Pablo Torre Finds Out - Exclusive: How The Onion Finally Shut Up Alex Jones for Good

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

The notorious conspiracy theorist profited from his vile Sandy Hook conspiracy. Then America's finest (fake) news source decided to troll the world's greatest troll. Ben Collins — who transformed from reporting on the historic Infowars defamation trial to buying out his "ideological enemy" in a Storage Wars-style auction saga — tells Pablo why The Onion committed to the ultimate bit: doing the right thing.(Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. We're getting shut down. We beat so many attacks, but finally, we're shutting down at the middle of next month. Right after this ad. I'm really proud of you what you've done. I'm not kidding. It's really hard to do what you've done here.

Thank you, dude. It's hard to do journalism at all, and you bet on yourself and you had the fuck-de-backbot, so I'm really proud of you. I think both of us have probably felt this where it's like, man, the bar's real low. Sure. There's nobody, nobody's picking up the phone anymore to do any kind of journalism. It's crazy.

It's a market opportunity as well as the problem. The actual reporters left are the kids who are currently in journalism school because they're being told like old-fashioned tricks on how to do stuff. Right. Like they realize like that's actually the thing that's going to get me a journalism job. Yes.

It's scoops. It's information. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, I know.

What an accurate, descriptive summary of, of the thing we're here to talk about. Yep. And, by the way, the exclusive big announcement you're here to make with us here today. Thank you, Ben Collins, for doing that. For those who are not familiar

with your current job, what is the title that you have? I'm the CEO of Global Tetrahedron. It's primarily a puppy mill. That's why I make most of our money, a clandestine puppy mill. We also print a newspaper called The Onion, which you may have heard of.

Good newspaper. It's so good, I dare say, that you've become the foremost antagonist of the one and only Alex Jones. When you realize how fake it all is, the football,

the basketball, the Lady Gaga, the Justin Bieber, now the globalists are pouring on all the heat they can pushing their hive, mind, Borg, collectivist, zombie public system. I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin frogs gay.

Do you understand that? Ugh. Oh, serious crap. Liberal. Liberal. Liberal. Liberal.

Liberal. Liberal. Liberal. Liberal. Liberal. Liberal. Happy fun. La, la, la.

Human smuggling. Fit and no deaths. Force government. Euthanacea. Patriot. Patriot. Vampire. Nationalists.

Mental retard. Eugenesis. A scared man. Really? Retard. Retar. A traitor. Vampire.

Vampire. Next low. Moses. I don't know if I've given enough consideration to vampire as a really key feature of his work. Yeah, 50% of people are vampires, by the way, referring to that clip. Apparently, apparently. By the way, the visuals on where he's saying a bunch of that stuff from, there is a very familiar microphone that has kind of been an archetype for all podcasters, let's be honest, since then.

It's from inside of this bunker at this apparently undisclosed location in the woods of Austin, Texas. and that is where the headquarters of InfoWars are located. Yeah. Guess how much rent is there, by the way? What's it? Let's run Alex Jones. $75,000 a month. I swear to God.

We're going to get into the finances, the finer economic data points around this, but InfoWars is the foremost conspiracy newsroom, scare quotes around the word news, obviously the scariest quotes around the word news. It's been described by one of Alex Jones's former employees who has written since a book about his experiences

as quote unquote cult-like and Alex Jones himself chooses a different term to describe it in a tweet from 2016 he says, and you've certainly seen this photo before. There's a war on for your mind at infowars.com is the 21st century cavalry, exclamation point. And beneath which is a photo of what?

That's a Putin-esque Alex Jones shirtless atop a horse. I would call him barrel chess is a round. Chester is a really nice way of putting it, right? Bowling ball chest is probably another way of putting it as well. Yes, and he's wearing jeans. He is wearing jeans, yes. Before RFK Jr. was wearing jeans and exercising, Alex Jones

was the Venn diagram of all of these conspiratorial scammer characters. And his website, by the way, like the headlines over there, I mean, there are some classics like Lady Gaga, halftime show a satanic ritual, bombshell, Barack Obama conclusively outed

a CIA creation, NWO, New World Order, obviously, opening thousands of portals to ancient demons. Top insider confirms Hillary odor problem, comma, actual demon, question mark. When did you first encounter Alex Jones? This is not going to be a fun story quickly. I'm just going to be, I'm going to go back into time,

and it's going to be sad, and then I'll come back to the phone park. Okay. So I was working at The Daily Beast. I was a news editor, and one day I woke up, and my friend's girlfriend was shot and killed on live TV. This was in Roanoke, Virginia. Her name's Alice Parker,

and my friend Chris Hurst, we had a, like what we would call a podcast or something together in college. You know, he was an anchor at this news station of Roanoke and his girlfriend was out in the field. And a disgruntled ex-employee put a GoPro on his head. And I think it was the first ever live-streamed murder of anybody. I remember this. I had no idea that you had a relationship. Yeah. I freaked out and I just like left the newsroom.

