Enter your email to receive alerts for this author.
Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences.
Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Lizzie O’Leary?
“You think that Alex Jones gorged himself on Whataburger? You’re saying five triple cheeseburgers and how many fry boxes?”
If you’ve watched the Real Infowars livestream over the past week, this is what you got: not the actual right-wing conspiracy theorist but a gloriously deranged parody from absurdist comedian Tim Heidecker, who has been impersonating Jones for the past 10 years. “I’m attracted to people like Alex Jones—not sexually attracted, but interested in his mind and the way he presents himself,” Heidecker says. “Everything we do that’s perceived as absurd always starts from a real place of: ‘Something like this exists, and we’re going to expand upon it and go deeper and weirder with it.’ ”
For two years, after losing a landmark defamation case filed by the Sandy Hook families and declaring bankruptcy, Jones has been battling the satirical news site the Onion for control of his website Infowars. And despite still being in a legal gray zone, it’s finally launched—with Heidecker at the helm.
The first order of business? In the new Infowars world, Jones is dead.
On a recent episode of What Next, Lizzie O’Leary spoke to Heidecker about liberal wish fulfillment, baiting the real-life Jones, the ongoing legal saga, and his vision to establish a new media empire out of the old conspiracy site’s ashes. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Lizzie O’Leary: How did you get involved with this project? Did [Onion CEO] Ben Collins come to you and say, “All right, let’s do this”? How’d that happen?
Tim Heidecker: I reached out to the Onion a couple of years ago, when the Infowars auction was potentially going to happen. It was in the news everywhere. I was doing my podcast Office Hours, and we use a lot of Alex Jones clips, so I was just curious—I wanted to see if I could be of some kind of assistance. But I never heard back from them. I guess it fell apart.
Then they reached out to me maybe six months later, and the question was: “This might be happening, we might be getting Infowars. What do you think we should do with it?” They were looking for advice and thinking I could be more involved. After six or seven phone calls and meetings, it got defined as I would be the creative director of this and help them figure out how to move forward.
Ultimately, I got involved because I can’t say no to anything. I have to say yes and live with my decisions. I didn’t want to live in a world of satirizing this guy forever. I think pretty early on, we were like, “Let’s goof on Alex for a little while in this conspiracy world.” But this is a viable media enterprise that I’m really interested in for the sake of comedy and the opportunity for outsider or fringe comedy.
We’re all witnessing the death or consolidation of corporate media, and there are very few outlets for the kind of comedy I like. The Onion saw that too. In my old age now, I would love to be more of a mentor and offer a place for the new generation to come up and have some funding and distribution in place. And what greater irony would it be for this empire that Alex built to be turned into this fairly diverse, progressive, artsy-fartsy comedy streaming site?
We had our first taste of what this might look like last Thursday into the weekend, when you put out your first livestream, a mockumentary about American history. One of these stories involves the “death,” in air quotes, of Jones via explosion. How did you come up with that idea?
I think I made an offhand remark on my podcast where I said, “He popped like a balloon.” He is such a round man. I don’t want to fat-shame anybody, but it reminds me a lot of the Monty Python Meaning of Life sketch where the guy says the weight for him blows up. He reminds me of that guy.
I wouldn’t say anyone’s asking for this, but we want to do some little wish fulfillment, or just live in a world where you can pretend that this is happening. He’s trafficked in conspiracy theories and crisis actors and really has such little respect for the truth and for other people’s feelings and experiences, especially with the families of the Sandy Hook tragedy, that we were like: Let’s just serve him back what he’s been serving for years, which is a bunch of bullshit. Let’s muddy the waters, go on the offense a little bit and create this messy, stupid conspiracy theory that anybody with a brain knows isn’t true, but make it annoying and confusing and expand upon this conspiracy theory that Alex Jones exploded and there’s a new impostor Alex Jones.
A fake one they’ve created—you know, capital-T They. You can’t just go middle ground on this. We have to go to that place with it, or it’s not worth it for me.
Have you ever talked to Alex Jones?
No. During that period in 2016 when we were at the Republican National Convention, they were livestreaming on the street, and I interrupted their livestream. It’s on YouTube—you could see me doing my Alex Jones impression to his reporter who was there. And he was amused. If someone’s doing a pretty good impression of you, I think that’s kind of amusing, but he didn’t know who I was. He didn’t know I was a world-class legendary comedian.
Have you heard anything from Jones since your Infowars has aired?
I haven’t. I think his son Rex Jones chimed in. They made a huge strategic mistake originally: When we announced the show, Alex came out and tore his shirt off and said I was stealing his body, then they found all the old Tim & Eric clips and really lost it. It was pretty pathetic. It’s like we caught the big fat whale and he’s on the beach, a beached whale, gasping for any relevance. It was embarrassing.
I think maybe they learned the lesson that it’s best to ignore us, but it’s probably going to be pretty hard for him to keep quiet. Not to give away our strategy, but we want to draw him in, because then he’s not hurting anybody else for a few minutes or spreading more ridiculous lies about innocent people. We want to waste his time.
Do you think he can resist being baited?
We’ll see. The summer slump is probably happening and they’re like, Well, we’ve got to fill the air with something so we can sell our pills that don’t work.
I know it’s still murky, but what is the current state of the acquisition of Infowars? My understanding is that the Onion won the auction to buy all the assets after its collapse, but now there are all these court rulings and back-and-forth. Where are we now?
Alex’s attorneys somehow backroomed a deal with the Texas Court of Appeals and got it to put an emergency stay on anything happening. It basically tells us we can’t do anything until we have this resolved. And about a month ago, we all just agreed: “Who cares? Let’s just go. The courts are completely meaningless here. There’s no reason to abide by them, and no one’s going to sue anybody. We’ll just be Real Infowars, and come at us and see what you’ve got. We don’t really care.”