The Onion Buys InfoWars

Lately my wife and I have been enjoying spring in Boston by walking our ten month old daughter around the neighborhood and waving hello to all the flowers poking up from under the ground and telling the dogs that they’re good boys. The color is coming back. The people are outside again. It’s great. The Boston Marathon was last week, dudes were drinking beers out of their shoes at Fenway, plus I saw my first UPS driver wearing shorts. That’s all good news. (I do not want to talk about the rancid vibes coming from the baseball team.)

Speaking of things that crawled out of the dirt, Alex Jones has been one of the most noxious, evil voices out there even during a time when you can’t get in a Tesla Uber on autopilot without running one over. Jones, like many of the absolute worst people in the world, realized that evil paid really, really well. Millions and sometimes even billions of dollars well. Sandy Hook trutherism is one of the most fucked up and pathetic notions ever concocted, right up there with “HHS Secretary RFK Jr.” and “Grimace from McDonald’s.” These are agents of chaos in a post-truth society where they know they can get behind a microphone and lie loudly and repeatedly until it sticks. Just about everyone who hears them will understand that it’s schtick, it’s keyfabe, and yet some will say “eh, I just believe it… and I think I’ll buy some boner pills to support this guy while I’m thinking about it.” There are a a lot of things you could choose to spend your time on, and for Jones he decided to rant for years about how one of the worst things imaginable, innocent children and their teachers being murdered at school, a place of safety, discovery, and learning, did not happen. Just an absolutely bonkers thing to make up. A pathetic thing to lie about. And it’s become an important part of his brand, so he does it for lots of other shootings too. Their families had to deal with this intensely personal tragedy, and have these lies haunt them every day since just to make the worst thing possible even worse. Any sane society would dismiss these ghouls out of hand and shun them, and that would be it.

It became clear that absolutely nothing would stop Jones from continuing to lie about this.

And then The Onion showed up.

As I’ve said before, no one is doing it like Pablo Torre, so it’s fitting that Onion CEO Ben Collins went on PTFO to discuss the long, winding saga of taking down Alex Jones. I was heartened by this quote and wanted to write the whole thing out because it’s that good and really worth reading.

You're not buying InfoWars. 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 shirtless on a horse. And what I've realized over the last 18 months is strength is actually sticking through to what you believe in 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 here. That's not what it is. Or bombing the shit out of countries and yelling at people about it or sending your masked goons into cities and beating the shit out of women and shooting them in the face. That's not strength. That's actually the opposite. That's insecurity. Strength is knowing that you're going to walk into bunch of people saying insane shit about you and keep fucking 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 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 I just wasn't going to drop this. So, our 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, evil, whatever evil shit you want and make as much money you want. Friends of mine were like, "Wasn't it cool that time you hipchecked Alex Jones and I was like, "No, dude. We're still going for it." And they were 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.

Imagine if there were more people with that attitude? Imagine if elected officials had this kind of attitude? This is the fight we need with fascism in the White House. It’s long and drawn out and boring and expensive but I hope this tenacity inspires more of the same. There has to be some alchemy of common sense + “no, fuck you” + yes, money that can win the fight against these fucking losers.

The most normie Democrats are winning with their centrist views of “hey, uhh, maybe things could be a little bit better?” This is the time for big swings, this is the time for people to step up and offer a vision for what we could be as a country of empathy and respect and truth. This is the time for people who want to improve peoples lives rather than just take power and make money. Look at Zohran Mamdani. He walks the streets of NYC with a smile and just keeps doing good shit. What a concept.

We’ve moved lightning fast from “of course there is some corruption and lies in politics” to “we built the whole thing out of corruption and lies.” They also added in scams just for fun! Most mainstream media is complicit, but it’s obvious to the rest of us. It really shouldn’t be hard to run against that. It really shouldn’t be hard to run against a bullshit war started by a sundowning old man who just does not care about anything except power and money.

And especially in light of whatever happened last night at the Nazi dinner party, when Trump and co. say “everyone needs to turn down the rhetoric” it’s important to understand that absolutely does not include them. He can threaten nuclear war, threaten to end whole civilizations, call for executions, call immigrants vermin, murder people in boats, send the military into American cities based on lies, call the press the enemy of the people, pardon criminals, stay up all night posting racist tirades on social media, on and on. That’s all fine. But even mild pushback of those ideas is dangerous. The man’s brain is creamy cheddar soup and he is a danger to the entire planet, but even mild pushback to any of that hurts his wittle feelings so we just have to just let it happen and coddle him with maddening, asymmetric coverage. It doesn’t have to be like this! We shouldn’t have to all sit around and see just how far the madman will go on all his threats, the threats that by the way don’t count as heated rhetoric, because he’s a special boy. This is no way to live.

To Ben and to The Onion: fuck yeah. May your tireless work inspire more fighters willing to get in the ring and take down the losers, liars, grifters, and soulless goons who’ve been in charge for way too long.

Good things are possible. Their reign is not inevitable.

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My newest playlist and a new poem; a great new song by Fear Elements; a great new song by Dead Billionaires; looking back at 25 years of Dashboard Confessional’s The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most; an interview with Del Paxton; a profile of local DIY artist Kerrin Connolly; a review of the documentary Secret Mall Apartment.

You should also definitely subscribe to The Onion. Getting it in the mail is a real joy.

This is my favorite recent Onion headline: