: and actor and comedian Tim Haidiger. Tim, am I allowed to ask you to just give me your Alex Jones impression?

Tim Heidecker: Yeah, I'm like a trained seal now. [laughter] We we knew that was the case. And frankly, that's what that's why we're that's why we're talking about it. You know, [laughter]

Rachel Abrams: Collins and Haider were preparing for The Onion's imminent relaunch of Infowars. The Onion has been around for almost 40 years and became infamous for skewering everything from American politics to pop culture.

Ben Collins: In a lot of cases, people need katharsis. Just like give people a,

Tim Heidecker: oh, you're not nuts. This feeling of like you're just not insane.

Ben Collins: The shit that's going on is insane, but you're not nuts.

Rachel Abrams: Collins, who became CEO in 2024 after a decade as a reporter, has revitalized The Onion in a short amount of time.

Ben Collins: And we've leaned into that as hard as we can. It's why we're the I think fifth biggest newspaper in the United States.

Rachel Abrams: I started my conversation with Ben and Tim by asking why they decided to remake Infowars.

Ben Collins: You know, I used to be a reporter and I was covering stupid stuff in the internet when I was a little wee baby reporter guy at the Daily Beast now 11 years ago.

Rachel Abrams: Mh.

Ben Collins: And uh my friend's girlfriend was shot and killed on live TV on Facebook actually. She was the first person killed by a guy wearing a GoPro. It was brutal. It was just really bad. And then like when you Googled my friend's name, the thing that would come up was that he wasn't real or didn't exist and all this stuff like there was the internet had just started to show the cracks of where we were headed.

Rachel Abrams: Mhm.

Ben Collins: So I started covering that for a living. You know, I wound up covering Alex Jones's trial in NBC News and I remember sitting there when the judgment came down. It became clear that he was going to have to owe these people a billion dollars. And he said, "I'm not paying any of this. You guys know you're not going to receive a penny of this." And uh I was like, "N dude, I think you gotta pay money."

Tim Heidecker: Even after I got this gig, I didn't quite know about all the details. And there's a great documentary about it, The Truth Versus Alex Jones. And I sat there, watched that, and just my blood boiled. I couldn't believe what he had subjected those poor people to,

Rachel Abrams: which we know, of course, he not only accused the Sandy Hook shooting of being fake, he accused the parents of being actors. His listeners harassed them. Some of them had to move. Alex Jones as we know was ordered to pay more than $1.4 billion in damages. His assets go to bankruptcy because he does not have that money. Can you just Ben tell us what happens after that vis-a-vis your interest in the onion?

Ben Collins: Sure. We saw it was for sale in fors on like blue sky. There was somebody clipped out a newspaper ad because you have to advertise a bankruptcy auction which sounds weird but it said like you know get Alex Jones's armored truck or whatever. So, I started making some phone calls and I was like, "Does this mean InfoWars is for sale?" And they were like, "Yeah, it does. Get the IP if you want to." And I tried to figure out what to do because I had obviously never purchased something at a bankruptcy auction. So, I had to like learn some stuff and we were like, "Okay, well, we can look at this and I think we can pull this off." So, we get excited to bid on this thing. And the bidding is on, I think, November 14th of 2024. And what happens on November 5th of 2024 is Donald Trump is elected president of the United States.

Ben Collins: So people are wondering like should we do this? Is this a safe thing to do? Dan Bonjino who became the deputy director of the FBI got his start in Air Force. There were so many people tied up in those worlds. So people were spooked and uh we just had to make a decision and I just realized that I can't imagine other people had the gumption or just like time in their lives to take on Alex Jones's harassment campaign. So I was like, "Okay, you know, I'm a man of my word. We're going to go through this and we put down her bid and and then we won." And then Alex absolutely lost his mind. I remember him calling Steve Bannon on air and Steve Bannon being like, "What the [__] is going on?" like on the phone on air onion fors uh as it was like he was panicking. The funniest part is he had never heard of the onion until we bought it.

Rachel Abrams: You're kidding. He said that

Ben Collins: well you could tell like he was like the this newspaper the onion and he just never heard of it.

Rachel Abrams: Just to clarify here. So basically the point of the bankruptcy is that whatever gets sold everything's supposed to go to the families that got that judgment. Right. At this point when you were trying to purchase his assets, his company, was the idea to take it over and give money to the families in some way?

