Last week, Dave Grohl, the lead singer of the popular rock band Foo Fighters and former drummer of Nirvana, posted an Instagram text screenshot explaining that he had been cheating on his wife and knocked up his affair partner.
Now I know that many of you currently have three questions in your head: why should you care, why do I care, and why does anyone care? I will take these in the reverse order.
People at large care because Dave Grohl is a very famous man, whose public reputation for many years now has been “the nicest guy in rock.” He’s been married to the same woman for 21 years, he has three daughters he speaks of glowingly, and he does cute things like engage in an online beef with a 10-year old drumming prodigy.
Aww, he’s like the Keanu Reeves of rock! Which must be so annoying to Keanu Reeves, who is actually in a rock band.
So this is basically a redux of what we went through with John Mulaney two years ago: a guy sets himself up as a “wife guy,” a bunch of his fans develop parasocial relationships with him, and when he is publicly revealed to be a big ol’ jerk those fans are extremely disappointed.
That’s why a lot of people care. But why do I care? I am not someone who develops parasocial relationships, because I had the opportunity to meet some heroes at a relatively young age and very quickly learned that people are jerks and you never know someone’s heart just based on what you see them do in public. Except for with me. I assure you that even in my private life, I am an extremely sarcastic and annoying buzzkill.
So yeah, why do I care about what Dave Grohl does in his private life? And why should you care? Well, it’s because I remember things that Dave Grohl hopes you won’t learn. Because we as a society are accustomed to buying albums from guys who have extramarital affairs, and so eventually this drama will blow over and Foo Fighters will put out a catchy new song and we’ll all stream it with zero guilt.
But people tend to be a bit less likely to buy and enjoy music from a guy with a body count. Not the sexual kind; the actual death kind. And Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters have a body count.
I was already inclined to be suspicious of Foo Fighters due to their very name, which is a midcentury slang term for UFOs. That said, Dave Grohl has stated that he thinks it’s a stupid name. He only used it because he thought the plural would hide the fact that the entire first album was just Grohl doing every instrument and all vocals. He didn’t expect the project to lead anywhere, but when the album was a hit and it was time to hire on an actual band, the name stuck.
One of those band members that Grohl initially hired in 1994 (and is still in the band today) was bassist Nate Mendel.
As an aside, do you know what you call a beautiful woman on the arm of a bass player? A tattoo. I can say that because I have, alarmingly and without trying, dated several bass players.
Anyway.
In the late ‘90s, Nate Mendel got his hands on a book called “What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?” And no, it’s not a book correcting dangerous misconceptions like “you can get AIDS by shaking hands with a gay guy.” It’s a book that created dangerous misconceptions out of whole cloth, like “HIV does not lead to AIDS” and “no one should bother testing for AIDS” and “no one should take medication to treat HIV or AIDS.”
If you’ve been watching this channel for a decade or so you already have heard about the author, but for those newer viewers, let me tell you about Christine Maggiore.
In 1992, Maggiore’s doctor informed her that she had tested positive for HIV, probably contracted from an ex-boyfriend who also tested positive. A few years later, she met AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg, who convinced her that she was perfectly fine. If you’ll recall from my previous video on this topic, thanks in part to a spirited Russian disinformation campaign in the ‘80s, several academics and celebrities like RFK, Jr. were fooled into thinking that HIV and AIDS are unrelated, and that AIDS is simply caused by drug use in the gay community, and even that AIDS is caused by the medication doctors were prescribing people for treating HIV.
Maggiore preferred the lie to the truth, and so in 1995 she founded a new nonprofit called Alive & Well AIDS alternatives with the goal of spreading this lie far and wide. She and her organization became so influential that they advised the president of South Africa on his AIDS policies, convincing him to stop pregnant HIV-positive people from accessing treatment and leading to him overseeing about 330,000 deaths from new infections during that time.
In 1996 Maggiore self-published her magnum opus, which ended up in the hands of Nate Mendel, who found it fascinating and shared it with the rest of the band. They were convinced that Alive & Well was a worth nonprofit doing important work, and so in 1999 they started heavily promoting them, and in January of the year 2000, on Dave Grohl’s 31st birthday in fact, the Foo Fighters organized and played a sold-out show in Los Angeles with the proceeds benefiting the AIDS denialists, and featuring a speech from Maggiore and free copies of her book.
They also put a banner on their website encouraging people to visit the Alive & Well website if they “have ever lived or loved in fear of AIDS” to get “a reality check and to find out what the AIDS establishment isn’t telling you.”
AIDS researchers and activists were horrified, and publicly called on the band to stop associating with Alive & Well. But Mendel was unmoved, telling Mother Jones at the time that the band was united in their support of the organization and that they were planning more benefit shows for them, and that not only was he not worried about endangering their fans’ lives, but that “I’m absolutely confident that I’m doing the right thing. No, I wouldn’t feel responsible for possibly harming somebody. I (feel) I’m doing the opposite.”
Mother Jones also reported that Maggiore was over the moon about the band’s support because “she has heard from many Foo fans since the show — one of whom, she says, now works at the Alive and Well office.” They then quote a fan repeating her lies on the Foo Fighters’ official message board.
Undeterred by the experts telling them they were putting lives at risk, the Foo Fighters then updated their site with an entire landing page promoting Maggiore’s lies and encouraging people to donate to her organization. “AIDS is Not a Disease,” “HIV is Not Proved to Cause AIDS,” “HIV Tests Do not Test for HIV,” and other lies are all right there for Foo Fighter fans to read without even needing to click to another site. That page stayed live for three years before it was quietly removed in mid-2003.
Sadly, that bit of housekeeping doesn’t mean the band stopped supporting Alive & Well in 2003. In 2004, they gifted a song for the soundtrack of the AIDS denialist film “The Other Side of AIDS,” made by Maggiore’s husband.
As best as I can tell, by 2005 the Foo Fighters completely dropped their endorsement of Maggiore and Alive & Well. What happened to finally make that happen? Well, we can only guess because as best as I can tell, literally no one has ever asked them about this in the 20 years since. But I have some guesses.
By the early 2000s, Alive & Well’s membership was severely lagging. It wasn’t for lack of publicity from people like the Foo Fighters, but simply because they were dying at an alarming and somewhat suspicious rate. That fate eventually came to Maggiore herself, who decided to have unprotected sex with her husband, had a baby, and breastfed her despite the fact that no one was on any medication. Because it’s the medication that causes AIDS, remember. In April of 2005, Maggiore’s three and a half year old daughter died from complications caused by advanced AIDS.
You may think watching her infant daughter waste away and die in front of her eyes might cause Maggiore to rethink her philosophy, but no. She argued that the medical examiner was lying and it was all a big cover up. She continued to insist she was healthy without taking any medications for her HIV, and so she died horribly and painfully in 2008.
So I don’t know, it’s just a guess, but maybe at least one Foo Fighter DID rethink his philosophy when that happened, leading to them no longer be a united front on supporting whoever was still alive to run Alive & Well.
It would certainly be nice if someone would ask them. I do think that people can grow and change and adjust their philosophies, but when the conspiracy theory in question is THIS dangerous, the people spreading it THIS famous, and when it is being spread by grown ass men in their 30s, I think it’s worth demanding that the person in question offer at least some kind of apology and explanation. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but a good example is Ronda Rousey. Rousey, a former MMA competitor and current wrestling star, posted a link to a Sandy Hook conspiracy video on Twitter back in 2013, calling it “interesting” and arguing that she was just “asking questions and doing research” which she found “more patriotic than blindly accepting what you’re told.”
She soon posted a quick pseudo-apology and deleted her original post, and never spoke of it again. But last month, she did an “ask me anything” on Reddit and the comments were swarmed with asking her about whether she still thought the Sandy Hook massacre was just a big hoax. She left the AMA, but shortly posted this apology on her social media. I was going to summarize it for you but it’s such a rare example of a celebrity making what sounds like a real, heartfelt apology that I’ll just read it in full:
“I can’t say how many times I’ve redrafted this apology over the last 11 years. How many times I’ve convinced myself it wasn’t the right time or that l’d be causing even more damage by giving it. But eleven years ago I made the single most regrettable decision of my life. I watched a Sandy Hook conspiracy video and reposted it on twitter. I didn’t even believe it, but was so horrified at the truth that I was grasping for an alternative fiction to cling to instead. I quickly realized my mistake and took it down, but the damage was done. By some miracle it seemingly slipped under the media’s radar, I was never asked about it so I never spoke of it again, afraid that calling attention to it would have the opposite of the intended effect – it could increase the views of those conspiracy videos, and selfishly, inform even more people I was ignorant, self absorbed, and tone deaf enough to share one in the first place.
“I drafted a thousandth apology to include in my last memoir, but my publisher begged me to take it out, saying it would overshadow everything else and do more harm than good. So l convinced myself that apologizing would just reopen the wound for no other reason than me selfishly trying to make myself feel better, that I would hurt those suffering even more and possibly lead more people down the black hole
“of conspiracy bullshit by it being brought up again just so I could try to shake the label of being a “Sandy Hook truther”.
“But honestly I deserve to be hated, labeled, detested, resented and worse for it. I deserve to lose out on every opportunity, I should have been canceled, I would have deserved it. I still do.
I apologize that this came 11 years too late, but to those affected by the Sandy Hook massacre, from the bottom of my heart and depth of my soul I am so so sorry for the hurt ! caused. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain you’ve endured and words cannot describe how thoroughly remorseful and ashamed I am of myself for contributing to it. I’ve regretted it every day of my life since and will continue to do so until the day I die.
“And to anyone else that’s fallen down the black hole of bullshit. It doesn’t make you edgy, or an independent thinker, you’re not doing your due diligence entertaining every possibility by digesting these conspiracies. They will only make you feel powerless, afraid, miserable and isolated. You’re doing nothing but hurting others and yourself. Regardless of how many bridges you’ve burned over it, stop digging yourself a deeper hole, don’t get wrapped up in the sunk cost fallacy, no matter how long you’ve gone down the wrong road, you should still turn back.”
Say what you will about Rousey, but that’s a great apology and an important glimpse into the mind of the average edgelord conspiracy theorist. It’s also an insightful look at the celebrity PR machine: sure, maybe it makes better business sense to bury your mistakes and hope no one ever remembers them, but if you have any kind of empathy in your body, those mistakes will continue to lie there beating under the floorboards like a telltale heart.
I’d like it if we were able to hit the same kind of critical mass of people asking the Foo Fighters about their dangerous mistakes, where the need to unburden and apologize finally outweighs the financial benefit of pretending it never happened. So. Yeah. Maybe like and share this video? Thanks.
