A brand new weekly comedy livestream titled Infowars debuts tonight at 8 pm ET, and within the opening minutes of its first episode, the character built around Alex Jones is already dead. The show, produced by satirical outlet The Onion, will stream every Thursday across Twitch, YouTube and Instagram under the handle @realinfowars, with Tim Heidecker serving as creative director and doing double duty as the show's Jones impersonator.
What happens in episode one
Spoilers ahead for the premiere. Jeff Lawson, who owns The Onion's parent company Global Tetrahedron, says it may not be a surprise that they kill off Alex Jones pretty quickly. Ben Collins, chief executive of The Onion, adds more color: in the first episode, Alex Jones is popped like a balloon. Viewers are shown a clear and convincing video that Alex Jones has exploded from eating too much Whataburger.
That fictional bombshell derails the in-universe Infowars-style broadcast, called Emergency, hosted by Heidecker's character. According to Collins, the rest of the episode is devoted to two competing theories, whether the character is still alive despite having exploded inside his car, or whether he had actually been dead for a long time before the explosion, and a body double has been standing in for him ever since.
A name still tied up in court
The Onion first won a bankruptcy auction for the real Infowars back in late 2024, backed by families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Those families had sued Alex Jones over his repeated claims that the massacre was staged, and were awarded judgments totaling more than $1 billion, a sum that pushed Jones toward financial ruin. A federal judge later struck down that original auction deal because of a technicality in how the bidding was conducted.
In April, The Onion announced a fresh deal to take control of Infowars' assets, one that would send hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees to the Sandy Hook families. Jones filed an appeal, and within days a Texas appeals court paused the sale. With the acquisition still stuck in limbo, The Onion has decided to push ahead with its Infowars parody programming on its own channels in the meantime.
Collins says that legally, they have to say this is a direct parody of Alex Jones and all this bullshit, until they're allowed to take over all his stuff, but until then, they're having a lot of fun. Jones' attorneys did not return requests for comment on the matter, and messages sent to Infowars email accounts bounced back as undeliverable.
Karmic justice for Sandy Hook families
Lawson describes the seizure of the Infowars name as karmic justice for the Sandy Hook families, who have still not received any settlement money from Jones. The Onion plans to give an initial $100,000 from merchandise sales directly to those families, Collins has said.
Lawson explains that the parody also answers a business and cultural need The Onion had identified. He says they kind of realized at some point they need some satirical product that is natively internet satire, but the problem is the internet is so hard to satirize because there is no one internet, and to make satire, you need a shared understanding of some medium that you break.
Targeting the podcaster economy
When Collins first conceived of the stunt acquisition of Infowars, the team began to see an opportunity to target a specific, all too common digital format. Lawson describes the target as blowhards who have a million listeners and will say and do anything to make a buck, adding that it's these podcasters, the Joe Rogans and the Alex Joneses, who are the thing you can satirize.
Collins says the broader goal is to ridicule the conspiracist internet brain rot that has spread across the entire social media ecosystem. It lets them break down how stupid everything is and how people talk now, he says. People are constantly trying to find the big secret thing that is running the world, but in reality, the big secret thing running the world is right in front of everyone, the sprawling government machinery people live under.
A cast built from years of mocking Jones
Beyond Heidecker, the livestreams feature other familiar faces and voices. Tim Robinson, known for I Think You Should Leave and The Chair Company, calls in as Tim from Ohio in the premiere episode, sparking a debate over whether Bozo the Clown was actually played by several different people. Fictional newscaster Jim Haggerty, played by Brad Holbrook, also returns, having abandoned his anchor job at the Onion News Network to spout paranoid theories while hawking products like Hog Water.
A delirious opening theme comes courtesy of comedian musician Nick Lutsko, who has repeatedly gone viral for songs mocking Jones and other right wing personalities. The song is derailed almost immediately when Lutsko's pitch for a cartoon Infowars Elf mascot is rejected by corporate higher ups, though he keeps forcing the character back into the theme regardless.
Collins says it's very much like an Avengers assemble moment for everybody who's been making fun of these people for years, and he thinks if this cast had been direct foils all along to Trumpism, there probably wouldn't be Trumpism. Lawson adds that he does worry about democracy, and thinks satire is the answer to that, being able to point out the things people look around and say aren't right.
Building on a viral mockumentary
Collins says he is looking forward to connecting with The Onion's audience on more interactive platforms, pointing to last year's 20 minute mockumentary Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile, which included a live chat, as a template. That project's success helped set the stage for the Infowars spoof channels. That's kind of how they knew they should be doing this more, Collins says, because everyone went wild, and it's very rare to see people react in unison to pedophile jokes like that.
Keeping the value of Infowars alive
Beyond the comedy of mocking MAGA influencers, Collins says using the Infowars name and format this way is part of The Onion's broader strategy in the ongoing legal fight over the company. As Jones has kept delaying court proceedings by every means available, the Sandy Hook families claim he has deliberately driven down Infowars' value to avoid having it liquidated to cover part of his enormous debt.
Collins says they don't want that to happen, because these families have gotten nothing, and they want to give them money. In part, by making fun of this thing, they keep the value of it up. Collins believes this could help The Onion's legal push toward finalizing a sale, which he calls inevitable. One day, he says, they will get the Infowars website, and access to that awesome studio.
Asked whether he expects Jones himself to be watching the livestreams, Collins says, oh, definitely, noting that Jones' reach has already been significantly diminished without the Infowars name, which he could soon lose for good. He needs the clout, Collins says.
