Paragraph 1:
It is a peculiar thing to stand in a sun-soaked Miami conference hall, surrounded by the hum of optimistic chatter and the promise of innovation, while your own brain is still replaying the abyssal void of two years ago. That was the atmosphere at the WIRED World Fair on Wednesday, where Ben Collins, the Chief Executive Officer of The Onion, took the stage, not to deliver a slick corporate pitch, but to excavate a very raw, very recent history. He asked the audience to remember the feeling of November 2024, the suffocating dread that followed Donald Trump’s second presidential victory. For many, it felt like the levee had finally broken, that the absurdity of modern politics had hardened into a permanent, inescapable reality. Collins was among those drowning in that hopelessness, sitting in the wreckage of a nation he thought he understood. It was in that dark, despairing haze that he turned to his partner, the journalist and researcher Kat Abughazaleh, and posed a question that sounds like the setup for a profoundly dark joke: were they ready to walk into a literal burning building? He wasn’t speaking metaphorically about a career change or a political campaign; he was speaking about the corporate and legal nightmare of attempting to seize control of Alex Jones’ Infowars—the ultimate bastion of conspiracy, misinformation, and grief exploitation. With the smoke already curling around their ankles, Abughazaleh looked at him and gave a response that cut through the smoke with a steely sense of purpose. “Yeah,” she said, according to Collins. “Nobody else is going to do this.” It wasn’t a cry of valor; it was a quiet, gritty acknowledgment that if the absurdists didn’t step in to dismantle the narrative machine from the inside, no one would. The decision was made not out of bravado, but out of a stubborn refusal to let the monsters own the basement.
Paragraph 2:
The undertaking has, unsurprisingly, been a crawling, grinding war of attrition rather than a swift victory. The Onion technically won the rights to Infowars in a bankruptcy auction, a move that felt like a cosmic joke finally landing in the right lap—the satirical publication owning the very organ of the man it had so frequently parodied. However, the law, as it so often does, proved to be a more tedious and less poetic battleground than the public imagination. A federal judge in Texas, a jurisdiction that has historically shown a certain affinity for Jones, struck the entire deal down, sending the parties back into a spiraling legal labyrinth that has stretched on for years. Despite this, Collins used his platform at the WIRED World Fair on that Wednesday evening to pivot from the deeply cynical to the cautiously optimistic. He pointed to the political shift that had occurred exactly one night prior—the Democrats’ significant midterm election wins—and framed them not just as a partisan victory, but as a regulatory and judicial sigh of relief. “I want people to feel hope today because things changed last night,” he told the crowd, his voice carrying the exhausted weight of someone who has seen too many false dawns to jump for joy, but has decided to allow himself a sliver of light. The specific, almost absurdly localized source of his hope was the potential for a change in the Texas Attorney General’s office, which he hinted might be less inclined to overturn the acquisition. It is a profound statement on the state of modern America that the fate of a satirical takeover of a conspiracy network hinges on the bureaucratic appointment in one deeply red state. But Collins’ implication was clear: hope, in this era, isn’t about grand narratives of revolution; it is about banking on the right person making a different procedural decision that allows your absurd plan to finally come to fruition, to finally slam the door on the infowar machine.
Paragraph 3:
Sharing the stage with Collins was the comedian Patti Harrison, who has been tasked with one of the strangest creative assignments in recent memory: starring in The Onion’s parody version of the Infowars show. The panel itself was a collision of the absurd and the grim, touching not just on the legal battle for Infowars, but on the entire ecosystem of despair that Trumpism fostered—the devastating disinformation campaigns aimed at the Sandy Hook parents, the aggressive ICE raids ripping families apart, and the disheartening reality of Democrats abandoning trans rights in the face of political pressure. Harrison admitted to letting out a “huge sigh of relief” when the midterm results came in, acknowledging the tangible shift in the national mood. But she was quick to temper that relief with a sobering dose of realism regarding the sheer scale of the radicalization that remains. There is still a massive, steaming swath of the population that has consumed the poison for so long that it is now part of their cellular makeup. “They’re still out there drinking Mountain Dew,” she quipped, a sharp, nonsensical jab that veered into a nod at Vice President JD Vance’s bizarre, pseudo-intellectual attempt to label his love for Diet Mountain Dew as “racist.” The joke perfectly encapsulates the current zeitgeist—a discourse where the most ridiculous statements are made with deadly seriousness, requiring the satirist to point out the absurdity in a way that is both hyperbolic and, somehow, less insane than reality. In this environment, comedy becomes a “pill-in-the-cheese” tactic, as Harrison put it. It is a way to slip difficult, complex truths into the brains of people who have built walls against conventional journalism, making them choke on the bitter medicine of reality wrapped in the sugary coating of a punchline. It is not just about provoking laughter; it is about lowering the defenses of the radicalized and injecting a sliver of critical thought before they know what hit them.
