IHIP News - Alex Jones Trolled Masterfully, Major Meltdown Over Losing Everything

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

We are joined by the CEO of The Onion, Ben Collins to celebrate their acquisition of Alex Jones's InfoWars. Follow Us:I've Had It Podcast: @IvehaditpodcastJennifer Welch: @mizzwelchSpecial Guest: Ben CollinsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

All right, joining me today to celebrate the demise of Alex Jones in Info Wars is the CEO of the Onion, Ben Collins. And he is working to take over Info Wars, support Sandy Hook families, and turn one of the internet's worst misinformation machines into a new home for comedy. Ben, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to have you. I want to ask you, has the Trump administration been bad for business? with the onion. No, it's been good for us. Because for some reason, it could be, it could have been bad, but for some reason most media, most mainstream media,

legacy media, where legacy media have been around for 40 years, like abandoned the premise that they should be doing their jobs, that they should be holding power to account. And they decided it was more important to be on Air Force One to ask the questions to get yelled at by the president than to dig deep into his corruption and, you know, and you know abuses of power and his self-dealing and all of these things. And they do it in dribs and drabs,

but they don't really go as hard as they went the first time around that he did this. And it left us this incredible market opportunity to tell it like it is. Like we're the only people will call him a pedophile. And he's a pedophile. Yeah, he is. There is a pedophile. So I want to put up a couple of headlines for you and for our viewer. Pop these up, Callie.

The first one says, Mar-Lago Assistant Manager, wondering if anyone coming to collect nuclear briefcase from lost and found. And then another headline similar, FBI searched Trump's home to look for nuclear documents and other items. Sources say, one of these is from the onion and the other is from the Washington Post. Yeah. Earily similar. Yeah, we're always a month ahead of time. My favorite one recently is that in our print edition, which we have, we put out a headline that says, RFK Jr.

Cullen, I am six raccoon penises away from the theory of cancer. And then a month later, it came out that he had cut off a raccoon's penis for study. So it was just like, I don't know what oracular shit was going on in our newsroom that day,

but it was crazy. And I sent it around. I was like, what did you guys know? How did you do this? They were like, I don't know, we were just guessing.

That's just keeps happening during this administration. If you go to the wildest part in your life and then just like narrow it down to a narrative, if it's probably going to happen. It's insane. I sometimes will be like in a doctor's office or a place where I'm supposed to be super

quiet and I'm scrolling and then an onion headline comes up and I am doubled over crying laughing because it's so deadpan. And then now sometimes you do the newsroom people that are actually like reporting and staying total deadpan character. That stuff is amazing. Yeah, that's Joshua Johnson who used to work with I used to work in MSNBC and he was an anchor there too. And he was always so funny, like during in between the breaks and stuff.

So when I took over as Onion CEO, I was like, do you want to do this? I know that you can do this. But I didn't know he was going to be like the most deadpan person to ever live. He's incredible at it. Yeah, no, I love Owen. And it's our, it's our crown jewel. And it's beautiful. And I do want to say the reason this works is because like I said, other places sort of

abandoned their commitment to stuff and to standards and things that they did all the way until now. We haven't changed. The big, the big, you know, power move that we did is we kept it the same. We have 150, we, every day we like 15 writers, they have 150 headlines. They go into a room with and they come out with like one or two maximum. So like they're finding the funniest thing or the like most prescient thing in everyone's brain that day. And they're getting like the the unsaid sentence in American life out into American life. So yeah, we take it unfortunately.

We take this very seriously. This is how we ended up in this space. And it's working. People want. care. I agree. And how is the onion acquiring Info Wars? How did this happen? So now about 19 months ago or so, the info was assets were for sale. So Alex Jones is in bankruptcy because he owes the families of the Sandy Hook massacre $1.4 billion because he didn't just defame them. You know, his fans, he sent people up to Sandy Hook to go just

harang these families. Many of them had to move. Yeah. The person that he most harangued, I would say, was a NICU nurse who had to move to Los Angeles. And we just talked to him recently. And he was saying that until very recently, he hadn't been able to speak in public anymore because of all of this stuff. He couldn't speak. Guy orders. No, no, I mean, like, his like emotional wherewithal to speak among people had been evaporated because of Alex Jones.

