Dan and Jordan dissect The Onion's $75,000 monthly rent acquisition of InfoWars on April 20, 2026, mocking Alex Jones' claim of a secret transition to his new network. They analyze callers debating pineal gland worms and AI creators while Jones ignores the takeover news, comparing the situation to a blown baseball save where corporate antagonists like the DOJ cannot fix Jones' ruined audience trust regarding Iran and Epstein. Ultimately, the hosts conclude that satire fails against absurdity, leaving Jones vulnerable not just to comedians but to shifting public sentiment. [Automatically generated summary]
So now, Jordan, the great mystery of why Alex has been out of studio for the last week or so has been revealed.
All has become clear.
Mysteries are solved.
On Monday, The Onion announced for the second time that they bought InfoWars.
This time seems a little bit more officially, maybe?
I have a lot of complicated feelings about this turn of events, but I want to sum it up as succinctly as possible by saying I hope it all works out and that there's a positive net effect.
I think that a lot of people want a little bit more than that from me or us, so here goes.
I think The Onion has an incredibly talented writing team and competent leadership, and that Tim Heidecker is exactly the kind of performer who can pull off layered and biting satire.
If anyone should be the person picked to try and make a parody of Infowars, he's definitely the guy.
And I think that some strong comedic talent is going to be involved, and some content will come out of this that probably will rule.
But for me, the issue is that I don't think anyone should do this.
InfoWars isn't really satirizable in a meaningful way.
The content is absurd to the point where anyone trying to create a fake version of it will only succeed in making something that's kind of close to the regular version.
Alex drunkenly throwing hatchets around the studio, or telling Chase that he thinks he's about to call in the Angel of Death, or Alex sincerely talking about how he ran into some really tall vampires in DC, or the orbs that are coming on Easter.
That's all content that should be in a parody of InfoWars, but it's actually just what the show is.
So, I think that there's a challenge that pulling off a satire of this presents that I sincerely hope that they can do something with, but I don't know if anyone can.
Yeah.
That's really where the heart of my sort of weird feelings about this live.
And one of the reasons that we talked about was because you have to, if you're making a parody of Infowars, you have to be making it for an audience who is in on the joke.
And most people have no idea what Infowars really is.
They don't know he's talking about like calling in the angel of death.
Yeah.
They don't know this stuff.
They see a meme of him talking about gay frogs, and that's the extent of the awareness.
Because how would, like, if you said in a, like, let's say a joke article on their new site, if you were to say, Alex tearfully calls in the angel of death to take out Biden or whatever, that looks like a pretty fucking funny headline if you don't watch Alex's show, but it's actually just a regular thing he said.
I don't think that there's anything wrong with taking away.
His shit.
You know, like, I think, great.
It's a consequence of the actions that he's taken in the past and all that.
I do think that everyone at this point should be keenly aware that he's not going anywhere.
Yep.
And so, pretending that taking over the site or anything is going to have an influence on that, I do think that we need to be a little bit more realistic about it.
So, on the April 20th show, he starts the show and gets about to the third hour before the news has broken that the New York Times article about him that he bought came out.
Ben Collins, the head of The Onion, did an interview that came out in the middle of the day.
I'm very honored that he attacked me again, Trump, on Friday and said that I'm fried and all the rest of it because I don't want to be associated with this disastrous situation that's unfolding at all.
Because when somebody who doesn't know what they're doing tells somebody who's on record being right, they got a low IQ, well, that's where I want to be.
The truth is, I don't have a low IQ, Trump, and I actually study all these issues.
You may know all about real estate and you and Ludnig, how to insider trade on all your different economic announcements.
But at the end of the day, buddy, the military told you not to do this, and Israel, Netanyahu, lied to you.
If I'm writing SAT tests or ACT tests or any test at all, any standardized testing, if there's one question that is just like, if you help get a person elected and then that person you helped get elected calls you low IQ, that person is correct.
Yeah, and if you're getting on your show and being like, you and Howard Lutnick certainly know how to insider trade, it's like he didn't just start that last season or whatever.