My editor was like, get out of here. too close to this and I was like, you're right. But over the next few days, I started to look up all of these people who were calling it a false flag. Because if you, at that point in time, if you Googled his name, the very tough things would be like he is a CIA plant. She never existed. This is a false flag gun control thing. These are all notes that stank heavily of Alex Jones, right? So over the next few weeks, I did a story where I just called everybody who made those claims. And remember one guy, I, you know, I would let them talk for a half an hour at the end and I would just say, I'm just letting you know, I hear you, but I know Chris Hurst, if he's a CIA agent, he sucks. He's a terrible fantasy baseball player. He's like garbage at this. He's a real man. And they would just say, well, that's just what I believe. I've just, I just believe this. And really at the end of the day, it comes from the culture that Alex created. Right. The idea that there was, fact, video.

Yeah. And despite that, you could deny what seemed to be when we were growing up, the most undisputable way to convey reality. Well, so my previous job, I used to cover conspiracy theories. And so I saw that Alex Jones had a guy on his show that said they're doing child sex trafficking on Mars. Like they're bringing children up there to Mars. And I just did some quick math and I was like, by the time they get up there, though,

they're like 25 at least. They're like, you know, I don't know what number you're getting at here, but like they're fully adults by the time they're up at Mars. So my editor was like, you should call NASA. What was NASA's response when you fact-checked the math? They thought I was just an idiot calling them, and they were trying to be nice to me. And then they got so mad. Like, once the story came out, they were like, I didn't know I was on the record,

all this stuff was terrible. And I did feel bad for them. But the headline was basically like NASA colon, there is no child sex trafficking on Mars or something. Had Alex Jones stuck to this kind of shit, there's no problems. This is great. Amazing content. The thing that he ends up doing, though,

is not just do 9-11 conspiracy theories and Pizza Gate. It gets to the subject that is at the heart of this entire saga that you've been immersed in. Yeah. It's a Sunday of sorrow for Newtown, Connecticut and for the nation. This

afternoon, hundreds of residents walk the road to Sandy Hook Elementary School where on Friday, 26 people were murdered. The majority of those who died today were children. Beautiful little kids between the ages of five and ten years old. Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake, with actors, in my view, manufactured. There's a cover-up, there's actors, they're manipulating, they've been caught lying. What do you do when they've got the kids going in circles in and out of the building with their hands up? I've watched the footage, and it looks like a drill.

How do you describe what we just heard there in terms of where it fits into his sort of uvra? It's a harassment campaign against private citizens who've gone through the worst thing that you can ever imagine, right? You know, I've come to call it like the double whammy of American life. It really only happens here, where one day you drop them off at school and then they no longer exist as human beings anymore. And then for the next few years of your life, there is an economy. around trying to make it clear that your child never existed at all and by the way, you deserve harassment

because you're in on it. Right. You're a crisis actor. You're a crisis actor. You're part of it. And, you know, a big part of this to me was always, when I say the double whammy of American life, it's that Alex was part of that ecosystem

and really kind of drove it. And what he did at that time was he told people to call the families, you know, call the parents. There was a guy who went, who was an Alex Jones fan, who like ripped up the moment, and then called the families and were like, you know, why did you do this? For years, this is what happened to the matter.

All these people had to move just to stay away from this harassment. And more importantly, he made so much goddamn money, dude. He made so much money. No, the business of being a Sandy Hook truther. Yeah. Was one of the most telling chapters in human civilization. Yes. The thing that was least acceptable became one of the most monetizable.

Yep. And there were no guardrails around this. And it reminds me, of course, in the bigger picture sense, of one of the greatest onion headlines of all time, the recurring headline, which I'm sure you know by memory. Yeah. Which is, no way to prevent this says only a nation where this regularly happens. And it's hard to come up with a better capsule summary than that. But this is where, like, the onion being the antagonist to Info Wars, to Alex Jones, is perfect in this sort of, I don't know, like. Like the fake news spectrum, the moral valence of what it is to do satire and the abuse of satire?

I mean, I grew up reading the paper, which you have revived. Yeah. I'm holding the new onion in my hands, and I'm seeing at the very top, this is the March-April edition. Tearful Trump claims he was sex trafficked by Epstein. I was one of his victims, we've president. It's the stuff that made me laugh consistently. Yeah. 1998, drugs win drug war.

2011, judge rules white girl will be tried as black adult. Once the trial begins next week, all courtroom images of Hannah will depict her as a 300-pound muscular black man, and jury members will be instructed to imagine her as such. Great video, by the way. So good. Leading us to 2014, Ohio replaces lethal injection with humane new head ripping off machine. The new device is designed to be as humane as possible. emitting soothing white noise and putting prisoners on a cushioned seat

before its metallic talons dig into their necks and painlessly wrenched their heads off. And so the whole point in all of these things, not to be pedantic about satire, like in the humor, in the sacred topic that you seem to be defiling, you're actually revealing something fundamentally interesting and useful about us, in which the person being made fun of is not one of the most traumatized victims you can imagine. Yeah. But it's often incredibly powerful people in institutions. To me, it's the financialization of it. Anybody can believe stupid shit. But if you say, believe my stupid shit. And the only way to stop that stupid shit is this boner pill I'm selling you in the internet. And then suddenly

you're a millionaire. My friends, we have done it. With Dr. Group's help, we have developed ultimate male vitality supplement with eight concentrated super herbs. This is the answer to the globalist war on male vitality. Like a multi, multi-millioner. Like, you have a recurring revenue of people buying your burner pills every month. That is not a speech issue. That is like an FTC issue. That's like, that's an issue of, do we want an economy that incentivizes that behavior?

