#2043: Dave Mustaine

Dave Mustaine is the co-funder of Megadeth and thus a celebrity loon in the tradition of such luminaries as Ted Nugent. Mustaine has voiced his support for an impressive range of wingnut conspiracy theories and is, for instance, a birther, having claimed that Obama was born outside of the US and therefore ineligible to be president (“Why hasn’t somebody moved to impeach this man,” asked Mustaine: “With all of the proof about his birth certificate being a fake, and you see the signs in Kenya saying, ‘The birthplace of Barack Obama.’ Hello! Come on, guys. How stupid are we right now?”). And in 2012 he accused Obama of staging the Aurora mass shooting and the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting in order to push a gun control agenda (he also pushed wingnut Fast and Furious conspiracies and said that the country looked like it was turning into “Nazi America”, which is so inanely meaningless that we won’t bother). When family members of victims were unimpressed with Mustaine’s comments, he told Alex Jones that he didn’t have any intention to hurt anyone with his comments. He still thought it was a conspiracy.

Yes, Alex Jones. Mustaine is a fan, and even wrote the album Endgame based on Jones’ film of the same name in order to “educate his fans and the general public about the march towards a New World Order and Global government”.

Before being born again, Mustaine claims to have practiced black magic. “When I got into black magic I put a couple of spells on people when I was a teenager and it haunted me forever, and I’ve had so much torment,” said Mustaine, and is apparently unwilling to play certain older tracks because he thinks their black magic powers might hurt someone.

Trivia: To celebrate his non-endorsing endorsement of Rick Santorum in 2012, Mother Jones put together this quiz.

Diagnosis: Ok, so it’s a celebrity loon, and we sort of sympathize with those who think that we shouldn’t give these any more attention. But Mustaine’s deranged conspiracy theories are of a particularly odious kind, and if we could just convince one person not to give this guy any more money, we think we’d be doing something good.