Like, you know this, and you've been pretending that you didn't.
Before we go any further, I'm going to make announcements in the next few days that are detailed on this.
But barring a miracle, InfoWars will close in nine and a half days on the 30th of April.
And starting May 1st, the Alex Jones Network will fire up.
Same time slot, radio stations, satellites, stations all know.
It's going to be pretty seamless.
We'll have a new news site we're going to be announcing and a lot more.
And even though in federal and state court, the bad guys never even got the right to have InfoWars or get the building, the judge has ordered a receiver to not let us pay the bills and to close us.
So I watched an interview that Ben Collins did after the news broke about the sale, and he explained that Infowars pays $75,000 a month in rent on the facility that they broadcast from.
It wasn't an issue where the receiver was withholding money to pay the rent, it was a situation where they weren't bringing in enough money anymore to pay the overhead.
Part of the reason that The Onion was able to make this deal work, where the other time it fell through, is that in the current situation, if Alex were just left alone, Infowars would go out of business on its own.
He's directed all the money flow and sales over to his Big Lee operation, so he's kind of just waiting for the InfoWars boat to sink, even if no one did anything.
The receiver has a fiduciary responsibility to the plaintiffs in this case, so he has to do what's best for them in terms of recouping the money that they're owed.
Ben was able to make the argument to the receiver that if they just did nothing, InfoWars would be a dead asset and none of the plaintiffs would make anything from it.
But if the Onion were allowed to take over and pay the overhead and rent and all that, The plaintiff stood to see a return on this, which is a more compelling argument to the receiver than prior, like the auction.
I'm sorry, but all I hear in that clip is Alex refusing to live out his destiny.
He cries on air constantly about how he's like Colonel Travis at the Alamo.
And if you listen to this show with any regularity, you know that all he's ever really wanted is to be a hero like that.
Someone who lives on in the lore of future patriots.
He's being handed an opportunity to be Colonel Travis on a silver platter, and instead of sticking to the ethos of no surrender, no retreat, he's saying that the landlord is going to ask them to leave, so he's moving to a new fortress.
I'm not saying that he should have an armed standoff that leads to his death rather than leave the Infowars studio, but I am saying that if he doesn't, then he's kind of invalidated the entire fantasy of who he is, and he kind of looks like an idiot.
If Santa Ana had told Colonel Travis that they weren't going to have electricity or the internet at the Alamo, But he could just leave and go to a different fort and let Santa Ana take the Alamo.
Colonel Travis wouldn't have said, Great, I can continue the fight from there.
If King George had told our founding fathers that they could all go to Maine and have their country there, but he would keep the rest of the colonies, they wouldn't have said, Cool, we can keep complaining safely from up there.
Alex agreeing to leave Infowars because the corrupt law or some landlord is telling him that he has to.
Means that he plays by the rules of the corrupt law and some landlord.
All of this shit about him being on a mission from God, that's secondary to not getting in trouble for squatting at his studio when he's been asked to leave.
Him being willing to leave and negotiating a date to leave that helps things go smooth for his new business really penetrates the illusion he tries to cultivate of himself as this rampaging revolutionary.
It's probably a really good short term business decision for him to just leave the building, but it does irreparable damage to his ability to present himself as a heroic figure in terms of patriot mythology, and I think that damage he's doing to himself is.
Is more than anyone, any court or anybody could do to him.
So maybe the person who owns it wouldn't have given up all of, you know, like, wouldn't be like, yeah, I'm going to keep owning these parts, but you can own.
Well, this caller does bring up something that Alex really should address, and that is that he's claimed he's had the ear of Trump for a long time and then has to do public outbursts to get his attention.
So, I appreciate the update on the InfoWars future.
I'm glad to hear you're fighting them till the end.
I'm looking forward to the new site and everything coming out.
Just a suggestion.
So, I know, like, when you've been on vacation, you know, these past few weeks, like, you kind of had different guests fill in and stuff like that.
