Rage Against The Machine Bassist Confronted Buzz Aldrin About Faking The Moon Landing

Christie Goodwin/Getty Images

Rage Against The Machine Bassist Confronted Buzz Aldrin About Faking The Moon Landing

Christie Goodwin/Getty Images

Rage Against The Machine bassist/Audioslave bassist/erstwhile VMAs rafter-climber Tim Commerford recently apologized for RATM’s dubious rap-rock legacy and mistakenly celebrated the demise of Limp Bizkit. Or at least, we thought he was mistaken — we assumed that Commerford was just unaware of the band’s continued existence, but now it seems possible that he truly believes they broke up years ago and the current incarnation of “Limp Bizkit” is all an elaborate cover-up. In another interview with Rolling Stone to promote his new project Wakrat, the self-professed “conspiracy theorist” opens up about his beliefs on voting (stupid), ISIS (fake), the moon landing (fake), and more.

The interviewer gets him started by bringing up a music video for Commerford’s band Future User, a scathing indictment of the American healthcare system that features real footage of Commerford having actual spinal surgery. When asked about who he supports in the upcoming presidential race, this is what Commerford had to say:

I don’t buy into the hype. My advice would be none of them. They’re all the same; their campaigns are all funded by the same corrupt corporations that accept the same favors. And I don’t care whether a Republican or Democrat wins; the same shit’s going to happen. That’s why you’ll never see me at the ballot box ever…I don’t believe in any of it. It’s all bullshit. They’re not the ones calling the shots. Whether it’s the heads of the corporations or the military guys that have been in there for 30 years, there’s no president coming in every four years and telling those motherfuckers what to do.

Then, after a bit of protesting from Commerford (“You don’t really want to get me started on this”) and a bit of prodding from the interviewer (“Yes, I do”), the floodgates opened:

Like, ISIS? 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.

What happened to the people who ISIS claimed to have killed in the videos?

They were already dead.

There seems to be a lot of proof of their actual existence. Do you think the U.S. government made it up?

Oh, I think it goes so much deeper than just the U.S. government. It’s the same people that put presidents in office all over the world. It’s a global conspiracy of people whose names we’ll never know, but they’re the ones who really run the show because they’re the ones with the deepest pockets.

Here’s Commerford on the moon landing:

I can’t help but look at the lunar landing and go, “We didn’t go to the moon.” 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.

But wait! It gets better. Yes, he actually confronted Buzz Aldrin about it:

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.

And yes, Commerford is proud of his tin-foil hat tendencies: “Question everything,” he says. “It feels good to find information that doesn’t mesh out. I’m into it. I’m proud of who I am. When you hear the [Wakrat] record, it’s there for sure.”

Read the full interview here.

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