Right. And I just don't want to live in a world like that. I just simply don't want to live in a world like that. And so the story we're here to tell, it's basically been in the works for more than a year at this point. 18 months. Okay, well, I think we should probably catch people up with the date November 14th, 2024. Yeah. This is nine days after Trump's reelection, and actually good thing seems to have happened.

New this morning, the satirical news site, The Onion, has just won an auction to acquire the media outlet Info Wars. That is right. The Onion buys Alex Jones' info wars in a bankruptcy auction. It sounded like a headline you would read. in the satirical newspaper, but this is no joke. The Onion plans to turn Info Wars into a parody mocking the kind of disinformation that Alex Jones amplified. The Onion-Bind InfoWars is like if Mad Magazine bought MindConf. It's hard to imagine something more perfect

than you guys trolling the world's greatest troll by using legal mechanisms available to you that I did not know were even possible. We do big swings as a company. And this was clearly our biggest one yet. Also, it was a 50-50 ball until we found out. So in terms of a swing, it was a home run swing, and we connected. Well, this is the thing.

So this news breaks, and it's an enormous deal. Everyone's covering it. And then it doesn't happen. Yeah. So the answer I'm here to find out is, like, what the fuck did happen? And also, in the, in the, in the, process of that. What happened to you? Medicine.

Antidepressants. That's what happened to me. Yeah, look, it was a, it's been a real test of my medal as a human being, and I think, like, our medal is a country in the last 18 months. And those two stories sort of dovetail pretty nicely. So I just got to recap here, because summer of 2022, Alex Jones and the parent company

of Info Wars, which is conveniently named, free speech systems, they had already been found liable for damages. Like significant damages because of three defamation lawsuits led by Sandy Hook parents. And just to set the scene here, there are lawsuits in Connecticut, there are lawsuits in Texas where Alex Jones is based.

And so these two sets of Sandy Hook families at these two different trial venues, they're bringing litigation stemming from, again, the mass killing of 20 students. between six and seven years old, plus six of their educators, plus the shooter himself. This was all 13 and a half years ago

in Newtown, Connecticut, Sandy Hook Elementary. But legally speaking, Alex Jones lost those cases. Yeah. Why? Because he didn't participate in the cases. He thought he was above it. And you were covering the trial for NBC News.

Yes, I was. Yeah. We love discovery. We love documentation on this show. How forthcoming is he with the documents that the court is demanding? Oh, he doesn't provide anything. Like, literally does not provide anything.

But that also backfires, which I'm sure you're going to talk about. There is, like, this one moment that is... It would be like, if it happened on Law & Order, you'd be like, shut the fuck. One of my favorite moments in the history of jurisprudence. We have Alex Jones on the witness stand. The judge in her black robe is over his shoulder, and he's on trial in Texas. And a lawyer for the Texas families

is going to reveal something that is objectively amazing. Is that your phone number? Yes. So you did get my text messages. And I said you did a nice trick. Yes, Mr. Johns. Indeed. You didn't give this text message to me.

You don't know where this came from. Do you know where I got this? No. Mr. Jones, did you know that 12 days ago? 12 days ago, your attorney's messed up. And it sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cell phone with every text message you've sent

for the past two years and when informed did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protected in any way and as of two days ago it fell free and clear into my possession and that is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn't have text message

about saying you over. Did you know that? See, I told you the truth. This is your Perry Mason moment. I gave them my phone and then... Mr. Jones, you need to answer the question. Did you know this happened? No, I don't know this happened. But, I mean, I told you, I gave him the phone over. I just want to take a second to applaud the camera panning down to the back of his lawyer's head.

Everybody involved cooks. It's, I don't even know how that's possible. Yeah, I don't either. Like, I accidentally gave you the opposite of what I should have done. Whoops. He has gone through many. legal trials and tribulations, and no one sought through to just embarrassing him at scale. It also just has sort of like the vibe of like a kid who's finally been hauled in front of a principal.

Yeah. And in this case, the principal is Texas District Court judge Maya Gamble, who treats him like he is, yeah, he's misbehaving in class. Spit your gum out, Mr. Jones. It's not gone. What is it? Because you're not allowed food or gum of any kind in the courtroom. I had my tooth cold a week and a half ago, and I had some gauze in earlier, and it's been causing me to have some pain. So you're chewing on your gauze?

Would you like me to show you? No, I just want you to answer my question. No, I was massaging the whole of my mouth with my tongue. I'd say right here. I don't want to see the inside of your mouth. Oh, no, if there's no down, hole. It's like, it's incredible. It's great.

And ultimately, like, on the stand in Texas, Alex Jones goes on to admit the thing that he has been seemingly loathe to admit finally, which is that, oh, yeah, the whole Sandy Hook shooting, it was, quote, 100% real. Do you understand now that it was absolutely irresponsible of me? It was, especially since I met the parents. And it's 100% real, as I sell the radio yesterday. and as I said here yesterday, it's 100% real. And the media still ran with lies that I was saying it wasn't real on there yesterday. It's incredible. They won't let me take it back.

They just want to keep me in the position of being the standing hook man. I mean, just the experience of watching him try and save his reputation. Yeah. As a reporter covering the trial at the time, what did it tell you about Alex Jones' capacity to actually handle the truth? Well, you have to, like, bring him to the limit, right, of him realizing, like, this might actually be it. He might actually face consequences here. The issue is, though, every mass shooting since then, he has called a false flag, almost every single one.

You know, El Paso, Buffalo, his default statement is these people who died in this horrific thing are not real or they are real, but it's being done on behalf of, like, a government or something like that. And to say that this isn't a big deal. It's not a problem that we have in the country with gun miles. So this jury awards the family's $50 million, and that's not even like the big damages trial. Yeah. Fall 2022 in the state of Connecticut, you have the jury form in there.

This is the other trial we've been talking about, and he's reading off the damages to plaintiffs. Total fair, just and reasonable damages to plaintiff Robert Parker and against Alex Jones and free-speed systems and line A and line B, total of $120 million. $120 million, $25 million, $55 million, and on and on and on. And, yeah, Alex Jones on his show is like, he's basically saying, yeah, they had me doing the Oprah thing. You get a million, you get $100 million, you get a $50 million.

But the total damages, it all adds up to about how much, Ben. $1.4 billion. which, as a historical matter, how do we even begin to contextualize what that is? It's far and away the most in any defamation suit of all time. I want to make it clear. I do remember covering it that day. And he was, you know, almost elated. He literally said, oh, I'm never going to pay this.

It's like, I'm, you know, I'm never going to pay this out. This is the guy who's settled everything else he's ever done. He once was sued by Chabani, the yogurt company, for alleging that they brought to into the United States through immigrants. They settled. Another guy who he falsely accused of doing the Charlottesville attack settled. People generally just take, you know, the admission of guilt, the admission that he's making stuff up, the on-air apology in a paltry sum of money and walk away.

At the time that it was ruled that he owed these families $1.4 billion, how much was Alex Jones worth, allegedly? He was worth like, I believe, tens of millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars. But he, you know, that he had this recurrenties. stream of income. Like that, the thing, and it has not shut off. It's actually probably gotten bigger over time because he sells people the solution

to all of these conspiracy theories, right? iodized salt from a specific rock in a place is actually the thing that will save you from all of the radiation coming from 5G or a f-g. Like there's, he provides you something to be extremely afraid of and an answer. And also just like merch. His legal response to this is,

an ancient American response because he does what? He files for bankruptcy, yeah. Because he has to, right? He has a lot of money. Like, this guy is rich by any definition, but he's not $1.4 billion rich, right? So he has to file for bankruptcy. And what gets fully into that bankruptcy

is this thing called free speech systems, which encompasses InfoWRs and InfoWRs Life, which is the supplement company, and several thousand domain names, including which we learned after the fact when looking through Benchrist. Thousands of domain names. Yeah, including one called goblinlove.net.

I'm just going to go over at goblenlove.net right now and see what's happening on goblinlove. Dot. I'm getting the whole thing of like this side. It's not a secure connection. Okay, very good. It's probably for the best. Yeah.

I'm sure you had grand designs for Goblin. I should say for the record here that we have Poblatoria finds out are reaching out to attorneys for Alex Jones, as well as for the parent company of InfoWars. And while they may not immediately respond to our request for comment, You'll post an update and the show notes out on social if they do. And in terms of like bankruptcy strategy, the legal sort of dimension of that, I should be very clear that neither of us are bankruptcy lawyers. No.

And so while other sports podcasts have been talking about the final four, we ended up speaking to a guy named Chris Maddie. Yeah. My name's Chris Maddie. I'm a lawyer in Connecticut. I was lead counsel for the Sandy Hook families who brought a case against Alex Jones and Info Wars here in Connecticut. Lifelong Husky fan, go Huskies. And Chris Maddie said that Alex Jones, mocking the verdict,

struck him as just another theatrical performance of sorts, as opposed to, again, something true. What it struck me as was a guy who was play-acting that he was strong and unbothered by this verdict when inside I think he was terrified of what this would mean for him and his business. And my biggest hope was that the verdict might puncture, you know, this aura that he has around him with many of his followers, you know, where some people who had been misled for so long might have watched the trial, seen all the evidence, and then seen this jury's verdict and thought to themselves, you know, this was bullshit all along. You know, in basketball, there's the concept of a heat check.