Ben Collins: Yeah, that was the immediate argument when I presented to my team. I was like, you know, we could spend $2 million on Facebook ads and make $2.1 million in onion merch or something, or we can do this really good thing and hope people come along for the ride. And that's what we decided to do. And we look, we uh I have no idea if I would do it again, but I think I would because it's been this gigantic pain in the ass in my life and it's been very scary and we've had the dogs called on us from him and all of his weird psycho.

Rachel Abrams: Alex Jones has come after both of you personally, I believe.

Tim Heidecker: Oh, in the best possible way. I mean, [laughter] I find it incredibly amusing for the most part.

Rachel Abrams: Yeah.

Tim Heidecker: Because he's discovered my body of work. Like you say, he didn't know The Onion and then he found Tim and Eric's stuff from 15 years ago. And you know, if you haven't seen some of that, it it is pretty out there. It's pretty weird, but it's all coming from a place of absurdity and a place of silliness, but he took it all out of context and basically thought that we were some kind of literal demons from hell.

Rachel Abrams: Yeah. So, you make a bid for The Onion. It goes through some legal wrangling in the courts. Now, you have, I believe, celebrated the takeover. I know that you guys are treating it like a fait accompli. are about to launch. But what is the current status? Just to be clear, like you have not officially taken over in the sense that like you can't go into Alex Jones's studio right now in Austin and like start broadcasting from there.

Ben Collins: Yeah. So, uh, last August there was an emergency stay put in place where it says like, uh, the receiver cannot sell these assets until we rule on this. The receiver is the guy in charge of dispensing all these assets. And then Alex Jones said that he was going to shut everything down. Alex Jones's goal, by the way, is to render these assets valueless so he can buy them back for pennies. I don't accept that because that means these families will never get anything.

Rachel Abrams: Mhm.

Ben Collins: So, we went to this receiver and we said, "We'll lease all of this stuff from you. I know you can't sell it, but it doesn't say anything about this." And the receiver is like, "Yeah, I guess that's a good point. My goal is to keep the value of the assets up, make the families happy." And so, we're moving this forward. And part of why we're trying to do this is to keep the value of this asset alive. By making fun of this thing, we were reminding people like, hey, it has value to people on the planet Earth, right? And it has value to us and you know, we would love to take this over and give these families. They haven't received a penny from this guy and it's been four and a half years since the judgment in 10 years since they sued him.

Ben Collins: So, they need this cash and we would love to get them some.

Rachel Abrams: How did the families react when you first told them that you wanted to take this horrific tragedy and make it into a comedy website?

Ben Collins: The first call was was weird because I was like, I work at The Onion. I used to cover this stuff. So, a couple of these families knew who I was. And uh they were like, "Let me think about it."

Ben Collins: And then they came back and they were like, "Now that I thought about it, I see the vision, cuz their goal has always been, you know, make it so he can't do this to any other family ever again."

Rachel Abrams: Yeah.

Ben Collins: this like double whammy of American life that is you just lost your kids in a tragedy and now I'm going to tell everybody they never really lived or they're still alive and they graduated from high school. That's a thing that these people say now.

Ben Collins: And I the strength of these families is absurd. Like you've met these people.

Rachel Abrams: They are the strongest people I think I've ever met in my entire life.

Ben Collins: And then we had this like really beautiful phone call with them maybe a month ago

Rachel Abrams: where the two of you

Ben Collins: um it was us and the onion writing staff

Rachel Abrams: everybody. Yeah.

Ben Collins: And then I think like six or seven of the families

Rachel Abrams: and um I don't know

Ben Collins: bunch of people left overtly crying in the office. It was weird to go into a thing where we thought we were going to say thank you for letting us do this and they were like no no no I don't think you understand. Thank you for doing this.

Rachel Abrams: But I want to go back to this idea that one of the reasons the family supported you and one of your goals is to neuter Alex Jones. Because Alex Jones, he might not have infowars, but he is up and running on the platform Rumble. He is doing his thing. He still has people that are watching him. It is nowhere near the millions of people he had on YouTube before he was kicked off of YouTube. But nevertheless, he is starting to do the same thing he's done before, right? And we don't know how big he's going to be. So, I just sort of wonder like if he's already out there still doing his thing, like what how will you determine whether this effort is successful?