So Alex Jones took this guy's speech, basically. So, you know, he lost these judgments. in part because he just did not participate in the American legal system. And now he owes these people over a billion dollars. But he was hiding his assets, moving things around, trying to find different ways to get away with it. And then the auction for his assets happened nine days after the 2024 election. So, you know, it was us or him. So he either got to get all of his stuff back for like a penny or we would bid on it.

and hopefully win with the backing of the families. And we realized we were walking into like a tire fire. Again, like we didn't know what was happening. The guy who was immediately named Deputy Director of the FBI, Dan Vonjino got his start on Info Wars. So we knew we were like, we're just about to go into this a fight. And we won the auction. Then everybody got scared, Alex Jones,

really, really harassed everybody involved in the process, the judge, the lawyers, everything. It got kicked down the line. And then 17 months later, we realized that he was going to get away with it again, basically. You had enacted this plan to, like, basically render all of his assets value list so he could just buy it all back from this landlord. So we stepped in and we said, we'll take over his studio, whatever you guys need to make it so these assets have value in your eyes. And as long as we can use. the name InfoWords, as long as you can use InfoWorS.com and, you know, turn it into something better. So the receiver said yes to that, the guy who's in charge of it by the state.

And Alex appealed it, but his appeal got slapped down in federal court on Friday. We just need the state court to say that federal court was correct. And then once we do that, we'll have full and clear control to sell gay frog plushies to people. Oh, my God. Okay. Right. Here is Alex Jones reaction. Play the clip. Do they try to silence you? Then they misrepresent who you are. They're body snatchers or skin walkers. They literally take your skin. This is going to backfire big time, folks.

Okay. Why would I want that skin? So are you a skin crawler? No, as far as I know, I'm not. And that's not, he would not be in the top 50 million of skins I would take personally. I don't know. That's just, that's just me. I was reading something. So you know, those supplements he sells the reason that we did this also is because he's gotten rich right right rich from all this right and he sells things called like things like the red pill plus and i was watching this youtube video of a guy who took it and the guy was like the chemical in this is supposed to give you testosterone but it actually makes progesterone which makes estrogen so oh so they're during trans care you're doing trans care honestly it's pretty moving really it really

I'm I'm proud of them to see the other to like to they they need a little bit of femininity in their life and I think that this is a good way of getting it I can should continue that actually good for them I know so let me ask you this do you think Alex Jones do you think he's a true believer or just a grifter or crazy person I think it's a combination of things right I think he I think he loves power yep and he was as close to power as you could get right he was friends the president the president in 2015 when he started running said, I will never let you down to Alex Jones. Since then, he's turned on him because he turns on everybody.

So Donald Trump does. But he, he loves being, he loves making money, he loves being close to power. And he loves coming off as this guy who secretly knew everything. The truth, but Alex Jones is that he just says every available thing. And then he's like, look, I was right about that thing. He said the 9-11 was done by, you know, the Saudis, the Jews, you know, the Iranians. He said it like every kind of person you could say. And then he goes back and he says,

Oh yeah, I was right. I swear to God, that's what it is. And you allow, he allows he's an opportunistic liar. Exactly. Yeah. And from there, he's like, you want to be right like me? Do you want to feel safe like me because I'm so strong and I look like that by my supplements? And he was, you know, he was making millions, sometimes tens of millions of tens of millions of millions of dollars a month just on, you know, apparently estrogen pills this whole time. Like it was a, it was an incredible con, but the issue is, and like that's fine by itself like, whatever if you want to be like aliens are coming have some iodine whatever where it changes in my opinion is you take private citizens who've had their lives completely upended uh from the worst thing

that could happen you use your kid in the most miserable way you could lose your kid and then immediately you don't get sympathy in this country anymore you have to deal with these fucking people yeah you deal with this guy yeah and why do you have deal with this guy because he needs to make money. He needs to be loud. He needs to insert himself into this conversation no matter what so he can sell pills. And I just don't think that's, I don't think that's a speech issue. I'm sorry, I think that's just being a fucking asshole. And I think that we, we lost a plot a long time ago about this stuff. We let a lot of people dictate what it is to be an American to say that that's speech, that the ability to sell, you know, scam pills on the backs of dead kids. That's speech. It ain't.

And I honestly, I hate to say it, but I have had it. I've just, yes. There was a moment in these last two years where, again, we're looking, you know, down the barrel at a government that wasn't going to like this deal. And a guy who sells knives first and foremost now and like small machetes and all of his crazy ass user base all throughout the entire country. And we could have been cowards about this and just been like, well, we tried and it didn't work. Right. But we just quadrupled down at every step. And it's because I just couldn't fucking handle what I.

This is this was my line. I'm sorry. I couldn't handle him winning. And I think there's a big lesson in this bin because we see time and time again, companies that have a lot more net worth than the onion. Oh my God. Yes. I mean, almost all of them.

Yes. Yes. And they make participation trophies. They set a lot. lawsuits, they bend the knee, they appoint propagandists. I'm talking about Barry Weiss at CBS News, who is dismantling real journalism, disinfectant journalism that shines a light on wrongs. And you see everyday people that don't have fuck you money standing up to this regime

and saying, fuck you. And it's unbelievable. We just filmed an episode where you have Jeff Bezos and he was talking about, he thinks the Trump 2.0 is more mature. He said that on the news. He thinks he's a more mature, controlled president than he was in Trump 1.0. It's fascinating, the moral rot. Let me ask you this. During this process, did you and Alex Jones, were you ever in court, same day, same time? Weirdly, no. He was in court with the families a couple of times. I saw that documentary. Yes. And listener, you should watch it. It's called the

the people versus Alex Jones it's incredible it's very disturbing but it's important to watch yeah and he you know he ran up right right up to the line and then he saw them in person and he's like oh they're human beings maybe i shouldn't have said all this stuff and then it was just way too late and it shouldn't have to be that way it shouldn't have to be at the point where you know you've already defamed them to the extent they've had to move across the country and their lives are in danger for you apologize weirdly enough i've not i've covered Alex i used to be disinformation reporter at NBC News and i covered him uh for 12 years or something before I did this.

And, you know, I've talked to lots of the staffers and people around him. But weirdly, I don't, I have no idea how it happened. I just never actually talked to like every, every available crazy person. Like my beat on election night 2016 was to watch InfraWords and call people. Oh my God. I remember like Roger Stone was on there and he was behaving like he had known that he was going to win the whole time. And Alex Jones is freaked out because he had no idea. It was weird.

But yeah, somehow I've never met Alex and I, it would be cool if that remained that way, actually. that way, actually. I don't, I have no particularly. Yeah. Don't you think it's a, a hubris or an error on the part of the Democrats that in 2016, we treated the Alex Jones, the Roger Stones, the right wing media ecosystem, Rush Limbaugh before he passed as French. Yeah. We treated this whole movement as fringe. And they, in this movement, you know, till the psychological soil. for a fascist demagogue to take over. Meanwhile, we're like, oh, that's fringe, just disregard that. And the Republican establishment didn't want Trump. Fox didn't want him, the RNC didn't want him, but this ecosystem knew,

do you think we would be more behooved as a culture to report on this and report on their lies and identify it as such instead of just being this kind of elitist dismissive? Oh, that's fringe, nobody'll do that. because now all the Frenchers are in the White House, crimeing. Yeah. Yes, they're taking everything from us. And they're giving, you know, one and a half billion dollars to the people who, you know,

to January 6ers who are more likely statistically to be pedophiles than like literally any other section of people. I've never seen anything like it. It's crazy. Every time I open up my phone, if it's not me bending over from an onion article, it's January 6 or and it shows some posts where they're like, trans people and drag queens ruin in America. And then it's like, this person is caught with underage, this and that.

