Tucker Carlson Show: w/ Ian Carroll on Deadliest Mass Shooting (Transcript)

Jason Aldean still doesn’t realize what’s going on because the concert is super loud and he’s got his monitors going and all this stuff, even though most of the eyewitnesses that were there claimed that the first shots sounded like they were coming from the stage. They sounded like they were very close is what witnesses described. They sounded like they were coming at them, from right there at the stage.

By the second volley, which came a little less than a minute later, Jason Aldean realizes that he gets pulled off stage and everyone’s scattering. And then over the course of about 9 to 10 minutes, 12 volleys of automatic gunfire ring out in the night and are captured on body cams, they’re captured on cell phone videos, they’re captured on various recordings, and you can hear them all across the Las Vegas Strip.

The Alleged Shooter’s Actions

And then the official story is that Stephen Paddock, barricaded in his room up on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay—he’s knocked out a window so he can shoot through the window. He’s actually knocked out a window in both of these suites, and he’s running back and forth between them and shooting his bolt action rifle and then shooting his bump stock ARs and spraying this concert with bullets.

And he allegedly shot more than a thousand rounds from that room, used multiple ARs, even though one would have done the trick. And then allegedly, he just got bored or sick of it and just committed suicide. With no cops at the door, with no reason to stop, with no real explanation for why he stopped. He just stopped, shot himself in the head with a revolver, and that was the end of the shooting.

And no other shooting took place. No other gunmen were there, no other things happened that night at all. That’s the official narrative. Just this one guy with no motive, no manifesto, no explanation of why, just did that and then checked out.

The Police Response

In the meantime, the concert’s tripping out. There’s all sorts of other things that are definitively happening all across the Las Vegas Strip, in the air, at the airport, at the other casinos, which we’ll get to.

But the police response to the alleged lone gunman is—this security guard that had come up and had gotten shot at, he had discovered that the door to that floor from the stairwell was bolted shut. And so he had gone down, gone up the elevator, and then at that point had gotten shot at through the door.

We found out that there were cameras kind of set up outside the room, so someone had visibility outside the room. But so the cops get up into the stairwell right by this guy’s room, and they are within a minute or two of the shooting ending. They’re outside the stairwell door that’s barricaded, and they’re just waiting there.

And they wind up waiting there, allegedly for SWAT teams to show up so they can bust through that door. And then over an hour after the shooting has ended and he’s allegedly shot himself, finally the SWAT—which we’ll get to—has busted through this stairwell door and they’re on the floor. And then they breach his hotel room door. And we have one body cam of this that is very suspicious. And he’s dead there on the floor. And they secure the room and it’s all over.

Public Skepticism and Contradictions

But immediately the public was completely not with that explanation because everyone that had been there had experienced something completely different than that. And everything that was coming out from the LVMPD, Las Vegas Metro Police Department, they had changed their stories, had been strange during the night.

Things that had obviously happened, things that were recorded on body cams, things that had been witnessed all across the Las Vegas Strip were completely absent from what they were telling people had happened.

And every single person that was there had heard the gunfire that was clearly not the firing of AR platforms. It was clearly some sort of—and I’m not the weapons expert on this, but there’s lots of them there. It was a country music concert and the consensus was that it sounded like belt-fed machine guns of some sort.

And when you watch the video footage, which is available online, and we’ll talk about some cool resources online, the video footage very clearly can be heard that this is something else. But you can also hear that there’s multiple guns being fired at once. And you can hear that some of these machine guns are in different locations while they’re simultaneously firing. Just from the way they sound, you can hear lots of different stuff going on just in those 12 volleys of automatic gunfire.

Evidence of Multiple Locations

But just to sort of tease out the audience on how many things we’re going to have to talk about to get to the bottom of this, we have, for example, at midnight, more than an hour and a half after this guy’s allegedly shot himself in the head, we have at least nine different police body cams that are public on the Internet right now that you can go watch where all nine of them at 11:59, I think it is, all of them in different locations around the strip, record 7 to 5 volleys of automatic gunfire somewhere down by the Bellagio.

And I say 7 to 5 because some of their body cams capture the later five and some of them capture an earlier two as well. And in between there, you can hear the police dispatch saying, “We got reports of shots at Bellagio. Shots at Bellagio.”