Yeah. And it just felt like the Sandy Hook family's finally exposed Alex Jones as the thing that he knew. never wanted to be regarded as to his audience, which was just a fucking bullshit. Yeah. I mean, that sort of felt like in the moment. I mean, what this lawyer, what this Yukon Husky's apologist also told us, which is that... First of all, disgusting behavior. I mean, that's gross.

That's gross. But the degree of public confidence that Alex Jones was sort of theatrically performing, according to Chris Maddie, it was far from the only thing that he saw Alex Jones misrepresenting in this case. Throughout the case, we knew that Alex Jones was lying about his assets. I mean, that's one of the reasons that he ultimately was defaulted is because he had his people fabricate financial documents and he was concealing, you know, crucial information about the way his business worked, which was obviously corrupt, like lie and you get clicks. That was the basic profit model. So we expected, you know, to run into some, you know, malfeasance post-verdict.

He sought bankruptcy in a very friendly venue in. Texas, and we were assigned to a court that, you know, basically allowed him to drag things out, continue to operate his business while benefiting from it. And the problem was that our families did not care about money. They've never cared about money. They rejected a deal with Alex Jones that would have paid them a lot of money and instead wanted to make sure that this verdict was used to basically defang him. And so the whole bankruptcy process. Again, the vampire thing keeps on coming back.

Yeah, I mean, he shouldn't use that word. What is he doing? I mean, dare I say that the whole onion thing is a bit on the nose now. Pablo, that's garlic. Hold on. Yeah, I'm getting in my ear that is garlic. Motherf-h, do not edit that out. Do not let him have that.

Furiously Googling vampire onion. We got to fast forward, though, to June 24. because the families and the lawyer, Chris Maddie, represents them, they agreed to let the court supervise the liquidation of Alex Jones, Inc., all of his assets. And the biggest asset in what is now, like, storage wars. Yes. Is, of course, what?

Oh, it's info wars. So when did you and the onion come up with the idea to make a bid on it? Yeah, so I saw it was for sale. Like, they have to market these things. They have to, in bankruptcy court, they have to go market it. and it appeared in like the equivalent of a classified ad somewhere in some Austin newspaper. And that was uploaded, I think, to like Blue Sky or Twitter or something.

I was like, this would be funny. The first thing I wanted to do is make sure the families would be okay with us doing a bit on this. Because you don't want to go in there and do a bit about stuff like this without people's, you know, permission, like express permission. The other thing that the big thing that play into our calculus is the money goes to the families. Like if we buy this, it goes to the same.

Sandioke families. And I was like, I'm not sure anybody else is going to bid on it. He might just get it back with money he's laundered through like Roger Stone or something, which would be unacceptable to most people. And it certainly looked like it was headed that way. So we were like, well, it's either us or nobody. But when you say that you talk to the families and their reaction was like, huh.

Yeah. I think it took of a minute. I think at first they were like, that thing? It's worth characterizing, by the way, the reaction of Chris Maddie, the lawyer for the families, because it was understandable. I think the families would have been very happy for somebody to come in and just shudder this thing. On the other hand, they also recognize that there's kind of real value in using a brand and a property that has been for so long used for terrible. purposes and to kind of turn it around a little bit? I think a lot of people characterize victims of tragedies like this as like, that's all they are.

You know, they are, that's the dad of this dead child or something. They are human beings who like to laugh at stuff and have lives. And this allows them to like reclaim their identity in a way that is very nice, right? And also, if you live in America, you almost certainly know someone who has been a victim of gun violence. and that's not all they are. Now, the issue is nine days before the auction for this thing.

It is now official. CNN projects that Donald Trump has been elected president defeating Vice President Kamala Harris and making a political comeback unlike any. Oh, right. Remember that? November 2024, to put it in the grand timeline.

So he wins, and then there's this like eight-day window where we're like, okay, we are walking into a burning building when we bid, but we have. And what we have is $1.75 million, in part because our business is doing well, and in part because we have a sponsorship for a launch of it with every town, which is the, you know, the gun safety group. And then we have the backing of the families. The families have helped out by basically, so the Connecticut families don't really care about money very much.

The Texas families care about it slightly. They have basically a deferred payment from the Connecticut families to the Texas families built into this thing, claims waiver kind of thing. What that allows that to do is like push the value of our bid up much higher. The federal receiver

in charge of the estate for Info Wars, he has a fiduciary duty to maximize value. Cash is king. And by maximizing value, we have the highest bid. Well, Alex Jones, his shell company, first United American companies, they had bid three and a half million. Yeah. And lost because you guys had bid the 1.75 plus what I can only translate into sort of like non-lawyers speak is like this sweetener. Yeah. Where the families agreed to forego some of the proceeds to benefit other creditors, which brought that sweetener to a value of, like around $7 million.

Correct. Yeah. But of course, the response from Alex Jones as InfoWords is going offline and, again, he can't even broadcast from his famous studio. Yeah. You would describe how?

He lost his fucking mind. Ladies and gentlemen, it is $750 right now. I'm about to upload this to X. I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the U.S. trustee over our bankruptcy this morning, and they said they're shutting us down, even without a court order. This morning, the Connecticut Democrats with the Onion newspaper,

bought us. They asked, do they outbid? They said, well, it was competitive. So they changed all the bidding rules, made it secret two days ago. I had a bad feeling. I told you that. One of the very first things he does is he calls Steve Bannon on the air. And Steve Bannon picks up the phone and goes, what the fuck is that happened?

The audience is trying to understand. The onion is the first. front group that bought it with backing from from other sources but the onion is going to turn it into a parody site thinking they can mock us so you're going to you know make fake news and and and and the uh vitamin supplements that you sell Alex and other people sell they think they're going to be really funny let's show how funny it is walk in the control room put the freaking camera up in their face and let's get a name rank and serial number imperial troops going to come in there and think they're going to jack boot what's going on let let let's see the jack boot let's see the polish on the

jack boot. Let's see the heel of the jackboot. This is, there's nothing but Gestapo. And then the receiver goes in and starts like turning stuff off in the studio, which was also weird and we didn't really fully understand the extent of how that was going to take place. They're turning off the internet, they're turning everything off here. And so that's in process right now in fours is turned off, band out video is turned off. And so there is a very good chance that we will be back here in the next few years. days as soon as the judge has an emergency hearing.

And this will, this is what I believe is, is injustice and wrong will be upended. A thing that I didn't fully understand that until midway through the day is that he had never heard of the onion until it bought in force. He just never, didn't even,

like, the concept of it was completely foreign to him. So we, that was a fun thing to deal with. And then over the course of the day, like, you know, the local, like, the Fox News started a trick, because like, it was so out of left field, the news didn't really know how to handle it. Fox News said we had 4.3 trillion daily readers, which is on our website somewhere, but I don't even know where. It's not even on

the about section. I don't know where they found that. We had done a hostile takeover of the news for a day, and it was great, except this really, really made Alex very, very upset. So we realized that he was just simply not going to give up on this thing. Yeah, and spoiler alert, less than a month later, a judge rejects your winning bid, rejects the entire auction that took place. And Alex Jones takes to his microphone again. This is a fight all the way to the end. And I've told Trump and I've told his advisors,

they're the bad guys. And so I like our odds. Just taking the gloves off. Can you describe what it's like to face Alex Jones with the gloves off? Oh, it sucks, brother. It's not good. They had made a bunch of threats toward me and, like, the Onion in general, over that month, that they were going to come after us for, you know, thought crime, whatever.

I don't know exactly what the charge of being. For silencing him. For taking his free speech. Yes, for taking his free speech. For basically enacting a judgment, several judgments against him by bidding on the company. And a lot of people ask me, like, you know, The judge, for example, is like, why wouldn't this sell for more? Why wouldn't this go for more?

Yeah, I got to admit, like, that's a pretty good price. Yeah, right? And it's because you're not buying InfoWords. You're buying Alex Jones's personal harassment campaign for the rest of your life. You are inheriting this thing. You're taking on all of this bullshit forever. Like, we were just talking about strength and how he views strength. Alex Jones v.

Yeah, shirtless on a horse. Yeah. And what I've realized over the last 18 months, is strength is actually sticking through to what you believe and what is the right thing to do for people who would otherwise just abandon it.

It's not about showing up on a horse and taking big pills until your voice sounds like this down there here. That's not what it is. Or bombing the shit out of countries and yelling at people about it. Or, you know, sending your mass goons into cities and feeding the shit out.

of women in shooting him in the face. That's not strength. That's actually like the opposite. That's insecurity. Strength is knowing that you're going to walk into a bunch of people saying insane shit about you and keep walking.

I just think, Pablo, there is a moment in your life where you see a bunch of evil shit happening and you have a chance to stop something that is particularly egregious. And if you walk a walk away from it. I just don't know why you're alive, you know? And I decided, with the help of everybody in my life and family, that, like, I just wasn't going to drop this. And I just didn't want

to make it. So our most grievous sin as a country, which is our, which is mass shootings of kids in school, where financializing that and getting away with it is fine. If we can't draw a line there, then there is no line anymore. You can just do whatever you want, whatever evil shit you want and make as much money you want. Friends of mine were like, wasn't it cool that time? You're like, you hip-checked Alex Jones and like, and I was like, no, dude, we're still going for it.

And they're like, yeah, that's cute, Ben. It's nice that you're doing that. Everyone had just given up on the premise. And I wasn't going to give up on these families. I just didn't want to do it. Except the problem was that bankruptcy court doesn't exactly make doing the right thing. easy. And I will spare you the full TikTok of what happened here, but all you really got to know

is that shutting up Alex Jones for good because of Sandy Hook ultimately hinged on a legal character known as the court-appointed receiver. And the court-appointed receiver's job was to sell at auction a whole bunch of stuff belonging to a bankrupt Alex Jones, kind of like, you know, storage wars. He has the actual passwords. Yes. to Infowars.com. He's also the guy, relatedly, who sued Alex Jones in June of 2025 for things, which included, allegedly,

selling part of his ranch to his dad for $10. Yep. Gifting his dad, three luxury cars, and then apparently forgetting which cars they even were. Also making up a prenuptial agreement payment to his wife and other, quote, sham transactions concocted to frustrate the collection efforts, end quote.

