The Onion's plan to finally take over Infowars

NPR's Scott Detrow speaks to Ben Collins, CEO of the satirical news outlet The Onion, about a long-delayed plan to take over Infowars and pay damages in a defamation case to Sandy Hook families.

Transcript

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

There have been a lot of false, bombastic conspiracy theories to come out of podcaster Alex Jones and his former Infowars platform over the years.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

ALEX JONES: They tell your kids they got to love Justin Biebler (ph), and then Biebler says, hand in your guns.

These are people that had gay sex hundreds of times in coffins.

I don't like them putting chemicals in the water.

DETROW: But the billion-dollar line of disinformation was his claim that the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary was a hoax. Sandy Hook families sued and won. They've yet to be paid the $1.4 billion in damages, though, from that defamation case. And that's where The Onion comes in. The satirical news outlet has been trying to take over the Infowars brand since 2024, and despite continued legal hold ups, The Onion's CEO, Ben Collins, is planning to relaunch Infowars as a comedy site today. Ben Collins joins us now. Welcome.

BEN COLLINS: Thank you for having me. And I'm sorry that you just heard that voice.

DETROW: You know, we're here. It's OK. So before we talk more broadly, I just want to kind of walk through the order of operations here. The Onion bought Infowars at auction, right? That was step one of this process?

COLLINS: That was step one of this process. Yeah, back in - nine days after the 2024 election, we were the only other group to bid on Infowars other than Alex Jones' shell company.

DETROW: And the thinking was, this could be funny, but also this is a way to help get some money to these Sandy Hook families?

COLLINS: Yeah. It was, in my opinion, a win-win. Our number one goal is to help them get some cash because at present, they've not received any. If we didn't bid on this thing, Alex Jones would have gotten this thing back for, like, a couple of bucks, probably, and that's not ideal. And then, you know, he's had a years-long plan to try to devalue this stuff so he could get it back from his landlord. Like, that's the level at which he's trying to not pay these people. So we, at least in the intermediary steps here, are going to get them some cash. And long term, we're going to turn this, in my opinion, really bad website - really, really bad website - into a really good one and give people some hope that maybe funny things can still happen.

DETROW: I want to talk about all of that. But first, without going through every single twist and turn, what is the best way to understand where this stands in court right now, what the hold up has been, what the issue has been as to whether you can use the domain name and all of that?

COLLINS: Sure. So here's the deal with this. He has lost two different cases - one in Texas to a couple of the families and then one in Connecticut to even more families. The Connecticut one went all the way to the Supreme Court, and he lost. The one in Texas, there has been a - what's called an emergency stay, which bans the receiver who oversees all of these assets on behalf of the families from disbursing them. This stay usually lasts, like, days or weeks. This time, it has lasted about a year. So what we're doing is moving on forward anyway. We're trying to prove that these assets do have value to these families, and we are going to do a parody of Infowars, starting Thursday night at 8 p.m. eastern time anywhere you see video - YouTube, Twitch, wherever you want to watch it. And it's going to be pretty spicy. Very explosive is the word I would use for it.

DETROW: How - like, what's the content going to be? Is it going to be Oniony (ph)? Is it going to be a straight Infowars parody? Is it going to be a weird mix of both? Like, what are you thinking?

COLLINS: Yeah, it's going to be both among some other shorts and some other stuff that we're really proud of, which will allude to the future of Infowars; is Tim Heidecker's "Emergency" broadcast, which is, you know, uses the Infowars studio and set and all that stuff. And he's also selling supplements, by the way, 'cause that's the goal of this whole thing, obviously. He's selling Pure O Oxygen Capsules because, as you know, breathing is just too much work.

DETROW: You're saying a lot of stuff that I feel like somebody who's not deeply online is, like, what language is he speaking. But the fact is a lot of the stuff you're saying is, like, pretty close to nonparody of some of the stuff we've heard on Infowars.

COLLINS: Yeah, or stuff you heard from your crazy neighbor. And I think that's why it's been such a hard 10 years, is because I think people at face value have just said, oh, these are silly people. They're just going to go away because no one could take this seriously. Whatever. And now you have a neighbor who is just, like, injecting random Chinese peptides into his arm and yelling at your child through the lawn. Like...

DETROW: This stuff is influencing real life and becoming more and more mainstream.

COLLINS: Everywhere. Yes, and, like, we have been told to not take this seriously over and over again, and now they run every branch of government. And it's time to start making fun of these people. So we're very excited to finally, at last get the guys who are the best at this making fun of the dominant form of media in our culture right now, which is selling a bunch of [expletive] pills to people who are very afraid.

DETROW: I want to - I'm just going to read the full line. This is a story from our member station, WBEZ, covering this relaunch. In response, a shirtless Jones recently appeared online saying of The Onion's Infowars grab, they are body snatchers. They are skin-walkers. They literally take your skin. This is going to backfire big time.

COLLINS: Yeah, we've been saying skin-walker in the office a lot recently. It's like, I'd never heard that term until he said it, and, boy, is it fun. It's, like, such a fun sentence to say.

DETROW: It's vivid.

COLLINS: We're not going to take his skin, unfortunately. I have no use for it. I don't prefer my skin to many people's, but I do prefer my skin to his. I'm going to keep mine. The reality is, like, look, he's being all silly about it now and all this stuff, but his most die-hard people will go and harass you until you have to move. A lot of these families, the Sandy Hook families, had to move away from their hometown. After the worst thing in the world happened to them, they had this extra stuff to contend with. And I just don't think that's good. I think that there should be consequences for that. And if the law tells you you have to give them a billion dollars, you should at least give them a little bit of that.

DETROW: Let me ask you - my favorite topic, the economics of the media business right now.

COLLINS: (Laughter) Woah.

DETROW: Another uplifting topic, you know? Like, how - what is your plan to get money to Sandy Hook families but also keep The Onion solvent?

COLLINS: Yeah.

DETROW: Because it's hard to make money with a website and media products right now.

COLLINS: Yeah. I want to make it clear - this has been good for us. People want people to take a stand against what's going on. And there's a huge market for this. I don't know if you know this but what's happening right now in this country is deeply unpopular. Like, it's really bad. And for people to just call that out straightforwardly instead of being all wishy-washy about it, it's what people actually want.

We have over 80,000 subscribers who get an actual physical newspaper in the mail every month. And that's in no small part because we take stands like this. We take big swings, and we stand up for decent people who need a little bit of help. But also, most importantly, we make fun of the bad guys in a way that nobody else can. So, financially, this has been good for us.

And I hope other people take this as that, as well, is that you can - although it might be a pain in the ass legally for a minute in terms of, you know, having to hire a lawyer to defend against a bunch of psychos, like, it's actually worth it at the end of the day. And people will remember what you did in this moment.

DETROW: Ben Collins is CEO of The Onion and tonight launches a new comedy version of Infowars. Thanks so much for talking to us.

COLLINS: Thank you so much, man.

(SOUNDBITE OF DAMIEN RICE SONG, "VOLCANO")

DETROW: NPR reached out to Alex Jones' legal team for a response. Lawyer Norm Pattis sent us this email. Let me see if I get this right. Satire as a virtue? The Onion as a moral icon? Alex was wrong about Sandy Hook, but he was right about one thing - the world has gone haywire. Mocking Alex's supporters simply deepens the wounds that drew folks to Alex in the first place. Was it the Wicked Witch of the West who said, what a world, what a world?

(SOUNDBITE OF DAMIEN RICE SONG, "VOLCANO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.