After a lengthy court process to acquire the domain, The Onion is pressing on to relaunch InfoWars as a shrewd parody of its former self. But the battle isn't over just yet.
The Onion was at the home stretch of finalizing the paperwork to take over the alt-right conspiracy site from Alex Jones, who lost a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit brought by the families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, forcing him to file for bankruptcy and break up the company. But just hours before the deal was set to close, Jones appealed in a Texas court, putting the acquisition on hold until a lower court issues a new order.
The Onion is not to be deterred, though. CEO Ben Collins told Variety — where creative director Tim Heidecker also spoke on the record — that lawyers gave the launch a thumbs up and hoped that the move nudges the Texas court to finalize the deal.
The new InfoWars will raise money for the Sandy Hook families who were terrorized by the heinous claims Jones made on the site and have yet to see a single dime from the settlement. The site will have a mix of comedic shows and daily content helmed by The Onion staff and external satirical creators. InfoWars content is currently streaming on Onion.info and on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, Facebook and BlueSky. I know he's doing his own thing right now, but I'm manifesting a Dave Jorgenson–InfoWars collab into existence.
I talked to some of the women behind the historic relaunch, The Onion’s Chief Product Officer Danielle Strle and Chief Marketing Officer Leila Brillson, about what people can expect from the new InfoWars and why The Onion has stayed relevant despite media headwinds. And in Maxed Out tradition, they shared their favorite corners of the internet with us.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Stephanie: First, congratulations on the launch! Take me through the whole process of getting InfoWars off the ground.
Danielle: We probably started talking about the opportunity to acquire InfoWars very shortly after we went back to print in the first place, so it's been a long journey of legal wrangling and lots of surprising hiccups along the way, but we remain steadfastly committed to taking the terrible corpse of what InfoWars was and turning it into a new place for truly the funniest stuff you'll find online.
We've just been kind of rolling with the punches, keeping the North Star of making a new and great place, and then keeping it talent first and keeping an eye on who's emerging, who has a unique auteur-driven sensibility that you're not going to find anywhere else. The old InfoWars just got away with terrible, libelous slander for so long, and we're taking a different direction.
Stephanie: Going back to what you said about the court process, what were some of those surprising hiccups that you uncovered along the way?
Danielle: Oh, just that we thought all this was going to go down in federal bankruptcy court, and then it went to the Texas state court. It’s just different, weird little esoteric bankruptcy law things. All the surprises have been stuff in courtrooms that lawyers tell us is “unprecedented.”
Stephanie: Right, the typical diplomatic lawyer framing. Tell me more about the new direction InfoWars is taking. How will the site complement what you’re doing now on The Onion?
Danielle: Well, something we've talked about a lot is the Onion satirizes the New York Times and major newspapers with our print edition and our website. The Onion News Network, our flagship YouTube property, satirizes cable news. There's a lot of new media formats as the internet and the social media landscape has evolved. It's podcasts, it's vertical video, it's new mediums that are very relevant to people's media diets, but are not relevant to all of the institutional values of the newspaper and cable news.
The Onion is where information is coming from the top down, whereas InfoWars we want it to be coming from the bottom up. From the people, from those citizen journalists or podcasters and people who have set out to create their own platforms.
Stephanie: I also saw that a portion of proceeds will be given to the families of Sandy Hook victims. Is the goal to keep the charitable aspect of InfoWars permanently?
Leila: Yeah, absolutely. This has been such a harmful enterprise previously that it is really nice to be able to think of ways that this can do good, both financially, but also in terms of providing something that we all can have fun with and can all participate in.
Stephanie: What I find really impressive about The Onion is that it’s still managed to stay relevant all these years without losing its voice and mission. What’s the secret to keeping that relevance?
Danielle: The Onion has been around for 38 years at this point, so there's a lot of deeply ingrained love for the brand that spans generations. Some people picked it up for free in the 90s or the 2000s and then there's a whole cohort of our members who know us mostly from the great YouTube videos of the 2010s, so I think that a lot of our success is just being brave enough to ask our fans for their direct support, as opposed to selling their eyeballs down the river for some clicks or bullshit media impressions.
As soon as people were given the opportunity to send The Onion money directly, they were happy to do so. And now we've got a flywheel going where we publish the newspaper every month, people get the newspaper and take pictures of what's in the newspaper, they text it to their friends, they post it to their Instagram, and then more and more people are like, oh my gosh, The Onion is back in print, I got to get it coming to my house. So my philosophy always is, what can you do to give your audience the tools to be your best advocates?
I think that the saga of InfoWars has been—when it was first announced, it was kind of like the first nice feeling that people could have after the second election of Donald Trump. I think we've gotten a lot of mileage by giving people something to talk about, and you know, asking them to get closer to us.
Leila: In the vein of giving people something to talk about, we are consistently getting in the places and hitting topics that are the things that people are talking about, whether it's purchasing InfoWars or taking our Epstein documentary to movie theaters and letting people have an in-real-life experience, or taking out a page in the New York Times.
