Rage Against the Machine bassist Tim Commerford already made headlines earlier this week when he apologized for making Limp Bizkit possible. (Don’t feel bad, Tim. We all let it happen.) Turns out Commerford’s full Rolling Stone interview is full of even more crazy quotes. The 47-year-old bassist admitted that he doesn’t believe in the moon landing or the Islamic State.
Commerford warned interviewer Jason Newman that he is a conspiracy theorist and not to get him started. Of course, crazy makes good copy, so Newman egged him on into admitting that he doesn’t believe that ISIS exists.
“I don’t believe ISIS is real… 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…
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.”
Newman didn’t just let this idea hang in the air. He asked Commerford what happened to the people who were killed by Islamic State fighters if the group doesn’t actually exist. Commerford countered that they were already dead, and that the videos were part of a “global conspiracy of people whose names we’ll never know.”
Commerford went on to explain his disbelief in the moon landings, even though his father worked in the Apollo program.
“We never went there. My dad worked for NASA on the Apollo missions, and I’ve always felt it’s been fake since I was a kid. The one thing I always questioned: We put the flag on the moon. Why did we put a metal rod on the top of it? Why wouldn’t we just plant it into the moon’s surface and have the astronaut pull it out and let it go and we can watch it do its dance on the moon? It would’ve been an image we couldn’t have faked and one that we would have never forgotten.”
Commerford even shared his theory with Buzz Aldrin and didn’t get cold-cocked for his trouble.
“You could tell [Aldrin] 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.”
The alternative — that Aldrin was being sarcastic and got legitimately angry when his life’s work was questioned by a bassist while he’s trying to watch a movie — didn’t seem to cross Commerford’s mind. So much for “Question Everything.”
