Meet The Onion's new and improved InfoWars

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the international chip shortage. I'm Mia Sato, and today I'm talking to comedian and writer Tim Heidecker about the Onion's takeover of Infowars. A year and a half ago, the satirical news site The Onion announced it was trying to acquire Infowars, the conspiracy news website hosted by Alex Jones. Among the many lies peddled by Jones was that the twenty twelve Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax. The victim's family sued Jones and won $1,200,000,000 in defamation lawsuits. Infowars came up in bankruptcy auction and The Onion emerged as a potential new owner. The legal process to acquire Infowars has been through a lot of ups and downs, but The Onion is relaunching it anyway on July 2. Tim Heidecker, the influential comedian and writer, has been named creative director of the revamped Infowars. I'll talk to Tim about his vision for Infowars in an era when reality is stranger than fiction. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. Hey, it's your friend David Pearce, and this is ninety seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, 06/30/2026. We're starting to get looks at the next generation of iPhone, and they're coming in the strangest ways. First, there were reports that photos of the iPhone 18 Pro were starting to appear on the dark web along with the list of the device's parts. Then videos that supposedly showed the 18 Pro undergoing a drop test showed up on x. If this really is the 18 Pro, boy, does it look a lot like the 17 pro. Call me when the iPhone fold starts showing up on the dark web. You know what I mean? Meanwhile, a couple of important political things today. First, the Supreme Court stopped president Trump's attempts to end birthright citizenship, which means that still nearly everyone born in The US is a US citizen. And the Kids Act passed the House by a pretty wide margin, actually. This is a package of bills that, among other things, implement safeguards for minors on social platforms and would require AI chatbots to tell you that they are in fact not human. Versions of this legislation have been around forever and there are still a bunch of hurdles to clear, but this idea is starting to move. And finally, Verge contributor, Sofia Chen, just published an excellent piece on the state of quantum computing, which has supposedly been the next big thing for, like, forever at this point. In reality, there's a lot of progress being made, but you don't have to learn what a qubit is just yet. You can read more about all of this at theverge.com. That's ninety seconds on the verge for Tuesday, June 30. Back to Mia. Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise. But without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos …