OnionWars
A short reading list on today’s news
The Onion is taking over Infowars. Again. The announcement came today, April 20, which is the 27th anniversary of the Columbine shooting. Take that how you want. A licensing deal, for now, pending a Texas judge’s sign-off on April 30 and whatever appeal stunt Alex Jones pulls next. I wrote about the original purchase back in November 2024, then spent the next year and a half watching it get strangled in bankruptcy court and wondering if it was ever going to actually happen. It’s happening. Tim Heidecker is creative director. Perfect casting. Jones has vowed to keep broadcasting from a new site, because of course he has. Nice to have some good news for once.
Congrats to my friends over at The Onion, by the way!
Below is a short reading list. Today’s news, Collins doing the longer version on Pablo Torre, and the people who’ve actually been on this for close to a decade.
Where to read what happened today
For a clean overview, Benjamin Mullin and Elizabeth Williamson’s NYT piece is the one to read. It’s got the timeline, the deal mechanics, the whole thing, plus the best Heidecker quotes of the day. Heidecker calls the whole thing “a beautiful joke.” He’s right. But he also tells the Times he wants Infowars to eventually become a home for actually weird, actually ambitious comedy. That’s the part I’m paying attention to.
Hadas Gold at CNN is shorter but has Collins quotes with more bite than the press-release stuff everyone else is running. Eight years and three days after the Sandy Hook families first sued Jones, Collins tells CNN, they have not collected a cent.
Where to hear Collins tell it
For Collins telling the story himself, Pablo Torre had him on today. Watch the whole thing. My favorite bit: the part about Trump’s DOJ sending a threatening letter to Chris Mattei (lawyer for the Connecticut Sandy Hook families) last September. At Alex Jones’s request, basically. That didn’t come up in any of today’s wire copy, and I don’t know why not.
For the people who’ve actually lived this
Anna Merlan at Mother Jones did the piece today that nobody else quite did. She got Lenny Pozner, Noah’s father (Noah was the youngest kid murdered at Sandy Hook), who spends his days filing copyright takedowns on images of his dead son because those images keep getting recycled into “crisis actor” content whenever there’s a new mass-casualty event somewhere else. She talks to Chris Mattei about the legal strategy, and to Josh Owens, the former Infowars employee who quit in 2017, about what he calls “false comfort in the deplatforming and the trial judgements.” Owens is right. Today’s news is real progress for the families. The bigger fight, which started in 2018 when they first sued, is nowhere close to over.
For the longer view, two books. Robbie Parker’s A Father’s Fight: Taking on Alex Jones and Reclaiming the Truth About Sandy Hook came out in November 2024, right after The Onion’s original auction bid. Parker is Emilie’s father. Emilie was six when she was murdered at Sandy Hook. The book is his account of everything that came after.
Josh Owens wrote The Madness of Believing, a memoir about his years inside Infowars. He’s the ex-employee Merlan quotes. Read it if you want to understand what Infowars actually was as a workplace. The culture, the grift, the whole operation. Merlan blurbed it.
About the hearing
April 30 is when the Texas judge rules. Here’s hoping it’s a yes. The Onion crew has stuck with this for a year and a half through a lot of bullshit. They deserve to see this one land.
Godspeed, OnionWars!
Heidekker’s comedy will have to be plenty ambitious to surpass the Theatre of the Absurd that is the Trump administration. “Onion or Trump” is a game it’s easy to lose.
Not a cent yet for the families? That's discouraging. Fingers crossed that The Onion finally gets its day in court, at least. 🤞