How do you deliver karmic justice to one of the most evil media personalities ever? For the team behind the satirical website The Onion, the path to comedic retribution comes in the form of taking over the brand assets for InfoWars, a toxic right wing conspiracy theorist website previously run by disgraced host Alex Jones, and turning it into an entertaining piece of social commentary on all of the lies that Jones put into the world:
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. The resulting website is, at launch, a vehicle for making [Alex] 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.
While the takeover of the InfoWars URL is still in litigation, the new Onion-produced parody site features banner ads to “turn your piss into gold,” an intro video from The Onion’s Tim Heidecker in the sensationalist style of Jones and an interesting longer-term vision to maybe get people off social media news altogether. The whole thing is in service of getting compensation to the families of the victims of a 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School who also successfully sued Jones for defamation leading him to declare bankruptcy and go off the air.
Aside from the entertainment value, the site offers a reminder that sometimes the best path to expose deceit is using humor as the spotlight. As long as people get the joke.