Tim Heidecker: That's a good question. I mean, I tuned in the other day just because I hadn't done the impression in a while and I wanted to listen to his voice and I literally opened it up and he was talking about Charlie Kirk faking his own death.

Tim Heidecker: I was like, right. And we're doing a little bit of a similar take on that on our parody of it.

Tim Heidecker: I mean, he is extremely diminished from where he was 6 years ago, 10 years ago.

Ben Collins: It has like 6,000 views per stream. Like, this is not

Rachel Abrams: It's small.

Ben Collins: It's small. It's a small audience and I agree with you that he can build it back up, but that's America.

Rachel Abrams: We should also note that the core of Alex Jones is a pills selling machine. It is

Rachel Abrams: Well, just to just to be really clear about what you mean here is that he has a part of his business where he sells products to people. And in some cases, those products are to solve issues that he brings up on his show that might not be actual evidence-based issues.

Tim Heidecker: Nuclear war is imminent. Therefore, buy my iodine

Ben Collins: stuff like that. Right.

Rachel Abrams: I also just have to point out, did you guys see I think it was New York magazine, but I can't remember. Somebody years ago did a quiz. Is this product from Alex Jones or is this product from Gwennneth Paltro?

Tim Heidecker: Right. Sure.

Rachel Abrams: And it was very hard to tell the difference. So, I don't want to make it seem like it's singular to Alex Jones.

Tim Heidecker: No. No. But I mean, she's not advocating for the harassment of parents.

Rachel Abrams: I think that's the difference is you can do whatever you want to sell products. Once you start selling products on as a direct response immediately after a mass shooting and start demeaning the people who are victims of that mass shooting, that's to me, I don't know if I'm crazy here, is a step too far.

Rachel Abrams: The two of you have done a very good job of articulating, I think, what you think the core of Alex Jones's product empire and also website is. You've also explained a lot about the Onion and what sort of makes the Onion The Onion. Can you help me understand how does Infowars fit into the core DNA of The Onion?

Ben Collins: So, The Onion, in my opinion, has always been the best at going after the dominant mode of media at the time. We always go after the way people actually get their information. And this was a, you know, a shot across the bow. It's a little bit bigger than what we usually do in the sense that we're directly going after the information war people who are trying to make you feel bad about everything you do so you can buy a supplement. But that's how everything operates. You see like you know RFK who is carrying around sauerkraut and talking about peptides and all these other things like the current dour addiction of people who subscribe to things on the internet. So like to me it was an obvious opportunity to take this model that was really not invented but perfected by Alex Jones and say let's just lay it all bare.

Rachel Abrams: After the break we talk about what it is like to make comedy in this political environment. We'll be right back.

Rachel Abrams: I want to talk about comedy, not just Infowars comedy, but just sort of more broadly comedy in the Trump administration. A lot of comedians have said, and I've heard you guys discuss this, that satire is really hard in the Trump administration, which is I've never quite understood exactly why. And I feel like it's not the perspective that you guys have taken. And so I wonder if Tim, you can explain what you think the opportunity is for comedy that other comedians who say that are missing.

Tim Heidecker: Sure. I mean, you try to get to very universal, you know, human feelings. I'm not trying to just go like, haha, look at Trump's orange complexion. I want to get into like what is it about being a human being that gets you to the place where you're doing that to yourself? And I want to try to do that in a entertaining or funny way. I think it's also okay to at this moment in time, it's enough to just go like whatever the debacle is this week, whatever the insanity is, I think it's enough right now, you can just go, I think that's crazy. And if you can try to do it in a funny, witty way, at least people out there looking for signals that they're not alone can get something. They can get like, okay, I'm not crazy. That's crazy.

Rachel Abrams: I want to ask you guys though, like the way you are describing what you're doing does not sound ideological. But just to push back a little bit, like I went to the Onion website earlier today and there's like a zillion headlines about Trump and RFK Jr., Ken Paxton. Um, and I'm as somebody who's read The Onion, I know that you made fun of Biden. I know that you make fun of Democrats. I get that. But there's something called the Babylon bee, which for people that don't know is described funny stuff. It is described as like the onion for conservatives. Basically, the implication being that you guys have a liberal ideological bent, right? And I think that certainly in this moment, you could get that impression looking at the Onion website. I want to understand like how broad are you trying to appeal in terms of an audience?