And then all throughout the night, there’s all sorts of body cam footage talking about “We’ve got a suspect at Tropicana, we got a gunman at Tropicana, we’ve got someone at Bellagio, we got someone in the Mirage.” There’s basically something is happening at various times throughout the night, generally in a northward pattern at almost every casino on the strip.

Some of them are far more corroborated than others. The Bellagio, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of 911 calls. There’s body cam footage with stuff I just described. So there’s stuff happening in the casinos that clearly doesn’t line up with one lone gunman in one window that’s been dead for an hour, two hours by the time these reports are coming in.

The Airport Incident

Then there’s stuff that happens at the airport and there’s lots of stuff that happens at the airport. But the simple tease of that is that we actually have the audio from the control tower, air traffic control saying, I think it’s about an hour—what would it be? It’s not an hour, it’s at 10:35.

So Paddock allegedly kills himself somewhere around 10:16 to 10:18. At 10:35, Air Traffic Control says, “We have an active shooter on the runway. On the runway, on the runway.” And we have a really—

TUCKER CARLSON: On the airport runway?

IAN CARROLL: On the airport runway.

TUCKER CARLSON: At the—

IAN CARROLL: Yeah. Although they renamed it, but yeah, at McCarran Airport, the Harry Reid. Yeah. Which is right there next to the concert. It’s two blocks away.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, that’s an in-town airport, but it’s a huge airport.

IAN CARROLL: Huge airport. And at the time there is a police helicopter circling over top looking at, trying to figure out what’s going on at the airport, because something big happened at the airport.

But the footage that we eventually, that journalists got released feels very doctored because it’s pointing at one weird angle and it’s spiraling around. So you only get very small glimpses of what’s on the runway. But you do see several groups of people walking around on the runway.

And it’s in infrared and there’s a couple of these groups of people that look like they’re wearing black things. They have black things, which in infrared is steel, is, you know, no heat. So guns, body armor, those sorts of things would show up in black. So there’s visual of stuff happening on the runway.

There’s air traffic control saying, “We have an active shooter on the runway.” And then one minute later, someone comes onto that radio call and says, “I want you to kill the lights on this runway and that runway.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Kill the lights?

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, turn off the lights. And they turned off the lights at the airport for a certain amount of time, we don’t know how long.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s recorded?

IAN CARROLL: It’s recorded. It’s on audio.

The Evidence Emerges

TUCKER CARLSON: If you thought you had a man with a gun somewhere at night, why would you turn off the lights?

IAN CARROLL: Well, the only reason that I would think of, the most obvious reason that I would think of is because you also are doing things there that will benefit you to have the darkness to get away or to finish what you’re doing or something.

And we’re going to come back to all that because there’s what we were told happened and then there’s what we have evidence did happen. And then there’s theories of how could you possibly explain all of that in a rational way that would actually fit it all together?

Because right now the public has this experience with Charlie Kirk’s assassination, unfortunately, where when a crime is committed, obviously the actual explanation will explain all the facts. Some of them might be weird coincidences, some of them might just be crazy circumstances, but the actual explanation of what really did happen really does explain every single fact about a situation. Right. Like, that’s just the nature of reality, you know what I mean?

When you know the real explanation, everything fits. And it can be bizarre, it can be anomalous sometimes, but it has to be that that real explanation will suddenly click into place.

TUCKER CARLSON: And in other words, the facts have to drive the explanation, rather than the explanation driving the—

IAN CARROLL: Bingo. And so when it comes to Vegas, there’s actually after citizens, journalists, media pushed so hard, they sued, they went through years of fighting to get the most basic stuff released, like autopsies, body cam footage, audios, basic reports about, you know, police reports and such about what had happened, things that very much should have been public and forthcoming that weren’t.

And they had to sue the LVMPD. They had to sue the coroner personally in order to get the autopsy of Stephen Paddock released. I think he eventually wound up paying like $32,000 or something like that.

And so after all that stuff got released, we actually have quite a bit like a huge body of evidence. It would take the average person months to acquaint themselves with all of this stuff. Which is why I gave that disclaimer at the start that I wasn’t there and I wasn’t one of the researchers at the start, and I had to try to become acquainted with the story after the fact, which is a monumental task.