Paragraph 4:
For Collins, a former extremism reporter, the shift from traditional journalism to the helm of a satirical institution was not a departure from his previous work, but a logical, accelerated evolution of it. He spoke passionately about the sheer power of being able to state things plainly without the suffocating constraints of journalistic objectivity and multiple corroborating sources. In the world of straight news, you need three sources to write a heavily hedged sentence about what is wrong with the country; in the world of satire, you just need the courage to tell the unvarnished truth. “We don’t need three sources to write down the perfect sentence about what’s wrong in the United States,” Collins explained. “We’re allowed to get to the heart of the matter a lot faster.” This speed is not just a luxury; it is a defensive weapon. In an era where misinformation spreads faster than fact-checkers can type, satire allows its practitioners to strike at the absolute core of a story—the moral, ethical, or humanitarian rot—without getting bogged down in procedural he-said-she-said. Collins pointed out with a mixture of pride and grim irony that many of The Onion’s most outrageous headlines, particularly those concerning Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his volatile tenure in public health, end up coming true within weeks or months. The absurdity has outpaced the imagination of even the most cynical satirists, meaning their job is less about inventing fictional futures and more about holding a warped mirror to a reality that is already so broken it loops back around into comedy. By stripping away the editorial caution that weighs down traditional media, The Onion is able to identify the searing truth that bureaucrats and legacy outlets are terrified to state plainly, functioning less as a joke machine and more as a purveyor of brutal, undeniable clarity disguised as entertainment.
Paragraph 5:
Midway through the panel, Collins adopted a distinctly cagey tone, veering from politics to the decidedly more lighthearted world of college sports—though those in the know understood there was immense strategic weight behind his vague hints. He alluded to The Onion’s growing interest in the economics of athletics, leaving the audience dangling on a hook of curiosity. The retroactive payoff came the following morning, when Collins took to Bluesky to make a spectacular announcement: “The Onion is extremely close to buying an honest-to-goodness, Division 1 college football bowl series bowl game. Yes, we’re trying to pull off The Onion Bowl.” The reveal was a masterclass in leveraging absurdity to conquer institutional legitimacy. Here is a satirical newspaper, currently engaged in a blood-sport legal battle to own the most dangerous disinformation outlet in the country, and it is also attempting to buy a literal college football bowl game. The move is confounding, hilarious, and profoundly brilliant in its long-game strategy. It represents The Onion’s expansion from the margin to the mainstream, embedding its brand into the sacred liturgy of American sporting life. A bowl game is a sanctioned, absurdly lucrative institution, usually named after a credit card or a pick-up truck. By slipping The Onion into that pantheon, they are effectively claiming a piece of the cultural mainstream that cannot be easily dismissed or censored. It is a massive, public-facing monument to the idea that the absurdists are here to stay, that they are not just commenting on the circus but are buying the tents, the elephants, and the concession stands. It transforms the parody from a website into a physical, tangible event that real families gather around on holidays, forcing the ultimate juxtaposition of the real and the fake.
Paragraph 6:
Ultimately, the conversation in Miami, which ran the gamut from the hopeless abyss of 2024 to the tentative relief of the midterms, to the bizarre acquisition of sporting events, distilled down to a single, stubborn thesis: comedy is the last viable shield against the encroaching darkness. The panel was named for the role of satire in society, but it functioned more as a war-room debriefing on how to keep fighting when the ground keeps shifting beneath your feet. Collins and Harrison did not offer facile solutions or cheap laughs about the state of the world; they articulated a survival strategy. The fight against Alex Jones is not just a legal squabble over assets; it is a fight to reclaim the narrative, to forcibly shut down the amplifier of grief-tainted lies. The hope generated by the midterms is not a euphoric high but a baseline from which to continue the slog. The Onion Bowl, similarly, is not just a quirky PR stunt; it is a declaration of territory in the cultural landscape, ensuring that the fake news organ becomes the owner of real, undeniable American rituals. In an age of radicalization, where a huge portion of the population is immune to facts, the only entry point left is the universal language of the absurd. The final message from the stage was not one of naive optimism, but a gritty, determined resilience. Things changed last night, yes, but there are still burning buildings to walk into, and Mountains Dew to drink, and legal battles to win. The duty of the satirist, it seems, is to keep the laughter loud enough to drown out the screams, to keep the headlines honest enough to cut through the lies, and to remain absolutely relentless in the pursuit of claiming the spaces—whether in bankruptcy court or the end-zone of a college football field—and repurposing them for the side of sanity. It is a long, exhausting game, but as Collins and his compatriots prove, somebody has to be willing to walk into the fire.
