Dan and Jordan dissect the April 20, 2026 episode of "The War Room," mocking its false claim that The Onion purchased InfoWars to demoralize their audience. They critique host Harrison Smith for conflating 420 with Hitler's birthday and analyze how critics hijack sincere outrage regarding an IDF soldier smashing a Jesus statue in Lebanon. The hosts also attack Ben Collins, a former NBC censor now at InfoWars, for using homophobic slurs while defending his wife's anti-Israel campaign, countering claims about the Al Shira hospital explosion. Finally, they ridicule Alex Jones's shirtless appearance as a low-effort performance following the alleged acquisition, contrasting it with Burt Kreischer's successful trope usage and noting the legal settlement involving Paul Weiss and Donald Trump as evidence of The Onion aligning with the "bad guy." [Automatically generated summary]
There was Lost Lake there, and I tried to go mess around with the lake a little bit, but it seemed like all the roads, like everything that was close to the lake, ended up being on someone else's property.
And to make matters worse, I also, like, as I was, like, having the water heat up before I would have put it to the shower head, I noticed it wasn't draining.
And so now there's standing water in the tub, but I can't get it to drain.
I feel like I want to celebrate this in terms of the tattooist and you, but I think most of my memories of the bartender version of exactly what you're talking about.
We were not sincere.
I think they were fucking with me because I tipped well.
Listen, there was one specific bar that was across the street from my apartment that had roughly one person work there and one person go there, and both of those were me and the bartender.
It's still a boo because I think it's one of those now, like, Trivia facts that have gone from the realm of being interesting to tell somebody to, like, yeah, we all fucking know that.
That's one of those trivia facts now.
Like, the Statue of Liberty is from France.
Everybody kind of gets that now, as opposed to it being a fun fact.
And then, about five minutes ago, it was announced that The Onion is buying InfoWars.
Maybe.
Potentially.
They might in the future buy InfoWars.
This is, of course, the second time that The Onion.
Has done the media rounds claiming that they own InfoWars, which means that they've legitimately published more fake news than we have at this point because it's just that's not true.
That's not true.
Maybe it's eventually true.
We'll get into it.
I'm going to spend a lot of time on that.
We'll be joined by Rex Jones in the third hour.
We'll certainly talk about it.
We'll get into it.
And we'll also, in general, and just by virtue of the modern cultural landscape, We will be funnier than the onion ever is these days.
So I often say that I don't think there's anything wrong with criticizing Israel.
And I should actually probably be more direct than that.
I think there's something necessary about criticizing Israel.
I don't say that the criticism of Israel is okay as an attempt to both sides the issue.
The only thing I'm trying to bring attention to is that these people, like Tucker and Harrison, Do not care about the same things that a sincere critic of Israel or Zionism cares about.
They're trying to hijack other people's sincere outrage about a genocide and use that to demonize all Jews.
And I think that this clip is a helpful illustration of that distinction that I'm trying to get at.
Harrison is saying that the image of an IDF soldier smashing a statue of Jesus illustrates the Judeo and Christian parts of Judeo Christian values.
He's saying that Jews are hell bent on destroying Christianity, and you'd kind of have to be an idiot to not understand exactly what he's saying.
What Harrison and folks like him try to do is take the very real criticisms of Israel and throw bigotry into them, like fold it into the mix, while pretending that what they're doing and the version of criticism that they're engaging in is based in righteousness and like they are heroes standing up to a bully or whatever.
Yeah, I mean, that's the strategy that's worked for them for the past 40 years or whatever.
You know, like whenever they first got onto the internet, very useful and necessary criticisms of the United States were ready and available, and they tricked people into taking those and turning them into shouldn't we be Nazis?
Like when the bailouts in 2009 and shit were going on, there's serious, serious, necessary criticisms of capitalism and the situation that we had all gotten ourselves into.
And they pretended to care about that while yelling about Rothschild bankers and, you know, that kind of shit.
It's what they do.
They fold these dumb shit things into things that other people might care about if they take it seriously.
I, you know, my interest is a lot in that distinction because I think that it's very easy to think that someone is on your side or cares when they do not.
Well, I mean, I think it's easy to kind of turn it into a malicious thing or a kind of.
Intelligent thing by calling it kind of a controlled opposition because the opposition itself reinforces the dominant status quo, but it's more like a manipulated opposition.
These people think some of them or enough of them think they are fighting what you think you're fighting, only they're Nazis, you know?
We could not, not that we would anyway, but we could not start publishing things saying, We're NBC.
This is NBC saying that, you know, whatever, and just like saying stuff.
Like, we just couldn't do that.
We'd get sued.
It wouldn't be allowed.
They're just doing it.
This is the second time they've done it.
Gone on TV and told people, We own InfoWars.
What do you think that's going to do?
Obviously, people are going to believe it because it's on the news, because they actually are the liars.
They actually are the.
Fakers, they actually do just straight up lie to your face about things with the intention of destroying InfoWars, of convincing people, oh, I better not support InfoWars because they've been sold and I don't want to support The Onion.