And this is the dude. who, in so many words, seemed like he was all good with the onion and your bid. Yeah. And then what happened? I think he got spooked. As did the gum-hating judge that we mentioned before, who rejected the onion's winning bid back in late 2024,

only to have something of a change of heart in August of last year. I guess it's hit the news. The Hill, Judge clears the way for the onion to revive bid for Alex Jones InfoWor. So here we go again. But more than anything else, Ben Collins needed the court-appointed receiver to rule in his favor, or at least allow the onion to lease the keys to Info Wars for that 75 grand a month. And what that receiver realized, apparently, is that he did not want Alex Jones to do to him what he had done to all of his targets, including the Sandy Hook families who are still struggling to collect those 1.4-5%.

billion dollars in damages. He realized that Alex Jones was going to talk about him all the time on Info Wars and make his life hell. In fact, Alex Jones was so committed to information warfare and to fighting that $1.4 billion judgment that he tried to take his case all the way to the Supreme Court, filing an 84-page application, which ultimately failed. First of all, he called the onion his ideological enemy and that we shouldn't be allowed to take over because of that,

which I don't think is how courts work, but I just, you know, that's just, that's just me. But around that same time, last September, something remarkable happened. Donald Trump's Department of Justice entered the fray. The director of Trump's weaponization working group, a guy named Eagle Ed Martin, who is also the Associate Deputy Attorney General, and the United States pardon attorney, as previously discussed on this show, sent a threatening letter to Chris Maddie,

the Yukon fan and attorney for the Sandy Hook families. And in that letter, Martin questions the credibility and financial motives of one of the first responders at the shooting, an FBI agent. And he says, quote, as you may know, there are criminal laws protecting the citizens from actions by government employees who may be acting for personal benefit.

I encourage you to review those. End quote. Yeah. It's like active Sandio of Truthorism coming from the letterhead of the United States government. Alex Jones, naturally, obtained and then published this letter on infowars.com. And he tweeted it out alongside a photo of himself

standing next to a smiling Ed Martin. So yesterday, I talked to Ed Martin, the head strike force lawyer with billions of dollars under him and thousands of people at his disposal. And we talked about 45 minutes and most of what he told me, he said was, you know, he should be on the record. Only a few things weren't. And a lot of this was exclusive information because I've known Ed for really 24, 25 years. He's been a little bit about his background. He's been like hardcore anti-globalist for 40 years.

I mean, so he's been doing the longer than I have. But what this whole multimedia effort told the recipient, Chris Maddie, was something else about Alex Jones. He was getting very, very worried that he was getting to the end. He was trying to come up with some way to, you know, throw off the process that is going to result in the closure of Info Wars. And he tells Ed Martin, hey, and by the way, I don't have first-hand knowledge of this, but it's pretty easy to read these tea leaves that, you know,

one thing we might be able to do here is to suggest that, you know, this whole litigation is somehow under investigation by the Justice Department. Thankfully, somebody at the Justice Department, I believe Todd Blanche shut it down. But it is a, one thing that it made me think about is how many people have gotten letters like this who don't have counsel, who haven't done anything wrong, and with the Justice Department just being used as a form of like Bush League intimidation,

which is what this kind of was. Todd Blanche, by the way, the new acting attorney general, seemed to have at the very least the political wherewithal to think to himself, maybe we shouldn't want to be head to head against the Sandy Hook families

by accusing the FBI agent who was trying to, you know, help them. And this is the Galane Maxwell guy, by the way. But again, it's like, where is, the line is the story of our time. What's going to be the point beyond which you cannot return? And they looked right over into that canyon and then drew themselves back at the last second. Yeah.

And I think part of why I've been living with, you know, this like feeling like I'm falling out of an airplane for 18 months is I am with them at the canyon. And this was the last line of defense. we had to do it because literally no one else was going to do it. The good news is two things happen. One, the newspaper

went bananas in this time frame. So we relaunched it in August of 2024. Since then we've become, I believe we are the fifth largest newspaper in the United States right now. Which is insane. We have over 70,000 subscribers. So that was just cooking

as this was happening. So that was really helpful. And also, it gave us some time to figure out what to do with this asset, right? Because initially we were going to, you know, put some of our favorite old onion writers in charge of it and just do a bunch of, like, scams. Like, send us $100 and we'll send you your grandson, $20. That was the kind of thing that we were going to put on the front page, which I think we still might do, by the way.

And then we're like, well, is that really doing this justice? Could we do something much bigger and better? So the good news is over the last 18 months and the bad news for Alex and everybody else involved in the other side is it gave us a lot of time to think about what this could be and make. some phone calls. And then a couple weeks ago, Alex Jones shows up on Tim Poole's show, and they say that he smells like alcohol, and he says,

they're shutting down InfraWRs next month. I'm ready, but don't follow me at all the shows on X, n4Words.com. We're getting shut down. We beat so many attacks, but finally, we're shutting down like the middle of next month. Wow.

It's going to be insane what happens. People can go. Yeah, so this is it The fake receiverships, the fake auctions, all the The picture of sobriety I was going to say, I don't have blood tests But I can smell him

From here Yeah So I called my lawyer Or bankruptcy lawyer who we've had this whole time And I was like I know he says this like once a month But again he says that they're shutting down I for his next month

So what's the deal? So he called the receiver and he was like Yeah, we're shutting it down Like the receiver said We don't have enough money to pay rent on this $75,000. Right, exactly, let alone pay for utilities and internet and the staff. So we can't keep the asset moving.

And we were like, well, this receiver has two responsibilities, right? Do what the families want with this asset. That's one, which currently they want to sell it to hopefully us, I'm hoping, but like they want to sell it for value to someone they can trust is not in Alex Jones's orbit. and in order to do that, they have to keep the value of the asset up. That is the receiver's job is to keep the value of the asset going. That's why he's still in the air. The rub is, yeah, you can sell this to Alex Jones' ideological enemy,

but they've got to figure out a way to make money with it. Yeah, exactly. So we called the receiver and said, well, it has considerably less value to us as a dead property. We'll pay to take it over. and I can almost guarantee you with the plans that we have like it will increase its value over, you know, the Bono Pryl company that it currently runs. And by the way, and, you know, this is not part of the deal,

but the whole time we're giving a cut of merch sales to the families. We want them to be able to get paid for real at some point with actual human dollars as part of this process. So we've come to an agreement with. the receiver that we get to take over this asset pretty much immediately. It's in a couple of days. Wow.

Yeah. Wait, so just to be clear, then, the actual big exclusive announcement here is that the onion has finally acquired InFil Wars. Yes, yes, we have. We've taken over the InfoWR's studio and the IP and the website and all that stuff, yeah. You guys hiring?

Yeah. So part of the thing we did in the background is like, we're like, no matter if we get this thing or not, we need to go after this kind of like, you know, ecosystem of like slop fluencers. So we started hiring in the background. And the very first person we hired is a guy who reached out maybe like 20 minutes after the first announcement.

And that's Tim Heidecker from Tim and Eric and adult swim days and office hours and he's currently on tour. That's incredible. Yeah, he's an incredible fit. And we didn't know this until, One phone call, but he does a great Auschwitz oppression. I set up a website, and you can look at it right now, because I've got to liquidate, and I've got a lot of DVDs,

and these are items that I've had for 20 years. These are great DVDs. The entire Monty Python's Flying Circus, okay? Now, that's seven DVDs, and you can get that for $99 right now, and that's going to help pay for our legal bills. We're going to be able to keep the doors open here. A big part of what we've seen over the last couple of years is all of the good comedians that you and I know and love,

all the good pipelines for good comedy writers kind of got killed by a series of things like the writer strike the fires, the pandemic and by the time they all came back like all their jobs were replaced by like shows about oil with like that have like five racial slurs in them for some reason

and they're like shit like where is the apex mountain for what a comedy job is and it's kind of are you saying you're not hiring Jerry Jones to do a cameo? He is involved, but sometimes his yacht doesn't get great Wi-Fi. So that's kind of the issue. But I just love, hold on, but what you're saying is that you have made a series of bets.

Yeah. On print newspapers and now, yeah, comedy at the time at which both of these industries have, of course, been otherwise deeply, deeply destroyed. Yeah. I like a zag. We also have this woman in Mia DiPasquale. who was in charge at, you know, Nathan for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was in charge of duping all those companies

into participating in that show. And all of them have deep roll-dexes. My favorite thing about Tim is that he just loves bringing up younger comics and giving them more space to do stuff. And we're going to give them space and we're going to give them the ability to grow into a much bigger thing.

In what better way, right? Like build on the rubble of all this awful stuff. We're all going to have to do this, brother. Like, we have, like, there is just rubble now. And for example, what you've built is like you built this mansion on top of this rubble because you I correctly identified it as rubble. We're trying to do the same. And the people we've hired for this, I could not possibly be more confident that's going to be a big deal. Which is all to say that at some point, you, Ben Collins, head of The Onion, CEO of Global Tetrahedron, is going to get the keys to that studio.

And you're going to get to walk in to Alex Jones's headquarters and do whatever you want with it. Yeah. And these families, too. You know, I'm hoping we get access to the actual facility and it's not like booby trapped or whatever. But like, they can go in there whenever they want and, you know, put their feet up if they want. And that is important to me. And hopefully to them that they get to be able to do that and feel like, you know, what happened to them won't happen to anybody else.

Ben Collins, thank you for coming on the show. And if I find that there is a Filipino-looking sports podcaster on your new podcast network, I will sue your ass. Well, look, first of all, even our fake version of you

will understand that vampires don't like garlic and not fucking onions. I swear to God if you guys fucking cut that thing. We're going to cut every part of this. This has been Pablo Torre finds out, a Metal Arc Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.