We have our America250 issue coming out, and it is an incredible issue. We're so excited about it, and we're doing some cool stuff around it that I think will make The Onion perhaps feel more relevant than ever. So, it's opportunities like that that we get to really lean into to keep top of mind while also embracing the stuff Danielle was saying, which is having the bravery to say, “support us and we'll give you a really great experience that is not selling your eyeballs for clicks down the road.” And just making sure that we are always challenging our writers to have something cooking.
Stephanie: When it comes to those print subscribers, what has been the biggest success for you all, as far as that paid element?
Danielle: I think no one knew quite what to expect, but we did all exceed our biggest expectations on day one. I wrote down someplace of what everyone's bet was for our day-one new subscribers. I want to say that the top number was like 7,000 and it was almost double that. [And] There's a reason everybody does tote bags. [They] really freaking work, people want a tote bag.
Leila: Yeah, we've had great sales created by the flywheel, you know, and things like [the Epstein documentary], InfoWars, anytime we're able to get out there, we always do see a corresponding membership spike. Also, we have things go viral all the time. A couple, probably a month or two ago, there was a story about a horse…
Danielle: The horse is out!
Leila: The horse is out of print jail today. There was a story in the paper that was… I want to get it right, of course.
Danielle: I can tell you it's on the subject line of our email: I Work Very Hard, and I Would Like to Try Cake.
Leila: Somebody took a photo of [the story] and put it on Bluesky, and that photo went super viral. Everyone was commenting on it. Memberships, of course, spiked, but then, all of these horse sanctuaries and farms started joining in, and like making organic cakes to feed their horses. We have these crazy headlines that are entirely timely around what our country is going through right now. And then sometimes, there's a horse eating cake and people are just sharing it, seeing that it's in the paper, and then being a part of this thing. Danielle is incredible at getting a sale going, but then when people share something, it's also word of mouth.
Stephanie: Forgive my naivety, but what do you mean when you say “the horse is out of print jail”? I can confidently say that it’s the first time I’ve ever heard that phrase in my life.
Leila: For the most part, all of our articles that go out in the print newspaper don't go up online until about 30 to 60 days later, so we don't have a paywall for The Onion, except that the paywall is kind of the fictional newspaper, if you want the earliest stuff.
Stephanie: I love it. Well, now we're going to transition over to the final part, which is Maxed Out. We ask everyone the same question: What is your daily average phone screen time?
Leila: Six to seven hours.
Danielle: I like that you know offhand.
Stephanie: Yeah, it's impressive.
Danielle: I will say one great thing about this job is I do feel like I spend less time doomscrolling and catastrophizing at the news because it's more fun to immerse myself into making fun of it. But I would probably guess that mine is somewhere around where Leila’s is.
Stephanie: Yeah, that's usually about the average for everyone. The highest we've had is 21 hours.
Danielle: No!
Stephanie: Yep!
Danielle: Mine's actually nine hours and 17 minutes, which is up 23% from last week. Ask me how many days a week I use my brick, not enough!
Stephanie: Yeah, I just got one myself for this actual reason since I was in that double-digit group of screen time. A game changer! What do you like to read in your down time?
Danielle: Right now my main and most fun screen time is a WhatsApp group called Knicks Club. I think we're like 70 people deep. We go meet up in person to watch the Knicks. We wear Knicks gear. We trade Reels and articles and stuff about what's been going on with the Knicks. We hype each other up, we keep each other strong. That's been really, really fun. Boy, do I read some dorky media newsletters and listen to some nerdy podcasts…Leila, I feel like your media diet is going to be better than mine. [Editor’s note: This chat happened before the championship win, but Danielle, I hope you’re still soaking in all the glory of the championship somewhere.]
Leila: I love Today in Tabs. It’s my favorite newsletter. It has the good problem of being the one newsletter you really need, because it's all about the tabs you need to have open. Gosh, I spend way too much time on the Catatonic Youths Instagram page, which just finds really bad music from the Internet and puts it together. It's just hours of incredible scrolling of found footage.
Those are my two things. I'm not a big podcast person, sadly. Just because I have so little time to sit still and listen to things. I wish I had a cool Knicks group chat, but I'm stuck in Chicago, where our basketball team has not had a lifetime run in over 20 years. Outside of screens, I am so into ‘Widows Bay.’ It was designed in a lab to appeal directly to me.
Danielle: I'm a big WNYC head, big NPR head generally. It almost certainly informs some of the ethos behind our pay-what-you-want-style membership, but I love the podcast On the Media, it's a WNYC-produced show about media each week. I think they do a great job. There's a newish history podcast that I like called Super Structure. It's [Julian Feeld] from QAnon Anonymous with a comedian [Jon Gabrus]. They're talking through the history and the comedian is there to kind of serve for the audience's reaction, and I found that to be kind of fun.
I love Love Injection Radio, the music podcast. I am also a paying member of DJ Jazzy Jeff's Magnificent Mob, that's DJ Jazzy Jeff’s app. He does livestreams a couple times a week. DJ livestreams kept me going through COVID, so I like to make room for that stuff. And, I have one more thing!
Stephanie: Yes!
Danielle: I'm a Wikipedia editor and I originated the Wikipedia article for Ellie the Elephant.
Stephanie: Whoa! Way to bury the lead there!
Danielle: Yeah, proudest achievement.