Rage Against the Machine Bassist Doesn’t Believe ISIS Exists

Rage Against the Machine scored multi-platinum albums throughout the '90s by questioning authority and established truths. But even though they haven't been active since 2011, bassist Tim Commerford hasn't changed his views one bit. In a new interview, he said that ISIS, the jihadist group causing terror in the Middle East, doesn't exist and that it's part of a conspiracy created to wage war.

"I don't believe ISIS is real," Commerford, who described himself as a "conspiracy theorist," told Rolling Stone. "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 s---."

This extends to the beheading videos created by one of its members who is known by the nickname of "Jihadi John." "They're not real," Commerford continued. "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 [...] [The victims] were already dead."

Commerford then lashed out at those he says are behind it. "I think it goes so much deeper than just the U.S. government," he said. "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."

And no, Commerford doesn't believe the moon landing, which he called a "powerful propoganda tool," happened either and described a confrontation he had with Buzz Aldrin about it roughly five years ago. Commerford's father worked on the Apollo missions for NASA.

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