In news that sounded as if it had come straight from the satirical publication itself, the Onion acquired conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars out of bankruptcy on Thursday with help from the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting victims and the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety.
While Ben Collins, the Onion CEO and former disinformation reporter, tells Vanity Fair that the takeover is “maybe the funniest joke of all time,” the move has also garnered a sense of “poetic justice” for John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown. Jones was forced to sell Infowars and all of its property in a court-ordered auction after using his platform to spread rampant misinformation about the 2012 shooting, repeatedly referring to the tragedy as a “hoax.” When Jones lost the defamation lawsuit the families of the victims brought against him in 2022, he was ordered to pay $1.4 billion in damages to them.
Everytown will be the exclusive launch advertiser for the reconfigured Infowars, which is set to transform into a parody of its former self, mocking those who spin conspiracies and blasting the message of gun violence prevention. I spoke with Collins and Feinblatt after news of the acquisition broke. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Vanity Fair: How and when did the idea to acquire InfoWars out of a bankruptcy auction come to fruition?
Ben Collins: We all read the news that it was for sale back in June, and we all thought it would instantly be a very funny joke, maybe the funniest joke of all time. I think that has now proven to be correct, which is great. We’re excited that everybody also believes that it was, but we had to get down to business and figure out how to actually pull it off. From my previous life as a disinformation reporter, I knew some of the Sandy Hook family lawyers. I called them and was like, What is this process? What happens exactly? Because I obviously have never purchased an insane website in a bankruptcy auction before. Over time, the families themselves decided it would be a good idea to join, to be a part of this thing, and they thought it was funny too. As time went on, Everytown has long been a fan of us and vice versa. They’ve been fans of us since we published a story called “No Way to Prevent This, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” We’ve printed it 37 times verbatim, and it is, unfortunately, the most plaintive emotional plea that we have as a country, expressed in art about the gun violence epidemic that we have. Outside of the raw joke of it all, we also started recruiting some Onion and Clickhole hall of famers, and they’ve all come up with incredible ideas.
John, how do you view this collaboration?
John Feinblatt: Ben got it right. We’ve both been so concerned and devoted to this issue of gun safety and addressed it in very different ways. We’ve got at Everytown the facts, the research, the storytelling at our fingertips, and they’ve got the audience and a new way of messaging, particularly to Gen Z. We felt like we both had assets that if we couple them together, we’d each be stronger.
Does this feel like some sort of karmic justice?
Feinblatt: Poetic justice is what I’ve been calling it. When you think about the absolute pain that Alex Jones visited upon the Sandy Hook families, to have Everytown and the Onion join forces to write the new chapter is nothing but karmic justice.
Since Trump was elected again, it doesn’t feel as if resistance media is necessarily resonating in the same way. Has the resistance become satirical in a sense?
Collins: I don’t view it as resistance media. The world is very stupid right now. It’s very dumb. It’s getting dumber day by day. That is a worldwide phenomenon that is not, unfortunately, confined to the United States. We are going to confront that one way or another. So, we are excited to take it on. It’s not our mission to attack specific people. We’re attacking the concepts. We’re attacking the idea of getting people afraid of everything. Alex Jones is a tiny little speck in the universe of imposters who sell you weird stuff. He has created a framework to make people afraid of each other and everything they eat, look at, or think about. That framework has pervaded into other spaces we very much want to go after.
Feinblatt: I think that fear has distorted reality and distorted rational thinking and decision-making, and this is just an opportunity to shine a light on that in a way that we think will be received by people, no matter who they are. We realize this is a big deal, a big scary thing to do, but somebody’s going to do this stuff. We all got to step up. And I think finally, people felt hope for the first time in months, maybe from something they read in the news. That’s what we want people to feel. We want people to think that better things are possible.
How is the Onion gearing up to cover a second Trump administration?
Collins: We’re obviously in a grave and glum experience, but we have a brand new newspaper that so many people subscribe to. Part of that is just going to be a reprieve.
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