We have nothing bad to say about Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave bassist Tim Commerford’s music. He’s a solid bassist that, as half of Rage’s rhythm section, is responsible for some of the best grooves of the early ’90s. However, once he opens his mouth, it’s hard to take him seriously. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt when he talks music, given that he apologized for spawning Limp Bizkit, even though he seemed to think they’d gone away forever. However, in an interview with Rolling Stone about his new project, Wakrat, he comes out as a full-blown conspiracy theorist that not only thinks ISIS (the terrorist group, not the band) is fake and the moon landing was staged.
On the topic of ISIS, Commerford finds it hard to believe that different factions from the Middle East would join forces, and thinks that the beheading videos have production values that are too high to be real:
I don’t believe ISIS is real. ISIS has been an inspiration for a lot of the songs that I wrote with Wakrat. I don’t believe that all the different factions in the Middle East have gotten together and said, “OK, we all hate each other and we all hate America, so let’s all put on the ISIS uniform and join forces and just become ISIS.” That’s a bunch of shit. I don’t believe the Jihadi John beheading video. Go look at those videos and study them, and see if you don’t think they’re fake.
You think they’re doctored?
They’re not real. They’re high-def. They have a soundtrack. The parts of those videos that you couldn’t fake are edited out. At first, I thought it was edited out by our government so our kids wouldn’t be seeing it on the Internet, but no. That’s the way those videos came. The knife starts to cut the neck, and then it fades out. There’s too much stuff that doesn’t look real. They’ve edited out the parts that would be too hard to fake. We created Jihadi John and ISIS so we can go drop bombs.
And not only does he think that the moon landing was fake, he actually confronted Buzz Aldrin about it at a movie premiere a few years back, he says:
I got into it with Buzz Aldrin five years ago at a John Cusack movie premiere. There were a bunch of people gathered around, and I said, “I have a question: You have all these missions to the moon. How come there’s no pictures of the flags on the moon?” He said, “Well, those are highly degraded by radiation by now.” I said, “You left a lot of stuff on the moon. It seems that somebody with a telescope or satellite would snap a picture of that so we could see it. It’d be on the cover of every newspaper.”
You could tell he was getting frustrated, and I asked him why he put a metal rod on top of the flag instead of just letting the flag out and do its thing. He gets all frustrated and says, “I’m just trying to remember what they told me to say.” That’s what he said! Those were his exact words! Then he and his wife — all plastic surgery-ed up and fake as they can be — bolted out, and I watched them walking down the street and he was just yelling at her. It made him so mad. There are so many different facets of the lunar landing that are just bullshit. It was such a powerful propaganda tool at the time.
He also says that Trump will pull out at the last minute and tell everyone to vote for Jeb Bush, which, well, that doesn’t sound too far-fetched. On the topic of Rage Against the Machine, he says the band is still a band, even though it’s been four years since they played together. He says it would be interesting if they’re nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to see who would show up (spoiler alert: you know Tom Morello would!). Now that he’s a proud conspiracy theorist, look for him to probably become a lot more desirable an interview than anyone else in Rage.