And you've mentioned, too, like, when you transition to this new, News site and everything, you're going to be taking more of a news director type of role.
And I really hope that you're still able to do your show for maybe a couple hours a day.
You know, not to kiss your ass or anything, but no one does it like you, man.
No one tells the news like you and has your insight and everything.
And, you know, when we hear some of these guys, like Harrison Ford, he's great.
I like listening to him.
Even your son, Rex, and his other guy he has, they're really good.
Some of these guest hosts, though, like Gavin and even Matt Bracken sometimes, they're just hard to listen to.
And I really enjoyed your take on it.
Nailing it.
You can even see in your banned.video, your views are usually way less unless you're in there.
I realized recently, and I wish it was something that was just sparked by this misspeaking by the caller, but I was like, Harrison Smith, what a fucking dork.
Who's named Harrison?
And then it did dawn on me that Harrison Ford is named Harrison.
But my question specifically connects to the long term strategic, unwavering message of InfoWars with regard to the advance of artificial intelligence.
You did a Interview back with ChatGPT a while back.
But I mean, while all the geopolitical situation has been brewing with regards to Ukraine and, of course, Iran, we're hopeful for President Trump to succeed.
It's a bit concerning what he's doing now, to be quite honest.
But, anyways, I was just curious, while all of this stuff is brewing, we are getting newer and newer, more and more intelligent models, basically on like a monthly basis.
So I was just hoping that you keep an eye on that and spread the message to, you know, on your platform because it is.
It's stunning what's happening on almost a weekly basis.
In fact, they've got all these super AIs, then the studies try to take everything over that are basically siloed.
They're not hooked to the internet.
They're worried about them jumping out.
Here's an example I don't watch a lot of TV, but last night I had this nostalgia thing, and I went, I want to see Three's Company for some reason, which I wasn't even a huge fan of when I was a kid.
Ran 77 to.
But I was thinking about Sling Blade and Scott Ritter.
I thought it was a great actor.
So I turned on the smart TV, hadn't been on probably in a month.
And it's like 10 o'clock at night, and I go start watching really funny, classic scenes from Three's Company.
And then I turned it off and went and brushed my teeth, get ready to go to bed.
And I came back, and there was the screen savers on the screen.
And up until a few months ago, every time I turned the TV on, it would say who the photographer was.
It'd be like landscapes and cool things.
Now, everything was AI.
I would say AI generated, AI generated, AI generated, AI generated.
So, just like that, where are the photographers now?
And so, my main question is just do you plan on, I guess, with everything happening, it's just insane the attacks on you, on your team, on the studio, on the company.
But as far as do you anticipate, I guess, doing potentially another sort of question, QA style thing with?
Like one of the large language models, just because we live in this.
So, that call is a perfect example of how parodying Alex is impossible.
On its face, I have legitimately no idea whether this guy is making fun of Alex.
It's totally possible that this is a sincere caller who's worried about AI from the Infowars standpoint and actually thinks that there's some value to Alex interviewing a robot.
Whether it's a joke or not, this fits into the Infowars world.
This guy could be trolling him or he could be sincere, but it doesn't really matter.
Something that people on the outside see as absurd is fairly normal to people on the inside.
So something that appears hilarious to you and me, like the suggestion that Alex should interview chatbots more, seems like a decent request to the Infowars mind.
As far as this goes, if this was a guy trolling Alex, that's great.
Because we do need to see Alex interrogating robots more on the show.
And then there's the desperation, the true, honest desperation that exists within him.
Whether it's for the thing that he's trying to convince you of or just a general vibe of desperation that you cannot, as an observer, see from a comedian because you know they don't mean it.
So Trump says anybody that doesn't like the Iran war, that was right about it not ending quickly, and the Iranians closed Fedor Moose, not killing the economy and more, is low IQ.
He says, I'm low IQ.
Well, you can get your low IQ hats at the AliceShieldStore.com.
Now, the truth is, the high IQ people warned Trump, and he didn't listen.
And it's come out behind the scenes.
