The coverage picked up, but it certainly felt like a pretty lonely place to be for a minute, and a precarious place from a security standpoint that nobody else was jumping in full-throated, guns blazing.
At WIRED, we were like, “Let’s go. This is the time.” What I’ve seen from The Onion is you’ve had this groundswell of support, right? And I think we saw the same thing. It has been good for business to do good journalism and tell the truth.
It’s great for business and also you’re inured to all these other pressures, right? Like advertisers do come to us to be a part of this. They might not scream it from the rooftops, but they do.
That’s where the audience is—not with fascists with tiny mustaches. Where big billionaire money is, that’s where they want everything culturally to align. But it’s not where actual people are. People don’t like this shit.
We got a window into this immediately, because the election happened and then eight days later the auction for Infowars happened.
Back us up here a little bit.
Infowars was for sale at auction because Alex Jones was successfully sued for a billion dollars by two sets of families—one in Texas, one Connecticut—that he had [defamed] for saying that the Sandy Hook [school shooting] was completely synthetic and didn’t actually happen. The entirety of Infowars, including his supplements that he sells to people, were for sale, and we were going to put in a bid.
No one knew where the wind was blowing. Even in the week [after the election], you could see everyone was just like, I guess I better just batten down the hatches, board up the doors, and get afraid of fascism for four years.
We had to take a risk to do that. We won. The judge took it away from us because he was also scared of what was going on. He basically wiped away about like 18 months of court decisions. I mean, I would be spooked too.
You’ve got to remember, [deputy FBI director] Dan Bongino, [FBI director] Kash Patel—these people were on Infowars. That was a feeder system to the administration. So to be afraid of that is natural. But it also shows that putting your foot in the ground as a business and as a human being is important right now.
Absolutely. So just to be clear, you are still working on acquiring those supplements?
Yes. I mean, if we end up with the supplements, I still don’t know what to do with them, but we are absolutely trying to. We have a whole plan for what to do with Infowars if and when we get it.
You know what? I interviewed Bryan Johnson, and he has a supplements business, so maybe he could take that off your hands.
Yeah. We’re very similar people.
But back to Infowars, this is a murky universe that you are uniquely familiar with, right? You covered disinformation as a reporter, so you were very well steeped in how the internet became a cesspool of conspiracy and bad faith and artificial information, all of that nasty stuff. How has that shaped the way you think about The Onion’s role, maybe not as a purveyor of truth, because you don’t exactly traffic in truth, but as a purveyor of something sort of good amidst all of that muck?
