If you haven’t been keeping up via weekly streams and a near-nonstop barrage of clips, Infowars—the Sandy Hook-denying conspiracy mill once headed up by Alex Jones—is now in the playfully nefarious clutches of The Onion. For the past month and a half, Tim Heidecker and a seemingly bottomless rolodex of popular comedians have constructed a bizarro alternate universe version of conspiracy culture in which the real Alex Jones popped like a balloon and was replaced by a clone, and JFK, contrary to popular belief, didn’t kill himself. It’s been extremely effective at skewering the kinds of people once thought unsatirizable. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we talk about all things Infowars.
This time around, we’re joined by Onion CEO Ben Collins, because, against all odds, he and his comedic cohort have managed to transform Infowars—until recently one of the internet’s deepest, darkest toilets—into something funny and good. We discuss how the new Infowars came to be, its larger goal of providing monetary aid to the Sandy Hook families (with the help of gay frogs), and those families’ reaction to the new show’s deranged shenanigans.
We also delve into the particulars of satirizing something as inherently absurd as Infowars, as well as the ins and outs of how the show gets made on a regular basis. This includes, of course, an answer to the question on everyone’s mind: Is Tim Heidecker’s voice OK after doing a remarkably convincing Alex Jones impression for so long? (Barely.)
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, leave a review so that we, too, can dedicate our lives to tormenting Alex Jones.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Ben: Robbie Parker, who’s one of the fathers of [a Sandy Hook child who was killed]—the guy who Alex sort of lasered on immediately after, same day as Sandy Hook—was the only family member to speak publicly at a press conference the day of Sandy Hook. He nervously [did an exhale motion], and Alex took that as him laughing and said that’s why Sandy Hook didn’t happen.
Robbie had to move out of Connecticut. Again, he’d lost his kid. The guy is a NICU nurse, and he lost the ability to speak in public; he had a really hard time even speaking at all. And what he said is, this whole thing that we’ve been doing has been helping him speak again. Once we finally get in that studio [that Jones and co used to own] in Austin, which is just melting now, he wants to read his book in it. That, to me, is the cosmic justice that we get Sandy Hook families. And then we’re still the only people in the world who have at least committed to getting them money. We’re just trying to do the right thing on both ends here.
But [the families] have been so cool about it. They’re good people, and they’re just dogs. The Sandy Hook Promise folks, they don’t want [Jones] to be able to do this again. If you just take all of his stuff, he’s gonna end up in a closet yelling, because this is America and that’s what’s going to happen. But if you take all of his stuff and then spend a long time saying, “The way he did this, you have to be a moron to believe what this guy thinks,” that’s how you actually affect change here.
Nathan: How do you approach that on an episode-by-episode basis? Because I feel like somebody else taking over Infowars would turn it into kind of a current events show where it’s very reactive in an almost South Park-y way. This feels more like it’s riffing on broader themes that an Alex Jones would approach, as opposed to being like “Alright, something happened this week, and we’re going to do a parody of that.” Was that kind of the intention?
Ben: I think in both [The Jim Haggerty Show and Tim Heidecker’s Emergency segments], it was like “Let’s do a character study of what’s actually going on in these people’s brains” instead of “What’s going on with Alex Jones this week.” Because to be real with you, I do not give a shit. I could not care less what’s going on with Alex Jones this week.
Gita: And also he popped like a balloon and is in hell, so we know what’s going on with him.
Ben: Exactly. But I do think that getting to the guts of this [is important]. I don’t know if we had anything to do with this, but people are finally starting to be like “Oh, all these people [like Jones] have weird psychosexual problems, and it’s infecting our military and our government and all these things.” We just lay it all bare.
Like, Jim Haggerty is so desperate to get shot in a nonlethal way.
Nathan: Yeah, I love how he’s always asking his show guests like “How would that work? Do you think I’d still get a lot of attention? Could you make the bullet miss my vital organs?” It’s so good.
Ben: “Would Jesus Christ still be famous if he didn’t die?”
But that’s the thing; that’s what’s actually going on inside these people’s brains right now: “How do I become cool in a world that’s so focused on self-victimization?”
Nathan: “And how can I do it in the most cowardly way possible—in a way where I lose nothing and gain everything?”
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