That argument does not hold up because The Onion can't demoralize the InfoWars audience anymore at this point.
Harrison's trying to pretend that The Onion is pretending to own InfoWars so people stop buying Alex's supplements from InfoWars, but Alex has already directed them to do that.
Any true InfoWars fans are already only buying from Big Lee, so there isn't an audience.
That's being persuaded to stop buying shit because they don't want their money to go to the Onion.
No one's buying shit from Infor's anymore, which is why they can't pay their rent, which is why the Onion was able to make this deal.
If the Onion controlling Infor somehow impacted the Alex Jones store or Bigly, then this would be a different situation.
But as it is, Alex has already self inflicted all of the damage that Harrison is pretending the Onion is trying to do here.
I mean, you know, the reason that selling out has to happen now is because it feels like the only way to get an established audience is by joining the establishment.
Otherwise, you'll be like us and you'll kind of be really cool, but on the edge, on the outside.
He's like, Ben Collins, who's the CEO of The Onion, is the one telling everybody that he purchased us.
But again, it just, they can lie.
They can misrepresent us.
They can say that they're us.
They can claim that they own us.
Nothing happens to them.
They can rig a federal bankruptcy proceeding and just nothing happens to them.
They just get away with it.
It really is crazy.
And, like, that to me is the only disheartening thing about this.
So, you know, I don't really care about The Onion.
I mean, for the record, I went ahead and asked Grok today.
Infowars has two times the traffic of The Onion, at least, like, on a monthly basis.
And this is with The Onion having poured millions and millions of dollars trying desperately to regain the cultural cachet that they have lost over the last several decades.
Ben's almost certainly a public figure, so the defamation threshold is high.
But Harrison's accusing him of a crime, and he absolutely knows that accusation is false as he's saying it.
There's no way that this isn't defamatory.
But more importantly, I'm glad that Harrison's robot friend reassured him that he was more popular than The Onion.
It's interesting that he uses the metric of internet traffic because the whole push of The New Onion has been to bring back the print version of the paper.
It's not like they've abandoned the internet or stopped trying to get traffic, but their focus has been on the paper.
And by anyone's count, that's been quite a big success.
They've done a good job of bringing back the physical copy of the paper.
Which makes me want to ask Harrison if he wants to go back to Grok and ask how the circulation of InfoWars magazine is going, or if that hasn't existed in like 12 years because no one wanted it.
And I think that it wouldn't be worth his time to sue.
I only bring it up as, like, you know, a part and parcel of what Harrison is doing is like, They get away with so much, and we can't get away with anything.
And just to highlight, like, no, you engage in casual defamation that no one even cares about because they know it would be too much trouble to deal with your dumbasses who don't cooperate in courts.
I want Baltz to have all the possible work in the world.
He's the best.
But if the opposition hadn't gotten canceled, I might not have gotten Hey Randy.
So I'm a little conflicted, and maybe I'm glad it went away because Hey Randy is the greatest thing that has ever happened.
It's fun for Harrison to say that the reason that satire of the current right wing doesn't work is because they're too right about everything.
But the reality is that their content's just too stupid to parody.
His boss thinks God tells him what time it is in the middle of the night so he'll know it's really God who's sending him on missions.
That's the reality of Harrison's life and work situation, and there's no joke funnier than him pretending that he deserves to be taken seriously.
Like, the existence of it is a great joke.
Also, The Opposition may have been canceled after one season, but there's definitely one pretty successful, widely listened to, generally fairly funny show that criticizes InfoWars that's been going for about nine years now.
So, I think it would be wise for Harrison to understand that where his views and world may be so dumb that traditional satire has a hard time mocking it, we don't.
I mean, I think what we need to do here is just disambiguate work in terms of because I think a lot of people have a different definition while we're saying different things about the same word.
Like, what does work mean?
Does it mean long running show?
Does it mean three seasons is working?
That it was produced at all?
Does that mean it works?
Is it successful at accomplishing its goal but not popularly?
You know, like any number of these definitions of work could be applied.
I'm not sure what these people or what any of us really think would be working.
Is it really like the destruction of InfoWars is the only reasonable definition of work that we're all kind of operating by?
You know, it just occurred to me that all of their dumb.
Language, you know, that dumb thing where they're like, Watch who you can't criticize if you're worried about who's oppressing you or anything like that.
We're the only people that nobody speaks the name of.
And so I give Ben Collins credit for the fact that he reported the story in the first place, but he didn't claim it was Israel that did it.
And then when people like pushed back on him, he's like, oh, I never said, I never said that it was Israel that did it.
I just think people need to know that people died.
And I'm just, so it's like, We actually do what you do, but better and more courageously, you little rat, you little coward, you little scumbag, boot licking queer.
Trying to be nice.
I'm trying to use nice words.
Twink?
I'm sorry, twink is the right word?
Thank you, crew.
Apparently, he's married to that cat, Abigazella woman or whatever, who had that just utterly embarrassing congressional campaign where she would like, Sleep through appearances she was supposed to have and be like, I have narcolepsy.
