Rage Against The Machine’s Most Incendiary Moments

The Reunion; RATM vs. Fox News

Cited as one of the most historic festival nights, Coachella 2007 saw Rage Against The Machine reunite after a seven-year split. Against its signature black flag/red star backdrop, the band opened with Zack de la Rocha’s signature opening line, “Good evening, we are Rage Against The Machine from Los Angeles, California” to a packed audience, before launching into “Testify.” But, it was with his speech during the breakdown of “Wake Up” (at the 4:48 mark) where Rage would make the most noise. Paraphrasing author Noam Chomsky and citing the Geneva Convention’s code on war criminals, de la Rocha laid the case that under these international laws, U.S. Presidents from “Truman on[wards] would have been tried, hung, and shot” as war criminals. Word spread like wildfire and soon Fox News’ Ann Coulter had a field day dismissing Rage as “losers,” and “their fans [as] losers.” At a later show, de la Rocha responded to Fox News by saying, “Those fascist motherfuckers at the Fox News Network attempted to pin this band into a corner by suggesting that we said that the President should be assassinated. No, what we said was that he should be brought to trial as a war criminal and hung and shot. That’s what we said.”