After a bankruptcy auction, a rejected sale, and a year of legal wrangling, Tim Heidecker and Ben Collins are days away from a court hearing they hope will allow… Onions Finally, he took operational control of Infowars on a licensing basis — paying roughly $80,000 a month to keep the lights on, funneling money to Sandy Hook families and laying the foundation for a long-running comedy platform built on the wreckage of Alex Jones.
Heidecker, Tim and Eric and On the cinema The co-creator who had needed Jones for the better part of a decade was hired as creative supervisor. Collins, a former disinformation correspondent at NBC News who now runs OnionsIt is the public face of the deal.
They caught up with her Hollywood Reporter To talk about making sexy comedy in the age of Trump and whatnot onionIt looks like Infowars is actually up and running on day one.
This is one of the most violent media maneuvers in years. What can you tell me about how it comes together?
Tim Heidecker It’s been a wild ride. I have been involved behind the scenes for several months. About a year or so ago, when the initial news broke, I just reached out. I love playing with these guys, and I’ve been following Alex Jones and the QAnon team for a long time. I offered my help and heard nothing, because at that point it was a dead end. But it came back again last fall. There was a new energy behind it, and they reached out to me.
My initial thought was: “Yes, if you get this thing, it’ll be fun for a while — but then what? Where do you take it? How do you keep hitting it, but maybe not in a directly sarcastic way?” What the world needs now is a home for the people who used to do shows on Adult Swim and Comedy Central and are now all over social media and making amazing, uncoordinated and certainly unfunded things. Could it be that the final joke – the absolutely beautiful conclusion to this saga – is that this turns into a place for creativity, humor and goodwill to flourish?
So, will Infowars end up being the new Adult Swim or Cartoon Network?
Heidecker Definitely a place for centre-left, eccentric, individualistic – I don’t want to say political, but progressive – comedic experiments.
Ben Collins Not pieces of shit.
Heidecker Yes. Not hack specials, not four-hour conspiratorial podcasts by people doing sets at the Comedy Store. Good shit.
With Jimmy Kimmel making interesting jokes about the president, the first lady, and the president against him, do you feel like this is a dangerous time to be doing comedy?
Heidecker Not real. I think it’s less serious than it was in the 1960s. Yes, there will be backlash when you say things that go wrong, but no one I know feels afraid to say what they think. There are consequences for your actions and words, but I’ve said terribly inflammatory things under the guise of humor and I’m not losing sleep over it.
Collins There’s a cottage industry that says there’s never been a more dangerous time to do comedy [than right now]. If you said “I got canceled because of my beliefs” – congratulations, here’s your 90-minute special on Netflix. It’s a very easy thing to say.
It’s a scary time for speaking out in general, for good journalism, and for tough investigative stuff, but that doesn’t mean you’re doing nothing. Onions Always making fun of the big thing in the cultural zeitgeist. We haven’t mocked the power brokers of gut microbiology for too long, and now they’re running the Department of Health and Human Services; We have to emulate these people. If it’s scary, you’re not ready for the job.
Where are you in the legal battle to achieve this?
Collins On Thursday, we have a hearing to finalize this with the families and recipients. We already have an agreement with the families and recipients to acquire Infowars on a licensing basis. The reason it is a licensing deal and not an outright purchase is because there is the possibility of staying in court. It was supposed to be an emergency stay, lasting days or weeks. It’s been going on since August for some reason. We are waiting for this stay to be lifted so that the recipient can sell these items instead of just renting them out.
Until then, we will rent this out and get some money to these families. They haven’t received a penny yet. They are owed $1.4 billion by Alex Jones. He moved things, stopped this, and did everything he could to make sure he wouldn’t pay. We want to at least give them a set of very colorful hats in the meantime, and once they let us buy them, they’ll get the money right away. We’re almost there. On Thursday, we hope to turn on the lights in the completely dark studio.
For the first six months, the license is worth about $81,000 per month?
Collins Yes. It’s basically a pay-to-play way to make sure that this studio’s stuff doesn’t melt away and can eventually be sold. Other than that, I think Alex’s plan was to just get rid of this and declare it worthless so he could buy it back from his landlord. We wanted to boycott these plans so that these families could get some money. At every step, it was a matter of him trying to actually evade paying. We have no objection to escalation here.
And what new wins? onionDoes Infowars powered by Infowars go directly to families forever?
Collins They will get a piece of the merchandise. Actual details of the structure TBD. The families are very interested in getting this out of Jones’ hands first, so we’ll do that. The profits from purchasing the company – when we are eventually allowed to do so – will go 100 percent to them. That’s the high dollar figure we hope to reach. We’re just waiting for it to happen.
The Onion has been rocked by the discovery that its new creative director produced pro-pedophile abduction, torture and murder programmes.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is the main financier of Onions Inn’s acquisition of Infowars and is financing the production… https://t.co/SCCgFMvIGg pic.twitter.com/Pj6ilyXL7L
— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) April 24, 2026
Alex Jones tweeted what he called your picture, Tim. what was that
This is an image from a program I called On the cinema in the cinemawhere my character ran an EDM music festival and distributed toxic vape pens, killing 19 children. My character is arrested and put on trial. A mistrial was declared due to one of the jurors. Everything is great, great content. comedy. imaginary. It didn’t happen to me, even though the character shares my name.
He also posted a ton of old Great show Clips and clips from the film I made with Eric [Wareheim]as if they were verbatim, not sketches, of my true beliefs about child torture and Satanism. It’s so sweet, because 90 percent of the reactions to how he reacted were making fun of him. It feels like the last moments of a beached whale.
Did either of you deal with Jones directly?
Collins Weirdly, no. I had to talk to a lot of people on his staff because I was a reporter covering this stuff. On election night 2016, information warfare was my favorite. I turned on Infowars and watched him and Roger Stone come to grips with the fact that they were in power now. It was a really strange night. So I had to talk to a lot of his followers, who have since left, and get quotes from them. But I don’t think I actually talked to Alex. He’s said a lot about me over the past few years, but I’ve never spoken to him.
Heidecker I’ve appeared on Information warfare Once. They were live streaming the Republican National Convention, so I interrupted the live stream and told him my impression of it.
How did that happen?
He seemed to enjoy it. Like all narcissists, they appreciate being impersonated.
I interviewed Sam Hyde the other day — the right-wing comedian who was on Adult Swim and then turned on you. What are your memories of what happened with that? Was that just an anomaly?
Heidecker I choose not to talk about it, because it is very complicated and irritates a lot of psychopaths. So I’ll keep my focus on Alex.
Who has no psyche in his kingdom.
Collins One psyche at a time.
Heidecker I’ve dealt with all of this before. The world of QAnon – I was in the middle of it. So I know their moves, and it’s a lot less hot than it was back then. This movement has now become very divided, disillusioned and confused. We’re taking precautions, but it feels really hollow.
Collins That’s the thing about Alex Jones. He spent 15 years saying, “There will be guys on the street with masks on, shove you in the back of a truck and put you in a black site.” Then all this shit happened and he said, “Cool. Cool. Let’s go.”
Functionally, the things he worried about happened, and he loved it. This has become a problem for many of his fans. They get everything they want, and the world sucks. The amount of infighting between all the far-right conspiracy theorists is immeasurable. Everyone hates each other, and the battle lines are spread everywhere.
Heidecker This doesn’t mean they have to ride into the sunset and leave. I just watched Truth vs. Alex Joneswhich I was avoiding. If you haven’t watched it, it will make you very excited and ready to try and get this guy out of the audience. He has to go away. It must be completely destroyed. It cannot be forgotten. It cannot be forgiven and it cannot be excused. There should be a lesson for the future that you can’t do this.
He hinted at the long-term plan. But what is the plan for day one of the new information wars? What can you share?
Heidecker We have a plan for the first few months: We’ll have fun laughing at him and making fun of his world for a while. I think this will get old and boring for everyone, including us. Then, we’ll have the means, technology, and interest to start producing original content that’s not really related to Infowars or the satirical side of it — just what we think is funny. We will start rolling it out under this brand. Finally, let’s say in five years, you’ll have to take a second to remember what Infowars was like before we got involved.
Are you stuck with the Infowars name forever?
Heidecker Oh yes. It’s a fun name. It’s a stupid name. It doesn’t mean anything except that it has this great story that you can tell people: “Oh, yeah, that was the location of that lunatic. Now it’s the place I go to see the good stuff.”
Collins One cool thing that Alex did was come up with the name Infowars – because it actually does a very good job of explaining what we’re going through now, which is an information war on a global scale. It’s the No. 1 economy in the United States right now: just building data centers to try to control the path of information. The name is great, but “Alex” is one-note. It’s just: Fear this thing, take this supplement, it’ll make you stronger for the day they come and take all your stuff. I’m sorry, I’m bored by that.
Heidecker I want to add, because I think this has been lost: Second, after the Sandy Hook family, the most important thing to us is that Onions is America’s most prestigious comedy institution – apart from Mad TVwhich unfortunately stopped broadcasting a few years ago. She’s that way because she’s strict, strict, and specific in her voice. Meanwhile, Ben and the new owners Onions – Global Tetrahedron – They want to grow because they are a business and they want to do more things. To grow, you have to spawn something new. So this converges with the company’s desire to do this in a very real way onion-y way – A very strange, political, and strange way.
Collins The reason we can do this is Onions By itself it works fine. We’re the sixth, maybe fifth, largest newspaper in the United States now, depending on where The Washington Post In terms of print subscribers. We have 76,000 print subscribers Onions. We don’t want to mess with that. We want Onions To be the last institution in news with high standards if possible. In this other space, we can take more chances, because you can’t really tarnish the Infowars name.
