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

FastCompany: 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. [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 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. [Image: InfoWars] 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.

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The rebranding of InfoWars is significant due to its controversial past and the unique approach of using humor to redefine the brand, making it relevant for brand strategy professionals, though it may not be directly actionable.