The Onion’s InfoWars Takeover Stars Red-Pilled Jim Haggerty

The Onion announced this week that it has finally locked down a deal to take over InfoWars, the right-wing conspiracy platform founded by Alex Jones. The satire outfit is already off and running with the new acquisition, selling merch featuring a reimagined, rainbow version of the InfoWars logo. It’s already reimagining its content, too, which will parody both Jones and the broader conspiracy-crazed, grifter-rich ecosystem he cashed in on for decades.

Rolling Stone has obtained an exclusive first clip from one of InfoWars’ most exciting new properties: The Jim Haggerty Show.

“I’m free of my corporate shackles, and my only business is freedom,” a newly red-pilled Haggerty, who you may recognize from his days as a cheery Onion News Network host, says in the teaser. “My name is Jim Haggerty — and you are being lied to.”

“Jim Haggerty spent 35 years in the lamestream media spouting powerful lies on behalf of the elite, and was canceled for the thought crime of eating so much pork he turned into a pig,” The Onion CEO Ben Collins tells us. “We’re proud to give him a voice on InfoWars to talk about some of the most important information being hidden from the American public, including bombshell new reporting that JFK didn’t kill himself.”

Collins announced on Monday that after two years of legal hurdles and negotiations, the project to take over and transform InfoWars is finally getting off the ground. The acquisition came after Jones was found guilty multiple times of defaming the families of the children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, after repeatedly describing the massacre as a hoax. Jones was forced to declare bankruptcy and sell the property in order to fulfill the $1.5 billion in damages he was ordered to pay the families. 

The Onion is now awaiting final judicial approval to formalize its takeover of the media company — for which it has tapped famed writer and comedian Tim Heidecker as creative director. Heidecker — the mind behind projects including The Tim and Eric Show and On Cinema — has been parodying Jones for years. In a satirical video announcing his new role at InfoWars, Heidecker emphasized that while the team at The Onion is throwing around a lot of potential ideas for the future of the website, he still wants to extend a “hand of friendship” to the team at InfoWars. 

“Longtime fans and consumers of the InfoWars products” should feel free to “stay with us,” he said.

Heidecker tells Rolling Stone that The Jim Haggerty Show is “exactly the type of thing we’re excited about,” and that it’s “really riffing on that right-wing ecosystem and format, the tone, the confidence, the sense that you’re revealing something huge every night, but nothing actually happens. It’s a style that’s oddly compelling, almost like pro wrestling in a lot of ways.

“It’s funny because it’s recognizable, but it also lets us pull back the curtain on how that style of media actually works,” he continues. “And over time, the goal is for the new InfoWars to evolve into something beyond parody with its own voice, a place for more curated, more interesting comedy that doesn’t just live and die by the algorithm.”

Heidecker also elaborated on the role he hopes the new InfoWars will play in providing justice to Sandy Hook families — and in rewriting Jones’ legacy. 

“[The families deserve] a bit of retribution or justice and consequences for what he did, and I think the strongest way to do that is not through violence or anything like that,” Heidecker says, “but just through laughing at somebody.”