He's freaking out, and he should be.
But he now is caught in this pissing contest with Iran.
Back in the 90s, I knew my father was in the Bohemian Grove and went up there in Northern California every year.
And I've had lots of experiences with him.
I mean, I can remember when he had what's known as the surgery for the Black Eye Club, where they tore out his pineal gland and put a worm in place of the pineal gland.
A few years ago, I have a tendency to get up to urinate during the night and somehow was half awake.
And.
Had like hung up a sports jacket or something sticking out outside the bathroom, and I walked into a clothes hanger, wooden clothes hanger, and I got a little bit of a black eye.
Well, I immediately saw that in the morning.
I go, oh God, I have this black eyed club thing.
They're going to say I'm a Mason.
I need to go put some makeup on.
I don't ever wear makeup unless I have like a cut or something on my face, but maybe once a year.
Famously, I was on Steven Crowder's show.
They even caught it on surveillance camera.
They have these sharp wooden panels.
I was talking to Steven, and somebody talked to me behind.
I turned my nose into the deal and cut it really bad.
And then they made a joke about it when we played it on air.
But I put makeup on my nose for a week.
It was a big cut.
It looked bad.
That was not a secret Masonic deal to have a cut on my nose.
But I feel like we need to start flooding the elections with independent candidates.
Get rid of the party.
We know they're corrupt and they're corruptible.
If we get behind candidates who are registered as independent and we verify that they're a good person and that what they want to do with their elected office is true to our American values, then the alternative media platforms such as yourself, And other, you know, Joe Rogan, whoever, just big people could get behind these people and push their message and let the American people know.
We know people watch your show way more than CNN or MSNBC or any of them.
So, but I feel like, you know, I do have to agree a little bit with the prior caller that no matter which way the pendulum swings, whether it swings left or right, it's still advancing the clock on our enslavement.
You know, we've seen both parties for.
My entire lifetime of noticing politics, 30 years.
I mean, I'm 45 years old.
You know, we've seen them feed us hopium just to rug pull us.
And it's like they make great promises, but when it comes time and they get in office, their party is a good old boy club, you know, and they're all hammering down on them and coercing them to do what's not right.
And I feel like if we had strong independent candidates, it would be our best bet to say, Salvation.
I mean, we could literally turn it around in maybe one election cycle, but how do you feel about that?
I mean, and they just walked in and handed me this.
I'm going to do a little bit in the next hour and then hand it over to Matt Bragging.
New York Times, let's put the HD version up, please.
New York Times!
Now, a year and a half ago, remember the Onion?
They're supposed to have an auction in their federal law so good guys could buy or bad guys.
The Onion had that shut down by the U.S. Trustee's Office, Death Department, and had InfoWars handed over to them.
The federal judge said that that was not legal.
And here we are a year and a half later.
The onion is now in the New York Times.
It's just broke.
And says they're coming in here to take it over next month.
Even though we're still on appeal in Texas and they have huge liability, giant liability doing that, they've gone to Judge Guerra Gamble, the same one that's ordered the Texas trustee, the receiver, to turn our power, internet, and everything off the first.
And they've already cut the internet, but the internet hadn't cut us off yet, so that might happen right now.
I don't know, any minute.
So you don't pay your power bill or whatever, you just wonder when it's going to turn off, and all of a sudden you wait when the morning gets off, that we've all been poor in college or something, and you've had our power turned off and forgotten to pay it.
It's the same thing.
I told you, Bloomberg and the Onion, folks.
And talk about lawsuit city, but they don't care because they got that Bloomberg money.
But it doesn't matter.
I don't own the Alex Shields Store.com.
I don't own the Alex Shields Network.
And so it doesn't matter what judgments they have against me or anything.
You need to support us.
You need to go to the Alex Shields Store.com and get the T shirts, get the ultramethylene red, ultramethylene blue, all the other incredible supplements.
Fund us, support us.
We are under globalist attack.
We need to continue on to expose the Democrats and the psychotic neocon Israel firsters.
