The Onion’s Most Trenchant Headline
7 min read
This week, Americans learned that a Fox News personality could become the civilian head of the nation’s armed forces. They heard about a new government-adjacent agency that will be co-headed by Elon Musk and named the Department of Government Efficiency (or … DOGE). The headlines, occasioned by Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House, were new reasons to ask an old question inspired by a classic satirical website: The Onion or real? (The answer: extremely real.) But yesterday morning, reality got an even more Onion-y twist, this time courtesy of the publication itself. The Onion announced that its parent company was the winning bidder in a bankruptcy auction to acquire Infowars. That infamous site—the longtime home of the conspiracist Alex Jones, and a bleak metonym for an age of irony poisoning and reckless lies—will now operate under the auspices of a site whose homepage, as of this writing, was reporting: “Oyster Cracker–Wise, Nation Doing Pretty Good.”
Headlines are The Onion’s stock-in-trade. The site’s articles complete the “fake newspaper” aesthetic but are, for the most part, beside the point. Yesterday’s news followed that form. As a headline—“The Onion Buys Infowars”—the acquisition brought amusement (reactions included “metal,” “poetry,” and applause emoji). As a broader story, though, it brought a familiar kind of addlement: Was this news-news or “fake news”? Was it a prank? (If so, who was the butt of the joke?) “I can’t tell if this is real or satire,” one commenter said on Instagram, speaking for many.
The uncertainty made its way into coverage of the acquisition as well. Several journalistic outlets, reporting on the purchase, attributed a press release to “Bryce P. Tetraeder, CEO of the Onion’s parent company Global Tetrahedron”—apparently not realizing that the executive’s name was, itself, an attempt at satire. (The Onion has a tradition of assigning fake names to its leadership; this particular leader’s bio describes him, in part, as “media proprietor, entrepreneur, human trafficker, thought leader, and venture capitalist.”)
But the confusion was, in its topsy-turvy way, clarifying. “The Onion or real?” is a lighthearted question that has also become a way of life. We muddle, all of us, through a fog of ambient uncertainty. And this, in turn, gives way to suspicion. Question everything, that quintessential cry of the conspiracist, has also become a stark tenet of news literacy. In a media environment where fact and fiction blur, ever more steadily, into each other—where so many pieces of news are punctuated with invisible asterisks and scare quotes and question marks—doubt is written into the texture of things: Real person or bot? Real footage or deepfake? News-news or “news”? The lulz-to-life pipeline has never been shorter.
The result is not merely a White House that treats politics as an endless flame war—a government of the meme, by the meme, for the meme. The uncertainty also encourages, among the people who live within it, a particular strain of cynicism, the kind that can settle in when, to paraphrase the scholar Hannah Arendt, everything is possible and nothing is true.
The Infowars acquisition is an everything/nothing proposition: Is the purchase satirical or earnest? Was it made in good faith or bad? Is it a troll or a remedy? It is neither. It is both. “We thought this would be a hilarious joke,” Ben Collins, the (real) chief executive of Global Tetrahedron, told The New York Times of the decision to buy Jones’s site. And the whole thing—down to the (satirical) press release calling Infowars “a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds”—is, very openly, a stunt. But it is also, the publication insists, a strategy. Its comedy will be corrective, and potentially lucrative. Infowars will relaunch in January, Collins told the Times, as a ClickHole-style parody of Jones and his fellow conspiracists. In all those ways, the acquisition is also something of a concession: the martial logic of “own the libs,” upended through literal ownership.
The best satire will spin, always, around an axis of earnestness; its humor will make a serious point. One of The Onion’s most famous headlines—one that reliably goes viral after a new episode of mass gun violence—did precisely that: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” The updated Infowars could engage in that sort of satire too, making it a fitting addition to The Onion’s satiric universe. (The Onion mocks legacy media; ClickHole, started by The Onion and now owned by the team behind the game-design firm Cards Against Humanity, mocks new media; Infowars, it seems, will mock the people peddling media that mock the truth.) The Onion’s goal, the publication asserted in a statement yesterday, “is to end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor for good.”
But even that humor will be rooted in the rawest form of earnestness: grief. The acquisition was supported by families of the children murdered in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in 2012—families burdened, in their anguish, by Jones’s baseless insistence that the whole massacre had been staged. The new site, in addition to publishing parody, will also attempt to educate its audience about the human cost of guns. It will feature advertising from the nonprofit advocacy organization Everytown for Gun Safety. Everytown’s president, John Feinblatt, described “the potential this new venture has to help Everytown reach new audiences ready to hold the gun industry accountable.” The sale itself, one of the families’ lawyers said in a statement, is a form of accountability as well—for the man who, for so long, profited from their pain.
This is not a typical case of tragedy followed by farce; it is, in Infowars’ new owners’ telling, tragedy adjudicated by farce. But “laughter” and “murdered children” sit uncomfortably with each other. And The Onion’s public messaging has suggested that the purchase, in classic Onion fashion, is still a headline in search of a story. What will Infowars’ parody look like? Will the site attempt to coax its current audience away from Jones’s conspiracies? Or will it simply mock its readers? In a social-media post yesterday morning, Collins clarified that the sale has given The Onion ownership of all of Infowars’ assets, including the site’s content, its broadcasting equipment, Jones’s supplements business, and the intellectual property related to those supplements. He added: “We are still trying to figure out what to do with it.” The earnest comment was an adjunct to the final lines of the press release from “Bryce P. Tetraeder”: “All will be revealed in due time. For now, let’s enjoy this win and toast to the continued consolidation of power and capital.”
Cynicism is typically seen as an absence of earnestness—as a posture that places itself, on the irony continuum, somewhere near sarcasm and suspicion. It can be that, definitely. But it can also be, as Arendt observed, a form of earnestness gone awry, a means of coping with a world in which so many things refuse to mean what they claim to. Cynicism, in her framework, is a way to protect the ego in an atmosphere of widespread mistrust. Of the people who lived among endless propaganda, Arendt wrote: “Instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Arendt was writing about life under totalitarianism in a century now long past. But her findings are all too timely. Cynicism as she describes it—as sanctuary, as armor, as an outgrowth of despair—is a core feature of life on the web. It will probably become ever more common as the real stories look ever more like satire. Cynicism, as Arendt framed it, can also be a form of complicity. It inures people to the fictions that surround them. It makes them apathetic, compliant, subdued. But cynicism is also, according to Arendt, a reasonable reaction to an unsteady world. Humans don’t do well with uncertainty. For all the concessions it demands, the cynical style has one very obvious benefit: It provides an illusion of control. It imposes order, or at least the semblance of it, on a tumultuous world. (In that way, it turns out, it is very much like a conspiracy theory.)
Satire can do similar work. It can be an eloquent antidote to the kind of chaos that Arendt described: It can cut through the haze. It can clarify things, joke by joke. The earnestness of humor is, it seems, what The Onion hopes to bring to the site that turned suspicion into currency. The Infowars acquisition, Collins told the Times, “is going to be our answer to this no-guardrails world where there are no gatekeepers and everything’s kind of insane.” The irony is that the purchase—as a joke, as justice—may further erode the guardrails. The “answer” meant to address all the madness may be new, but it will provoke the same old question: “The Onion or real?”