They got a second chance at life. And they went immediately to the playground. Like insane. Yes. Yeah. It's horrible. So yes, we should absolutely cover them as it is. And they knew this, though.

Like, I'm in covering Steve Bannon. I heard Steve Bannon called me once on the phone because he was trying to get me to cover Hunter Biden's laptop, the most important thing that has ever happened. Oh, yeah. Hunter Biden's laptop, which we all know was really important. I think they were just jealous that Hunter Biden has such a large penis. Yeah, I mean, honest, yes. I do.

I think that's the root of a lot of that. His criminality, what it boiled down to was like he had sex with hookers and did cocaine. And like, I'm sorry, I'm not that cool. I'm not nearly that, but I don't think it merited changing the result of an election. So, yeah, he called me once, Steve Bannon, he was like, you know, what you and Brandy, my colleague Brandy's Adrosny, who still does this be at NBC News or MSNBC now. He said, you guys, you just do just incredible work. wish you did it for this side.

And I was like, what side? Felons? Like, what are you? What the fuck are you talking about? So I always took it deeply seriously because I knew what they were trying to do. Like their whole thing, they all kind of come around at the same thing. Curtis Yarvin, Steve Bannon, Mark Andreessen, who runs A16 Z, which is funding, you know, all the data centers and all those companies that drone strike dogs in the middle of the desert.

They all have, we're talking for 10 years about a thing called the parallel establishment. Like you build an establishment that is alongside the current establishment. And then one day, it's just bigger than that establishment. So people have to take you seriously. And because they're all so weird looking and talk all dumb, no one took them seriously. And I was like, these guys have a lot of fake money. They have a lot of foreign money. They have a lot of crypto money that is not being taxed.

Just like, we've got to take it seriously. And they also just, they have no scruples. They were doing a guerrilla war. while everybody else was sticking to what they were integrity politics yeah and of course they won why the fuck wouldn't they win they did they they were they weren't abiding by any rule and we were sticking around being like well maybe we should give them a chance maybe we should hear them out like there no actually you can't do that you can't you can't you can't sit down with a guy who is holding you hostage and be like let's talk through this this is not how it works and um i think i hope some people are getting the

message that's not the way out like zoron got the message like he just doesn't doesn't go fuck and people respect him yeah for it i mean they respect him because he is not a nihilist he actually believes in something yes and if you i've interviewed zoran i've interviewed berni've interviewed berny sanders and there are certain politicians that you have on that you can ask them anything yeah and then there are other politicians and i'm including democrats in this because republicans sadly don't come on my show um that they want to know what the script is they want to know in advance and then you know you're dealing with some somewhat of a nihilist, somebody who doesn't believe in anything, somebody that's going to

crowdsource their opinion. But I want to play another meltdown of Alex Jones. The Onion released this video after Alex Jones had his meltdown. Play the clip. But I'm going to sip from the blood of the forsaken. This is real human blood. You can find this at the Info Wars store. This is a human blood curated from the forsaken and sinners. I love that you made the info more is the pride flag. Yes. It's so petty. I live for shit like that.

Yeah. No, we have more of that coming, definitely. That's Tim Heidecker, who is one of the best satirous and comedians in the world, I think, and he signed up for this. I don't know if I should be saying this out loud, but we had a meeting with the, we had a meeting with the San Diego families and a lot of our staff had not met them before. And it's just a couple weeks ago. And I didn't know this, but Tim, like, volunteered this during, um, um, Maybe this isn't my story or child, but here we go. He'd volunteered this to the families.

