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.
InfoWars, 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.
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 it looks onine
The homepage of the new site has a simple layout at first glance. Core colors include black, white, and alarmist red. A black-and-white top navigation includes the new logo, which replaces the “O” in “InfoWars” with an onion, followed by menu items for the merch store and membership. A red news ticker runs immediately below it, as well as at the bottom of the visible page, bookending a full-bleed video: a special “Emergency Broadcast” in which Heidecker satirizes Jones as part of an ongoing series.
The program for the premiere InfoWars episode will feature Heidkecker’s “Emergency Broadcast,” the first episode of an ongoing Onion series called The Jim Haggerty Show, and a “couch gag” involving an InfoWars elf.
Additional content will include short-form segments from various comedians, including Husk, Harris Alterman, and Skyler Higley, along with Adult Swim-style interstitials created by Vic Berger. Episodes will stream across all platforms The Onion is on, including Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky, as well as its own website.
Heidecker, whose broad responsibilities include content strategy and talent recruitment, plans to continue to bring on new talent with strong points of view to parody internet culture even more broadly, through expected (podcasts, cooking shows, “get ready with me” videos) and unexpected formats.
“This is not just stuff that you scroll through,” Heidecker says. “This is good shit.”
Jones’s InfoWars capitalized on fearmongering conspiracies spun up with clickbaity copy, creative, and marketing to grab viewers. This design ethos was ultimately a way for Jones to churn out sales of the supplements and survival gear he hawked on his website to stay solvent: Think long, misleading, and urgent headlines and banner ads with supplement bottle graphics electrocuted by orange lightning bolts.
The new InfoWars visuals are a similarly arranged marriage between the web of yesteryear and the alarmist nonsense of today’s manosphere. At least to start, the biggest homepage visual of the new InfoWars is Heidecker’s parody of Jones, wearing a suit with undue breathing room across the shoulders and the vein-popping on-air disposition of someone who spent the last five minutes trying to break a brick in half with their bare hands.
“It’s meant to feel unhinged, and it’s meant to feel off the cuff and not thought out,” says Heidecker of his performance. “I couldn’t read anything in that style. I could just go around and bloviate. If you watch him, it is not really information heavy. It is bluster and it is repetition and it is exaggeration. So in the satire of it, my job is to try to be as ridiculous as possible without losing sight of who you’re doing or what the character is.”
It’s also meant to be a salve to people who are frustrated with the current political and online ecosystems, even if it doesn’t have much effect on the people being satirized.
“There’s really the majority of this country that thinks what’s going on on a daily basis is probably insane, and it either stresses them out or they’ve checked out,” Heidecker says. “I’m not saying I’m playing to the majority of the country, but good satire should be able to reflect the insanity that people see and make them feel like they’re not going crazy because somebody else sees what they see about how crazy this is.”
“Crazy, kooky, wacky” website design
According to Heidecker, his Jones parody will sunset eventually, so the rest of the website has to graphically skewer the manipulative tactics of a grifter spewing made-up theories.
The simplest way to do this is to simply apply the tropes of the InfoWars visual brand in a new context to show just how illogical it is—which is exactly what Heidecker’s creative team, Mia Di Pasquale and Danielle Strle, do.
“Everybody’s wild for news tickers now,” says Strle, who is also the chief product officer of InfoWars. “We’re wild for news tickers, so they’ll be going in every direction on the site.”
They’re also reappropriating the ad style of InfoWars, with intentionally schlocky banner ads that offer products like Demon Guard “holy protection patches,” oxygen absorbing pills, “patented” tablets to turn your gold into piss, or to send $10 to your grandson for just $50. A steal!
These ads redirect to real InfoWars merch (by The Onion), faux product pages (Demon Guard, oxygen pills, and piss tablets are supposedly all sold out) or Onion memberships.
Design elements of what Strle describes as the “crazy, kooky, wacky” website are intended to gamify the experience of scrolling online and make it fun enough for users to seek out InfoWars as a destination. In a preview of the sight, Strle shows off its most surprising navigation elements.
“Looks like a regular website, right? But it’s not,” she says. “It’s a website with four websites in one.”
Sure enough, navigating to another page actually opens what she jokingly calls a “tower of terror”: a 3D, four-faced column with content on each side. It’s a novel interaction that couldn’t be achieved within the framework of a social media stream.
“It’s really fun on mobile,” Strle says. “If we’re going to get people off of the platforms, like we want to give them something with a little fun.”
The physical form of the tower plays into the content story that’s being told on the site, namely, right-wing fearmongering. “But the wildness of it speaks to the inherent insanity of the conspiratorial ecosystem that we’re so freaking happy to have had some part in destroying so that we can rebuild it anew into something more beautiful,” Strle says.
Netflix of comedy
The new InfoWars’s gamification of its UX speaks to its broader goal: getting people off socials and onto this new site (later, perhaps an owned app). “The idea on a whole is to create a brand-new curated space for all of these people to live and make it feel less algorithmic overall,” Di Pasquale, who is head of programming, says of the creators she’s onboarding and the site’s UX.
Small, quirky details, like reskinning the InfoWars logo in a rainbow gradient and using rainbow hoverlinks creates a different overall frame for the user who’s watching videos than the standard UX of Instagram would. While video will be distributed across social platforms, the idea is still to funnel people to the site.
“The idea of having a destination somehow feels fresh again, right?” Strle says, noting the team wanted to build a website that steers people away from the “eyeball bait” and “soul torture” of social media. “We want to have a place where everything’s going to be funny. Nothing is going to be some bullshit trying to make you feel bad about yourself.”
Some might say the best way to skewer InfoWars is to completely rebrand it. But for The Onion, keeping the InfoWars name and its assets emphasizes the mission of the new platform. “We are repossessing this name and taking it in a new direction that’s going to be better,” Strle says.
Eventually, the team hopes that Jones’s InfoWars will be completely forgotten. “From the beginning, I thought it’s a very interesting social experiment or attempt to change meaning, to change what people think of when they think of InfoWars,” Heidecker says.
It’s in service of an altruistic sort of revenge. “So much of this is tethered also to the mission of providing justice for the Sandy Hook families,” Di Pasquale says. “That’s the massive motivation behind all of this, and they’re very much on board with what we’re doing, and that feels really, really good too.”