“Legally, we have to say this is a direct parody of Alex Jones and all this bullshit, until we’re allowed to take over all his stuff,” Collins tells WIRED. “But until then, we’re having a lot of fun.” Jones’ attorneys did not return requests for comment from him; messages to Infowars email accounts were returned as undeliverable.
Lawson calls the seizure of the Infowars name “karmic justice” for the Sandy Hook families, who have yet to receive any settlement money from Jones. The Onion plans to initially give $100,000 from merch sales directly to the families, Collins told the Associated Press.
The Infowars parody also meets business and cultural needs, Lawson explains.
“We kind of realized at some point we need some satirical product that is natively internet satire,” Lawson says. “But the problem is the internet is so hard to satirize because there is no one internet. In order to make satire, you need a shared understanding of some medium that you break.”
When Collins conceived of the stunt acquisition of Infowars, they began to see it as an opportunity to target one all-too-common digital format: “These blowhard assholes who have a million listeners [and] will say and do anything to make a buck,” Lawson says. “It’s these podcasters, they’re the thing you can satirize, the Joe Rogans and the Alex Joneses.”
The idea, Collins says, is to ridicule the conspiracist internet brain rot that has infected the entire social media ecosystem. “It allows us to like break down how fucking stupid everything is and how people talk now,” he explains. “People are just constantly trying to find the big secret thing that is running the world, but in reality, the big secret thing that’s running the world is right fucking in front of us, it’s the big grafty fucking asshole government that we live under the thumb of.”
Besides Heidecker, the livestreams will include other familiar faces and voices. Tim Robinson of I Think You Should Leave and The Chair Company calls in as “Tim from Ohio” in the premiere episode, leading to a debate as to whether Bozo the Clown was actually several different people. Fictional newscaster Jim Haggerty (Brad Holbrook) returns as well, having abandoned his anchor job at the Onion News Network to spout paranoid crackpot views while advertising products like “Hog Water.”
And a delirious opening theme is provided by comedian-musician Nick Lutsko, who has frequently gone viral with tunes mocking Jones and other right-wing personalities. This song is immediately derailed when Lutsko’s idea for a cartoon “Infowars Elf” mascot is rejected by corporate higher-ups—but he keeps forcing the character back into the theme anyway.
“This is very much like, an ‘Avengers, assemble’ sort of thing for everybody who’s been making fun of these assholes for years,” Collins says. “I do think if [this cast] had been direct foils all along to Trumpism that we probably wouldn’t have Trumpism.” Adds Lawson, “I do worry about democracy, and I think that satire is the answer to that, being able to point out the things that we look around and say, ‘This isn’t right.’”