He said, the day that he and his wife found out they were pregnant for the first time was the day of Sandy Hook. And like, I can't imagine bringing your kid into the world knowing that that's what's next, like that we're not going to fix this and there's no, there's no cottage industries around making it so we'll never fix this. And that's why like when we, when we, when we, we first bought this he emailed us almost immediately saying how can I help how can we get it on this because like he wanted to make sure that this thing was destroyed and could be replaced with

something better and uh yeah he's just been awesome and also we didn't even know he had an Alex Jones impression until one day during a phone call he just started talking about this and going down going down and we're like shit we got we actually have to use this now uh so yeah it's not just going to be Tim doing Alex Jones oppression although it will continue for a while like the point of it is to with in for us is to highlight all of these people who had their jobs taken away from media consolidation um you know you watch Netflix comedy specials now and it's all just like weird racist roasts and it's just obnoxious like yeah who is this for uh all the artful good comedy got sort of wiped away because all of the big money right now is trying to get behind the fascist

experiment and the fascist experiment is failing yeah so uh all of the good, weird, you know, the fun stuff that we had over the last, I don't know, 60 years of American life, like, you know, the airplanes of the world and every great comedy movie, they wouldn't be made now because they're not, you know, they're too silly and they're not racist enough. We're going to get in the business of amplifying people who would not be seen right now because they're not doing crowdwork specials on Netflix. I love that. I think it's, comedy is so important during George W.

Bush, his presidency. My husband and I lived in Oklahoma City. My kids were very small. And we would watch, we would stay up because we lived in this, you know, Republican conservative Christian values culture. We would watch John Stewart every night. And it was like therapeutic. It was so important for us to know that other people thought this shit was crazy, that this shit was immoral, that, you know, Abu Ghraib and the CIA black sites were horrific. And it shouldn't be done in our name and then seeing the troops being sent over there, killing Iraqis, seeing Iraqis being killed, all of the life loss. We were just so beside ourselves. And the Daily Show, when John Stewart was full-time anchor, it was very, very therapeutic. Do you see Info Wars kind of feeling

in that type of space for, you know, people that want to stay engaged or just depressed? I mean, when I grew up, you know, 9-11 happened when I was, I think, 12 or 13. The Iraq War started on my brother's 18th birthday. So everyone was nervous about drafts and stuff like that. And, you know, I grew up in a Republican household who have, they're now reformed. Everything's fine. Don't send them weird mail. They're just lovely.

I love them so much. But there was three people, three groups of people who were actively against this. And it was, they were obviously right. and I was a teenager, right? I was 14, 15 years old. And it was the Dixie Chicks, yep, the Daily Show, and the Onion. The Onion was like,

virulently anti-war at a time where it was deeply unpopular. It was also free on the street at that time. So it was like, really, like, to see that, it felt like contraband on the street. It felt amazing. And that's how I knew, like, the smart people were against this.

And that if I wanted to be a smart person, I'd probably read why they're so against this thing, you know? And they were right. And I think our role is at that time, the Daily Show went after like the chief propagandists, the Fox Newses of the world, Yellow Riley's of the world, things like that. Right now, the chief propagandists are on TikTok. They are on YouTube and Instagram and they are psychos in their own bespoke ways, right? They are telling you you're one animal away from fixing your life. They're telling you all this stuff.

And then it's the slow burn into. And also this is why I support Donald Trump and killing all these Iranian civilians. Right. We have to go after that. Like, if we're going to be the best satire company in the world, we have to find a way to go after the primary mode of the government trying to propagandize you. Right now it's that. And that's what we hope in force to be. I think it's a good antidote for Turning Point, who is going after people in college at their most objective, away from their parents for the first time, seeing the world outside of a binary worldview that may or may not have been presented to them by their parents. So I think you should go up to Erica Kirk for sure.

