When The Onion announced in late 2024 that it was acquiring Infowars — the defunct digital platform run by conspiracy theorist and Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones — and was planning to relaunch it as a satirical website making fun of extreme online personalities, Tim Heidecker was immediately intrigued.
“I’ve been following right-wing media, conspiracy theorists, conmen, male influencers as a source of my comedy inspiration,” said Heidecker, who sometimes impersonates Jones on his podcast, Office Hours.
The comedian, best known for Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, the surreal sketch comedy show he created with partner Eric Wareheim, reached out to the team at The Onion, which successfully bid on Infowars in a bankruptcy auction, beating other contenders more sympathetic to Jones’s worldview.
The deal was backed by the families of Sandy Hook victims, who were awarded $1.4 billion in a defamation lawsuit against the host, who repeatedly claimed the 2012 mass shooting was a hoax. Following the judgment, Jones began to liquidate his assets —including the once-lucrative Infowars. Nearly four years after the ruling, he has yet to pay the families what he owes them.
The idea behind the acquisition was two-fold: parody hucksters like Jones; and raise money for the families long denied justice. Jones tried to stop The Onion’s takeover of his website, and the case is currently in legal limbo in Texas. But earlier this month, The Onion went ahead with its plans anyway, launching a spoof Infowars site and an accompanying YouTube channel, with Heidecker serving as both creative director and star.
“We’re just proceeding as if it’s ours, and nobody can really do anything about it, from what we can tell,” Heidecker explained in a recent conversation with The Contrarian.
The comedian puts his well-honed Jones impression to use as the host of Emergency With Tim Heidecker, released every Thursday on the YouTube channel @realinfowars. Playing a character named Tim Heidecker but clearly modeled on Jones, he enthusiastically spouts crackpot ideas and speaks with a voice so ragged it sounds like he gargles glass shards.
Jones is so extreme he might seem beyond parody (how do you get more ridiculous than this?). But Heidecker said he draws a twisted kind of creative inspiration from “decidedly bad people” like Jones and Donald Trump. More than just satirizing them, “What I’m really doing is examining myself,” he said. Heidecker thinks Jones is an odious charlatan, but also marvels at his performance abilities. “The guy can go on the air and go for hours and hold an audience,” he said. “That’s also kind of a sickness, to be able to have that skill, and to be able to disassociate your brain from any meaning.”
At a time when many too media organizations are cowering in fear of the Trump administration, The Onion relentlessly skewers MAGA figures like Stephen Miller and RFK Jr. Emergency has been equally been fearless in its mockery of Jones and the conspiracy-addled right. The debut episode broke the (fake) news of his death, and featured an exclusive video of him “popping like a balloon” in his car. Heidecker then floated a theory that Jones was taken out in a targeted hit by “Big Iodine.”
“You have to take it to a sillier place,” Heidecker says of the parody. “We’re just playing it for jokes and being a little more cartoonish with it.”
Luckily, satirizing Jones doesn’t require a ton of research, although he did tune in to his show not so long ago and “randomly just hit a chunk where they’re talking about Charlie Kirk faking his own death,” he said. “I was like, okay, that’s all I need. [I] literally can dip in for two minutes and get the core of what that show is, which is funny that people watch it for hours. No one’s ever getting anything out of that experience. Nobody’s lives are getting better by watching the Alex Jones show.”
So far, The Onion has raised more than $100,000 through the sale of branded merchandise, money that will be donated to the families — “just to get something going their direction,” Heidecker said.
Another series on the channel, The Jim Haggerty Show, stars Brad Holbrook as a veteran morning TV host who spent 35 years as a “mouthpiece for the mainstream media.” Now liberated from his “corporate shackles,” Haggerty digs into stories being ignored by the liberal press — like the healing power of fish milk.
The satirical effect is heightened by mock ads touting sketchy cures (crab salts) and gadgets (“Demon Guard” holy protection patches) that are only slightly more dubious than the supplements Jones made a fortune selling on his website.
Everything on the new Infowars looks and feels like social media in 2026, with lots of jarring vertical videos, decontextualized clips of people talking into microphones, and ads with “skip” buttons (that don’t actually work).
Social media “is our prime influence,” Heidecker said. “Satire, for the most part, usually reflects the culture, and the culture right now is just looking at the internet.” He likens what he’s doing with the revamped Infowars to the early years of Late Night With David Letterman. “Everybody grew up watching Johnny Carson and Ed Sullivan and Howdy Doody. It was a generation that had watched TV from basically [when] they were born, and that’s how they understood the world. When David Letterman came on, he was making fun of TV. He was making fun of what it was to be a TV show.”
The satire is so precise you might expect it to confuse gullible people on the internet. But so far, the only person who seems to not get the joke is Jones, who went on a shirtless tirade against the “bodysnatchers” at The Onion and accused Heidecker of producing “pro pedo/child kidnapping, torture and murder programs” at Adult Swim.
“That was really funny to see that he couldn’t contextualize our work from 20 years ago,” Heidecker said. “That was a very embarrassing moment for him.”
Heidecker has a vision for Infowars that goes well beyond making fun of Jones. He aspires to turn it into a digital version of Adult Swim, the programming block on Cartoon Network that was once a popular platform for comedy that was too strange to find anywhere else (including Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories).
Emergency and The Jim Haggerty Show were designed to “plant our flag and get people watching,” Heidecker said, but in the coming months he hopes to expand to more content, in the hopes that Infowars will help fill a void in the comedy world.
“There are talented artists and writers and comedians that are a little bit adrift right now because there isn’t really an Adult Swim like there was when I was coming up,” Heidecker says. “Comedy Central, as far as I can tell, airs South Park and The Office 90 percent of the day, and then The Daily Show. There aren’t big swings, big risks being taken at any of these networks. They’re very, very risk-averse when it comes to trying something experimental or different.”
Heidecker is now done filming Emergency, and is looking forward to hanging up his tin foil hat and retiring the Alex Jones schtick — possibly for good. “It runs out of steam, eventually,” he says. “The last thing I want to do is be this seal at the aquarium doing the Alex Jones voice for a decade.”
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian