When The Onion made a bid to buy conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars two years ago, Donald Trump had just won his second presidential election—and, for many, things were looking dark.
“You guys remember … how fucking hopeless we felt?” Onion CEO Ben Collins asked an audience at the WIRED World Fair in Miami Wednesday. At the time, he asked his partner, researcher and journalist Kat Abughazaleh, if she was up for walking “into a fucking burning building” by trying to take over Jones’ media empire. Her reply, according to Collins, was “Yeah. Nobody else is going to do this.”
Although The Onion is still in an ongoing legal battle over Infowars—it won the media network in a bankruptcy auction but a federal judge in Texas struck the deal down—Collins is feeling more hopeful in light of the Democrats’ midterm wins.
“I want people to feel hope today because things changed last night,” he said. “We have an attorney general in Texas who might make a different decision.”
Collins joined comedian Patti Harrison, who stars in The Onion’s parody Infowars show, in a panel about the role of satire in society and politics. Collins also cagily spoke about The Onion’s interest in sports—comments that made more sense on Thursday when he posted on Bluesky, “The Onion is extremely close to buying an honest-to-goodness, Division 1 college football bowl series bowl game.
Yes, we’re trying to pull off The Onion Bowl.”
During the conversation, the pair discussed a lot of what has caused that sense of hopelessness in the Trump era: Jones’ disinformation campaign against the parents of Sandy Hook school shooting victims; ICE raids; Democrats abandoning trans rights. But they also talked, albeit in measured tones, about the value in fighting back with humor.
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“Comedy is a good pill-in-the-cheese way to sort of introduce ideas to people,” Harrison said, noting that although she let out “a huge sigh of relief” over the midterms, there’s a large swath of the population that is still “truly radicalized.” “They’re still out there drinking Mountain Dew,” she added, perhaps a nod to a nonsensical joke Vice President JD Vance made about how his love for Diet Mountain Dew could be viewed as “racist.”
Collins, who was previously an extremism reporter, extolled the virtues of being able to state things plainly via a satirical site. And he noted that many of The Onion’s headlines—including “almost everything that we say about RFK [Jr.]”—end up coming true.
“We don’t need three sources to write down the perfect sentence about what’s wrong in the United States,” Collins said. “We’re allowed to get to the heart of the matter a lot faster.”
Both also reflected on the internet being a lifeline for them while growing up in small towns. For Harrison, MySpace offered her a chance to talk to “other weird people” who were into “weird stuff” she had no access to in a rural, Christian, white community.
“I don’t think social media is intrinsically bad,” she said. “I think the version of it that we have is truly abusive and evil.” The algorithmic era of being online means that sometimes her content gets pushed on people who don’t get it; when she recently dressed up as Elon Musk in a black MAGA hat for a WIRED cover, a lot people told her it was “so fucked up.”
But she said comedy is still thriving online and it is possible to “de-algorithmize our internet.”
Collins’ take was harsher. He referred to the current iteration of the internet as a “joy vacuum” that “takes away anything that could be fun.” However, spaces like The Onion offer catharsis. “You kind of need to find ways to stay sane when things are so messed up,” he said.
For now, he says the most fun he has is “playing around in the real world,” including The Onion’s writer’s room, or just hanging out with friends. Then again, he adds, “I do hope that some benevolent-ass companies come soon and try to fix it.”
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