And I do a great Erica Kirk impersonation at a viral video. So anytime you'd like for me to fill in, I'll do it free of charge. Yeah. And then I also think you have to go after America's favorite crazy person, Candace. Oh, yeah. Candace is a, is that they're professionals. They're really, they're professional. It's professional crazy people.

It is. Yes. And I'm glad they're all feuding, by the way. Like that's delicious, really delicious. Just let them fight. Yeah. That's one way. Yeah, they all hate each other.

It's great because the pie's shrinking, right? Like the, I don't know what exactly happened. A lot of people were saying like, oh, when Orban left like all the money dried up or something from Hungary. I don't sure that's it. It's just that I think the audience, the audience were being upset all the time is dwindling. And the audience for, wait, why was like so goddamn upset for like eight full years? Like what was that happening? Right.

That is very underserved. So as those numbers, as the angry people numbers really start to get smaller, those people are just going to fight with each other, fight for scraps. They are crabs in a bucket here. So like, that's great. Let them fight and then make fun of them from the side and offer a vision separately. That's not my job. Like Zoron did that great. Somebody else has to come in and be like, okay, we're over, like we went through this weird technological destruction that led to fascism. Nobody wants anything to do with these people anymore. Here's a way forward that has nothing to do with any of this shit. Also, it has nothing to do with like data centers or AI or all these things

that people hate. It's a third thing. I'm very, I'll be very happy when somebody comes along who is eligible to run for president that provides that vision. I wish as Oron was that guy. But unfortunately, okay, final question. You saw recently probably there was a progressive speaker talking about the black representation being removed from Congress. And his name was Nola the Progressive. And he had on a red hat And it said Trump was wrong about everything. And this white, crusty Trumper guy was like, your head says Trump was wrong about everything. I think it should say you were wrong about everything. And the guy goes, ooh, burn.

And just mocked him. I think that that is so effective with MAGA because it's all built up on this very thin veneer. Like Alex Jones, whose company you just took over, when I watched the documentary about, how he terrorized these Sandy Hook parents. And then finally when he's on the witness, he is fetal position, snot, slinging, crying. Yes. And it is all bluster and bravado. So do you intend to just humiliate the shit out of these people? Yeah, I no longer care like what they think about us. Like there are all these people like this the most obvious psychosexual problems in the world. And then they're like, oh, we have to ban gender studies like yeah, of course you do

because then it would explain everything that you're doing. Like, no shit. Yeah, I don't care anymore. We're going to go after like, you know, the deep part of who they are. And I think that's like, again, a huge underserved market. And I don't think it's the technology that's bad. I think like people are blaming like TikTok and Instagram and stuff. It is like it's not good because it's owned by bad people.

But just, you know, take over the means of communication here. Just like there are more of us than there are of them. I agree. Stop being afraid of them. Like they are, you guys, they are one, they're one insult away from crying in a corner at all times. And I'm not. Like, you're not either.

No. So I tell you, I cry like once annually. Yes, exactly. If that. And that's good. And when I do, I'm like, oh my God, I'm so glad I'm crying. I'm not a sociopath.

Yes, exactly. I'm feeling real tears. It's based on a movie you. Yeah. You're a personal affront to you, right? Yeah. So, yeah, we have to go after all of these, guys who seemingly have the same exact problem.

And it's that their ego is gigantic, but their souls are tiny. And other things, I think, are tiny. Yes. Ben Collins. Thank you. Listener, go, support, subscribe, do all of the things with Info Wars. We have to support this company because they said, fuck you to Alex Jones and fuck you to the Trump regime.

And I love you for it. Yeah, get a newspaper. It comes in the mail. It's once a month. It's cheap. We really like it. Real hand real physical newspaper. Kylie, you need to sign us up for that.

It's really good. I'll be the first subscriber. I love a physical hand. It's really good. Nothing in it is AI, even the weird Photoshop's that we make in the fake ads that we have in there. So I like it. Yeah, go get it.

All right. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much.