The Onion Buys Infowars

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I was pretty surprised this morning when I got up
and I saw that The Onion named the winning bidder
at a bankruptcy auction for the info Wars brand set
up by, of course, Alex Jones. I'm sure if you
are a person who follows the news or politics, political punditry,
all sorts of that stuff, you're familiar with Alex Jones,

(00:21):
you're familiar with Info Wars and the Onion kind of
the opposite, right, the Onion. You know that you could
say that they are, you know, political in some way,
but for the most part, I would consider The Onion,
with its satire and everything, just to be more comedic.
I look at it that way. I am not a
person that gets overly offended by anything like that. Let

(00:44):
me let me just try to explain this the best
I can. I don't know that might come off weird. First.
The first thing, there are people I do. I get
defensive in some situations. We talked earlier this week to
deb Fisher, and I had a few people just you know,
not give me a lot of trouble, but you know,
just kind of ask me like, why didn't you do this,

(01:05):
why didn't you do that? And I get a little
defensive sometimes about things, like I think about this stuff.
I try to do it the best way that I
know how. And until you're sitting in my scenario and
you have to think about all the things that you
think about, it's hard to like, hey, let's tell this
guy how to do his job when he's doing the
best thing that he feels like he can do, right.
I don't do that to other people. You know, we

(01:27):
can Monday Morning quarterback on all sorts of different things
and all that, but I'm not going to demean somebody for,
you know, what they do unless they abjectly fail at
what they're paid to do. I say that in context
because it is important to have pretty thick skin in
this industry. It's something that I've had to learn kind

(01:47):
of on the job. I don't generally do. I don't
have a lot of thick skin when it comes to
me defending how I do things in my life. With
that being said, I do not get offended when people
joke about stuff I don't. I just don't. You know,
people get offended when Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, you know,
did their hipston't Lie dances on the Super Bowl that

(02:09):
stuff doesn't offend me. I didn't get offended. When you know,
Saturday Night Live makes fun of conservatives sometimes, you know,
they make fun of liberals too, maybe in a little
bit more of a lovey dovey way, but they still
you know, like I just I laugh at the stuff
that's funny, and if it's not funny, then I don't laugh.
I'm a person that loves South Park and Family Guy

(02:30):
and the Simpsons, and you have to at some point
have a sense of humor about things that are going
on out there. And if it's supposed to be a
joke and I think it's funny, then it's funny to me.
I'm not gonna worry about should I be offended by this,
because that's just that's a bad way to live. I
don't like living that way. So I do find the
Onion to be pretty funny. Like if I see stuff
that the Onion has put out with headlines or you know,

(02:53):
some of it is politically motivated, and that's fine. The
Babylon Bee is kind of the answer to the Onion.
On the conservative side of things. Find a lot of
their stuff funny too. It's supposed to be, and the
Onion doesn't have a lot of influence on America. I
don't find people go to the Onion and get influenced
about their political ideologies because of the Onion. It's quite
different than what I think the hope was for Alex

(03:15):
Jones and Info Wars. He made a multi million dollar
a multi like I mean, not just a multimillion dollar platform.
He had millions of people that not were only aware
of him, but like to watch him, even if it
was because they hated him. I tell you, there are
a lot of people out there that want to watch
or listen or read stuff from people who they just

(03:39):
enjoy disliking. There are people make good livings out there
being unlikable because people just want to hear or see
or read about the opinions or the musings of somebody
that they don't like. And Alex Jones certainly fit that bill.
I watched something go viral with Marco Rubio. This is
years ago now, I'm sure, but Marco Ubio is answering

(04:00):
questions from reporters and Alex Jones is kind of standing
there and just he's talking over Mark Ruby the whole time.
He looks like a child. Honestly, it really looks like
seventh grade level, like arguing with somebody just talking over
him the entire time, trying to troll Marco Rubio, who
I thought handled that situation particularly pretty well. But that's
what Alex jones whole thing was. You want to talk

(04:23):
about table flipper or somebody that wants to mix up
the pot that this is that guy. Unfortunately for Alex
sometimes he couldn't figure out where that line was of
trying to be kind of an imitation of some conservative
talk show hosts of the past that as the Internet
would you know, turn into some blossoming and information was

(04:44):
fairly selective and you weren't surrounded by it immediately, although
there are some people out there that still find a
way to surround themselves with just the media they're interested in.
But back in the day, like a Rush Limbaugh, who's
truly a legend and set, I mean, the only reason
Alex Jones was able to have a platform at all
is because Rush baw created it. Not literally created his platform.
He had to create his own platform. But Rush Limbaugh

(05:06):
opened the door for political punditry really on both sides
as far as I'm concerned, especially conservatives, though in the
way that you could do a show, the way that
you could entertain people by dancing around with the facts
a little bit and saying things in saying them in
a way that would conjure up reactions from people. Alex

(05:29):
didn't know where the line was though, to where it
really got damaging to not just people, but also causes
in a way that this Sandy Hook thing got completely
out of control. He said he was being silenced or
censored on multiple occasions, but here he was legitimately sued
for spreading what they would considering dangerous misinformation about the

(05:53):
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. And then after that he
owes over a billion dollars in defamation judgments because of that,
And I mean, it really is taking away his entire
livelihood at a certain point, though, we talk about people
that need to rooth the consequences of the things that
they did, and a school shooting is just such a

(06:15):
weird thing to be peddling a conspiracy about that being
a hoax. And I almost certainly know that I'm about
to get an email or somebody's going to try to
call in. Please don't because I have the phone lines
blocked out. It's just me and here by myself, So
I don't have anybody the inns of the phones for me.
But like I sit here, and I know there are
people out there that want to say this is all

(06:36):
It was made up, or it was staged, or it
was acted about, and all this stuff based on information
they have surrounded themselves by, even if there is contrary evidence,
and courtrooms have made determinations as such. And if you
are wanting to hold people accountable for some of the
stuff that they have done, like we said earlier in
the show, what's good for the goose should be good
for the gander. If we're holding people accountable for the

(06:58):
stuff that they are trying to do to Donald Trump,
and you say you're in favor of all of that,
you're in favor of people having to suffer the consequences
of their actions, regardless of what that looks like. Then
certainly Alex Jones falls under that, considering what a courtroom
ruled after he talks a lot and was leading the
discussion about Sandy Hook being a hoax. So it's quite

(07:19):
an interesting dichotomy between somebody who made angry conspiracy theories
his entire thing, even if a lot of it was
meant to be more entertainment based and not factual base.
It was not interpreted as such by many people, and
that goes completely on the other side of the Onion,
which literally only pedals its entire existence in satire and

(07:43):
things that are pretty obviously untrue or told in a
way that is supposed to make people laugh. So it
is interesting. I don't know what they're going to do.
It sounds like they may create an info wars with
the brand, and the rumor is that they could make
that into kind of an extension of parodying and sad tire,
because many people just kind of looked at it like

(08:03):
that anyway, even if Alex Jones was being completely serious.
But at the end of the day, another one bites
the dust, at least as far as the media goes,
and we'll see how the Onion expands its potential footprint
of comedics attire in this country after this