“You think that Alex Jones gorged himself on Whataburger? You’re saying five triple cheeseburgers and how many fry boxes?”

If you’ve watched the Real Infowars livestream over the past week, this is what you got: not the actual right-wing conspiracy theorist but a gloriously deranged parody from absurdist comedian Tim Heidecker, who has been impersonating Jones for the past 10 years. “I’m attracted to people like Alex Jones—not sexually attracted, but interested in his mind and the way he presents himself,” Heidecker says. “Everything we do that’s perceived as absurd always starts from a real place of: ‘Something like this exists, and we’re going to expand upon it and go deeper and weirder with it.’ ”

For two years, after losing a landmark defamation case filed by the Sandy Hook families and declaring bankruptcy, Jones has been battling the satirical news site the Onion for control of his website Infowars. And despite still being in a legal gray zone, it’s finally launched—with Heidecker at the helm.

The first order of business? In the new Infowars world, Jones is dead.

On a recent episode of What Next, Lizzie O’Leary spoke to Heidecker about liberal wish fulfillment, baiting the real-life Jones, the ongoing legal saga, and his vision to establish a new media empire out of the old conspiracy site’s ashes. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Lizzie O’Leary: How did you get involved with this project? Did [Onion CEO] Ben Collins come to you and say, “All right, let’s do this”? How’d that happen? 

Tim Heidecker: I reached out to the Onion a couple of years ago, when the Infowars auction was potentially going to happen. It was in the news everywhere. I was doing my podcast Office Hours, and we use a lot of Alex Jones clips, so I was just curious—I wanted to see if I could be of some kind of assistance. But I never heard........

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