Tim Heidecker: I would just say that I don't think about an audience often. I just try to express what's inside of me out into the world and I it will be ideological a lot of the time because I have a point of view. But I will say Infowars isn't going to be overtly political necessarily and maybe not really at all. I mean, we're making fun of food influencers and we'll be making fun of people that certainly voted for, you know, Mam Dani in New York, you know, and our friends of mine. Like you got to of course look at the world around you and see things that you kind of cringe at even though you might ideologically align with them. And we're not going to be afraid to do that, but we're not interested in punching down. Uh we're not looking at making fun of swaths of people because we're essentially scared of them.

Ben Collins: Yeah. The most recent takedown request we got from a politician was from a very prominent Democrat. You know, that's we we really do hammer all sides. The Democratic Party is really upset at us because they think that we sank Joe Biden's 2024 campaign

Rachel Abrams: because you didn't cheer him on. Is that the idea?

Ben Collins: Yeah.

Rachel Abrams: Okay.

Ben Collins: And uh I'm not going to ever step in on that sort of thing ever.

Rachel Abrams: I wonder if you guys succeed, if the website takes off, besides the financial benefit of succeeding, whatever that looks like, whatever your metrics are, just what do you think you will have accomplished besides sidelining Alex Jones, besides making him less offensive or powerful?

Ben Collins: I mean, creating another place for quality um art and media to exist that is pretty damn independent. I mean, this is one of the few bastions of not this monopolized super companies that we're having to live with. So, what we hope to have accomplished in, let's say, 5 years is we've retrained people's brains to think of infowars as meaning something fundamentally different. and separate it from that ghoul. If he wants to tell people about Charlie Kirk faking his own death or something, he's free to do it on the side of the highway.

Ben Collins: You know, everything about Enforce is horrible except the branding and the catchphrase they came up with.

Rachel Abrams: And their catchphrase is there's a war on for your mind, which is just a perfect it's a beautiful sentence, right?

Ben Collins: And that will remain a thing that we do basically like a mission statement or a you know something to point at where there has been a war on for your mind for the last 10 years. There's no question about that. Like we have lived through that and I would say normal people have lost in part because they didn't know they were in a fight and we're going to give people the ability to make fun of the processes and the ways people get information. That's going to be the through line that gets us through this. And like characters and ideas and things are going to build out of that. We are constantly being inundated

Tim Heidecker: with a bunch of insane garbage and [] frankly and that [] had no counterweight and we're going to try to

Rachel Abrams: Yeah. I think that sorry to interrupt you, but I've been thinking over the years a lot about darkness and comedy and death and comedy and it is a way to like survive the chaos of the world on a very deep level. Like the comedians, the writers, whoever, creatives that go into those dark places are doing it at a service for themselves to sort of exercise the fear of these real things. And then that gets received by an audience and I think it does a service to make them feel like okay this is something that happens and we have to laugh about it. There's obviously lots of things we could do about it but it's just like making you feel like all this crazy [__] is hanging over our heads but we shouldn't be afraid of it all the time.

Rachel Abrams: Ben Tim, thank you both so much for joining us.

Ben Collins: Hey, thank you. I really appreciate it.

Rachel Abrams: After we spoke to Ben and Tim, we reached out to representatives for Alex Jones asked for comment about the Onion's takeover of Infowars, but they did not respond.

Rachel Abrams: Here's what else you need to know today. Calls mounted on Monday for the resignation of Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, after a former girlfriend accused him of rape. In an interview with Politico, the former girlfriend, Jenny Rascott, described an incident during which Platner let himself into her home and forced himself on her despite her repeated pleas for him to stop. In a social media post, Platner denied the allegations and said he would take time to quote reflect on the path forward. Both parties see Maine as a battle in the midterms and a deciding race over who will control the Senate. Prominent Democrats withdrew their endorsements of Platner after the allegations surfaced on Monday, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, Representative Roana, and Senator Ruben Ggo. The Senate Democratic Campaign Arm, which had opposed Platner in the primary, also called for him to quit and pledged to withhold financial support from his campaign if he remained in the race.

Rachel Abrams: Today's episode was produced by Caitlyn O'Keefe and Chris Benderev. It was edited by Mark George with help from Ben Calhoun, Michael Benwis, and Paige Cowitt, and contains music by Pat McCusker, Alicia Betub, and Marian Lozano. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.