In the skin of a liar

So quite a while ago I reported that The Onion had bought Infowars in Alex Jones’ bankruptcy auction; there’s been a raft of further legal activity in the meantime that’s held them back, but finally they’re ready to take over. Alex is taking it well, obviously:

So that’s the comedian Tim Heidecker, who’s part of the duo Tim & Eric and who’s partnering with the Onion gang in their “hostel” takeover of Infowars (going to be creative director of the site). From what I can tell, Jones has been running old skits from the Tim & Eric TV show as if they were serious; the “actual mug shot” is from one of those skits, and the line about wearing Jones’ skin comes from an appearance on The Majority Report a couple of days ago (WARNING: video contains shirtless Alex Jones). Onion boss Ben Collins ponders what he’s up to:

Still, despite The Onion‘s decades of popularity and at least a year-and-a-half of legal sparring, Collins doesn’t believe Jones knows who or what The Onion is. Appearing on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast yesterday, Collins said, “A thing that I didn’t fully understand until midway through the day is that he had never heard of The Onion until it bought InfoWars. The concept of it was complete foreign to him.” But apparently, the whole conservative media apparatus didn’t seem to understand what it was. Collins also claims that, upon the acquisition, Fox News reported that The Onion had 4.3 trillion daily readers, “which is on our website somewhere, but I don’t even know where.”

This is really interesting, but I find something… unlikely about it. Little Alex is, I suspect, more in touch with consensus reality than he would like people to think, and I find it hard to believe that he knows so little about the people who’ve taken the precious from him. He knows who they are and what they’re about, and I think he knows this outburst of his is bullshit and he’s hoping that whatever’s left of his audience doesn’t know and will believe him.

Alternately, he could actually be that stupid and believe that shit himself. This is not one of the finest minds of the 20th century we’re dealing with here, after all.