Rage Against The Machine Loves Fascists, Says Guy Who Has Never Listened To Rage Against The Machine

Who can forget their big hit, 'Kill the Jews and Return the Fatherland to Glory.'

If you are of a certain age, you may have spent a chunk of your youth driving around in your mom’s Honda Accord with your friends while blasting Rage Against the Machine out the windows at eardrum-shattering volumes. You may have deafened yourself watching Rage perform at Lollapalooza. You may even remember when the band and its fans tried to storm the New York Stock Exchange while filming the video for its song “Sleep Now in the Fire.” A video directed by known fascist Michael Moore, no less.

In other words, you knew darn well which machine you were supposed to be raging against, and it was not a lawnmower. Unless you considered your family lawnmower to symbolize suburban oppression or the bullying conservative right-wing America that Rage’s members grew up in or the narcotization of a white middle class that had fled the crime-infested cities only to become trapped by capitalism in staid, consumer-oriented existences that could not fill the holes in its soul no matter how many microwaves and barbecue grills with which it filled its houses. In that case, you raged away.

There was and is no confusion about the direction in which Rage Against the Machine’s politics lean. Unless you are right-wing idiot and human sourdough starter Tim Pool, and you come across an Internet meme shared by Rage’s famously leftist guitarist Tom Morello and you realize that maybe the lyrics to “Bulls on Parade” were not in fact a celebration of conservative governance :

“wow, i didnt expect Tom Morello to come out as a fascist kinda sucks”

— Tim Pool (@Tim Pool) 1685623676 

Yr Wonkette has no idea if that is an actual German saying, but we get the sentiment because we’re not morons.

We’re also unclear about why opposing Nazis would make one a fascist. Unless you’re one of those idiots who think that the Nazis were socialists because the words “National Socialist” were in the party’s original name. Or you are Tim Pool and have been famously caught sitting at a table with, yes, a boatload of right-wing admirers of fascism making their stupid white-power hand gesture:

Photo courtesy of 

Anyway, Tim tried very hard to dig his way out of this one :

“tom morello supports massive multi national corporations and government mandates supporting the lucrative merger of corporation and state is fascism tom morello is a fascist and fascists are bad people”

— Tim Pool (@Tim Pool) 1685636142 

Er, no. Generally, hallmarks of fascist governments include extreme militarism and nationalist identity. Fascist governments elevate one leader as the powerful symbol and savior of this identity, and the citizenry in turn is expected to pay obeisance to that leader. Opposing him means risking, among other things, ostracism, the loss of social standing, imprisonment, and both judicial and extra-judicial execution.

If anyone can find an example of Tom Morello calling for people to worship Joe Biden or any other recent Democratic president as some sort of demi-god whose efforts to restore American glory are not to be questioned, no matter how violent or militaristic or extralegal they may be, nominate yourself for the National Book Award for fiction.

To the extent that fascism is lucrative for corporations, it’s not because they enter into a “merger” with a fascist government. “Merger” implies some sort of mutually beneficial relationship between corporations and the state. What fascists seek, at least in Nazi Germany, is the complete submission of corporations to the state.

So if you were a German industrialist and the Nazi government told you that from now on the scrap metal you got rich processing would go towards making bombers for the Luftwaffe instead of Mercedes to sell to other rich people, you might make a lot of money on that deal, but you’re not taking it because you’ve been dying to branch out from manufacturing cars to manufacturing warplanes. You’re taking it because the Nazi government said so.

But yr Wonkette digresses. The point is, imagine listening to Rage Against the Machine's music for twenty or thirty years and coming to the conclusion that the band members were secretly fascists the entire time. What kind of an utter dipshit would ... oh right, Tim Pool.

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