We need to continue.
Our most important work is still at hand.
I've been battling the deep state for decades, but intensely, intensely for eight years.
And so I wasn't ignoring that last caller.
I really do that.
But I was halfway listening to him while I was speed reading this because they came in and handed this to me while he was talking.
So I apologize to the caller if I sound a little bit distracted.
I did hear you about the third party and the Patriot Party and all that.
Musk said he was going to do that early on, and then he studied it more and pretty much agreed that it's just the two parties have a lock on that, too.
They're not going to let a third party ever get up there.
I mean, we've got major corruption, folks.
We've got to have major reform.
By the way, there's a deal that ends tomorrow.
By the way, ultramethylene red is still good.
It works the same as methylene blue, but it works great with it.
See the huge bottle of it right there by the methylene blue.
So, that thing about how you're going to need a wrecking ball to get me out of here, that's really awesome.
And it sounds defiant as hell.
It's the kind of message that Alex really wants to pretend he embodies.
But earlier in this show, he was calmly talking about how he'd chosen to leave the studio on the 30th because it would be the smoothest way to get over to his new fake business.
It's awesome to say that it's going to take the National Guard to make you back down, but you can't credibly say that after you've already said that you agreed to back down.
In some ways, this turn of events is a pretty big win for Alex because he now has an enemy who's causing the shutdown of Infowars instead of him just trying to insist that he could totally have kept paying rent on the old studio if they just let him.
Ultimately, I think that it's not really a win for Alex because the enemy he has to fight against is a brain trust of skilled comedians and a figurehead who's a pillar of alternative comedy.
Who has a rich history of pointed satire?
He can pretend that the enemy he's up against is Bloomberg and all that, but it's really just smart, funny people who want to fuck with him.
And so I do think that he's able to keep the plate spinning of like Bloomberg is attacking me, but I think people will see through it.
And I don't think it really helps him that much.
It doesn't solve any problems, and Alex isn't going to go away, but I can't just be a hater all the time.
I think it's ultimately not the best plan, but honestly, who cares what I think?
I don't say that to be facetious.
I may be a stick in the mud about this kind of stuff because of the unique position I'm in after all this time.
Like, when I see someone taking over Infowars, I see the possible academic and historical opportunity there is to mine the data and internal documents that'll illustrate how a real vibrant propaganda network runs.
And truth be told, I can't tell if the folks at The Onion aren't pursuing that along with making a comedy site on Infowars Ashes.
Maybe they can do both.
And maybe making an antagonist for Alex that he can't ignore and is inherently not meant to be taken seriously is good.
Maybe.
I don't know.
I'm iffy on everything, but we'll see how it shakes out.
Nothing that anyone does is going to make Alex go away.
So, criticizing this based on the fact that it doesn't make him go away isn't really fair.
And that's an inherent challenge that the Onion now has to deal with.
Sure.
They can't pretend and promise that they're silencing InfoWars or shutting him down for good because he's not going anywhere.
It is, I mean, here's the thing: as much as I would like to be optimistic in any form or fashion, if it were easy or if it were something that they were capable of doing, we wouldn't have 1,100-odd shows.
Maybe our existence wouldn't be necessary, probably.
So, because we exist, I would be actually fuck it because we exist.
I think that we've learned a lot of stuff over the course of the time doing this show, yeah, that make it clear to us why this is a really, really hard thing, yeah, that they're undertaking, yeah.
And I don't know if that means they're fucked, but I think that we have a unique perspective.
It comes out a little bit more pessimistically and negatively on your end, and more like, uh, let's see, on my end.
But at the end of the day, Alex is a problem that's still going to exist.
In baseball, my wife's from Philly, and we just watched the losing Phillies game.
You know, there's pitchers that used to play nine innings.
That's very rare now, pitcher pitches nine innings because the managers just say, you know, look, maybe he can finish the game, but it'll wreck his arm.
Then there's guys that come in and like, you know, a deep reliever that like he comes in to like get one or two outs.