Stop, stop mocking me.
Yeah, we're going to see another sad onion.
We're going to see another sad onion here pretty soon.
I have the feeling.
So, but like, this is weird.
So, I wonder if Ben Collins, who very like in a cowardly and tepid, just faggoty sort of way, refused to actually report what he believed because he was scared of the backlash.
See, I actually reported.
The obvious fact that Israel bombed a hospital because I'm not a coward.
And when they lose the information war, they wage a financial lawfare series of attacks against us and then lie about their success because they're everything that they say we are.
For one thing, Kat does have narcolepsy, and the campaign that Harrison is calling pathetic was probably one of the most anti Israel government campaigns that a non Nazi has run for public office in my lifetime.
If he was a sincere critic of Israel and APEC donating to candidates, I don't know why he wouldn't be on board with what Kat did.
Obviously, a lot of this is just personal attacks, and Harrison is super angry, but I think this also enters into territory that isn't fair.
Kat has been one of the larger public in the media voices who's been very clear about Gaza from the beginning and ran a campaign for Congress that pulled no punches on it.
Ben was with her and publicly supported her the whole way.
To pretend that he's in some way afraid to criticize Israel is nonsense, and this is Harrison being out of his lane.
I'm not going to defend every story that Ben ever reported in his career, but in this case, Harrison is not being fair.
After the explosion at this hospital in Gaza, the New York Times. Published a headline saying, Israeli strikes kill hundreds in hospital, Palestinians say.
Ben went on the news and reported on this story, and later that headline from the Times was changed to, Hundreds dead in blast at Gaza hospital, Palestinians say, taking away the Israeli strike part of it, which wasn't even something the headline was reporting.
It was still part of what the Palestinians said, but even so, the Times still walked it back.
So, Ben got attacked a ton for not correcting himself after the headline was changed because they thought the critics and people who were coming down on him were saying that he was being too critical of Israel.
This is the beef that he had then that Harrison is misrepresenting.
Harrison may be able to say that he himself has always said that Israel bombed that hospital, but I know that Alex didn't.
If he's so mad about what Ben Collins did, how can Harrison possibly work for a guy who said this?
Alex, if you yelled at him about saying that this Palestinian hospital was not attacked by Israel, if you complained about his coverage, he might hit you or scream at you.
Whereas Ben Collins would politely disagree with you and maybe argue.
So some of these headlines, maybe they're not The Onion's best work, but if you're going to read it like that, of course they're not going to be funny.
Well, what I like best about it is that even if you don't think they are funny or the lines themselves are not delivered with the kind of style they need to be, him reacting to them is fucking hilarious.
Trying so hard to not enjoy something is funny on its own face.
Like, there were a couple of times where it's like, he knows that's.
He was even delivering it with the end little punchline being, ah, shit, that's pretty good.
And I think that there's an inherent problem too, which is that they're supposed to believe that the onion is like this woke scold kind of like everything is super PC thing.
And then they're making a joke about Nick Cannon having a lot of kids.
Like you would think that that wouldn't be within the realm of what those censorious people would allow.
You know, like this is, no, I don't know about this.
I don't know if Rob Dew probably didn't enjoy his time in the sun, but, like, yeah, someone had to recognize that this was, like, pointed in a way that caused damage to them through humor.
That's my point here if it would have been okay, if the onion would have been okay with their bullshit if they were actually funny, then by admitting that we are actually funny by changing their behavior, they actually shouldn't have changed their behavior because they're okay with it because we're actually funny.
Maybe actually what he's trying to express is I'm really desperate to find ways to complain about this that don't make me look like a loser.
And that's kind of, you know, they're not even funny is a good way to pretend that, like, not only am I not mad, I'm so not mad that I'm cool and I wish they were funnier.
To paint you a picture, Alex has slowly lumbered onto the set wearing no shirt, standing behind the desk while Harrison looks on and tries to maintain his self respect.
Alex isn't sitting at the desk, so his face isn't well lit, and he's just a topless man complaining in the shadows.
What is clearly visible on the desk, however, is a hat that says low IQ.
The feeling you get here is that Alex knew that everyone wanted a blow up, and he just can't muster the energy to do it.
There's no point anymore.
Like, all the customers who are going to migrate to the new store are already doing it.
So, if he blows up or not, the bottom line is the same.
Sleepy Alex staggering in without a shirt feels like low effort, low commitment InfoWars.
It's checked out.
And if anything, it gives the vibe of a drunk stepdad walking in from a midday nap to complain about something and bother you.
That's really what it feels like.
I think.
Six years ago, five years ago, Alex walking in on the show, topless.
So, this is where we're going to end our little jaunt with Harrison.
But I think you need to, you know, in the interest of completeness for the day and what happened, you definitely need the Alex with his shirt off coming back.
We need that to be part of the canon.
But it's diminishing returns, it's underwhelming a bit.
I know I drove through at least a couple cities that had names that were like Midas or, you know, things that were like, ah, this is the ancient world.