The new InfoWars website will make you forget all about Alex Jones—eventually

Tim Heidecker’s favorite form of comedy wastes your time. So there’s no better punch line than the internet, society’s ultimate time suck, which has woven its addictive, algorithmic tendrils into every single aspect of our lives, bottoming out in the silty, dark, disorienting unreality of Alex Jones. Info Wars, the right-wing conspiracy theorist’s poison pill of a brand, went up for auction in 2024 after the families of the victims of a 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School successfully sued him for defamation, and he subsequently declared bankruptcy in 2022. That’s when the satirical website The Onion stepped in. It has been attempting to officially take over InfoWars’s brand assets and related production equipment (the bid has been mired in court appeals by Jones), with the intention of donating its proceeds to those families.The team, helmed by Onion CEO Ben Collins and Heidecker as creative director, isn’t waiting any longer. InfoWars.com is still in limbo, but a new InfoWars website is launching today all the same, as a sort of pirated brand. Spending time on the site is like looking at a simulated head-on crash that collides the visual urgency of a 24-hour news cycle with the low-fi, low-res graphics of desktop-era websites, print tabloid ads, and overnight infomercials for Bowflex or Magic Bullet. [Image: InfoWars]The resulting website is, at launch, a vehicle for making Jones and his insidious website a (very funny) punch line. But that satire is in service of a greater long-term ambition. Eventually, the new InfoWars wants to become a challenger to social media—one that could someday look like a Netflix of comedy.“For the short term we’re gonna take direct shots at what everyone thinks of as InfoWars and goof on that pretty directly. We’ve been calling that phase one,” Heidecker tells Fast Company. “Then phase two is to become a player and a competitor to the various . . . social media platforms.”The role of satire now, and how