And so I’m leaning on the shoulders of all these people that did all this incredible work to try to uncover this and then to theorize about what really happened. And there’s still a certain amount you’ll never going to get back when you look backwards at these kinds of things. Because so much gets covered up.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

Witnesses Who Died

IAN CARROLL: So much requires you to have been there or to have talked to the witnesses, whatever it is, and surprise. A number of the witnesses that were most vocal about the fact that there was more than one shooter actually died strange deaths in the weeks following, like, people that were taking to Twitter or Facebook and being very vocal about their testimony that no, I guarantee you it was more than one shooter. I know it was more than one shooter.

Multiple different people that were doing that died in things like car crashes or of, like, weird medical conditions, actually. Yeah. So I don’t know the number of exactly how many, because those are harder to trace down and confirm. But I know for a fact, like, for example, there was a couple that died in a car wreck that had been there and had survived and that had been, I think it was the husband that had been pretty vocal online about how there was more than one shooter and they’re both in a car wreck and they die.

There’s another woman that had been extremely vocal and had one of the most sort of viral multiple shooter testimonies that I think that she died of a health thing. One of them died of like a random, like kind of robbery, shooting kind of thing.

And those ones are, those things are harder and harder to confirm because there’s not as much reporting about a single random person’s death. Sort of like a nobody, so to speak. And by then the apparent cover up was in very much full swing. But it’s pretty well confirmed that at least a fair, at least a handful of survivors that were vocal about the story being wrong happened to die.

And maybe that’s just all coincidences, but there’s no coincidental explanation for the number of things that don’t fit that narrative that night.

And so now we’ve kind of covered the official narrative. Lone gunman, no explanation. And that is their official explanation is that there was no why, they never figured out why, and that it ended by, you know, 10:16 or 10:18 and that was it. And nothing else is true.

So after the fact, I come to this story, trying to learn about it. And I spend a number of days digging through various people’s documentaries and various people’s YouTube channels and various people’s reporting about it, sifting through kind of all the old material.

Vegas Shooting Map: A Citizen-Led Archive

And I wind up I stumbled across this website called vegasshootingmap.com and I don’t know who made vegasshootingmap.com, but whoever they are, they are a hero. Because what they did is they made a website using Google’s map tools to build an archived map that is actually overlaid over Google Maps that has little pins for every single piece of original documented, not literally every piece, but hundreds and hundreds of 911 calls actually sourced.

Click it and then you’re at the 911 call listening to the audio timestamped out for when the first volley is, when the second volley is, when the third volley is, or at the reported shooting at Tropicana. And you can listen to the audio of this 911 call.

And it’s so it’s like this invaluable resource of calls and autopsies, the death reports, police body cam footage, cell phone videos. I don’t know who made it.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, that is an enormous task.

IAN CARROLL: Unbelievable.

TUCKER CARLSON: You say the name of the site again in case people—

IAN CARROLL: Vegas shooting map.com. Vegas shooting map. Now, whenever I type V-E-G into my web browser, it suggests Vegas shooting map because I’ve been there so many times.

And so for me, when I stumbled across that, that’s a gold mine. Because any story that’s been covered up, any story that you suspect foul play in the reporting or in the mainstream kind of narrative, the first thing you have to do is hone in on what are the documented primary source facts that we can read and understand and see and hear.

And so then I just started sifting through and I started watching body cams and I started listening to 911 calls and I started repeating it together for myself because I’d found there’s a number of really great reporters that I’ll credit throughout here, like John Cullen and Jason Goodman and Mindy Robinson and yourself. You did some on it too. Alex Jones did some on it.

TUCKER CARLSON: I got nothing, but it didn’t smell right.

The Evidence Doesn’t Add Up

IAN CARROLL: Well, you at least spoke up. You at least were someone that was in that mainstream media space that was not buying it because it was just, it stank.

And so there’s all these people that have made media that synthesizes it and made media that speculates and takes it much, much further, especially into the Saudi angle that we’ll talk about. But for me, I was like, I need to start with understanding the information and see if I can arrive at a similar factual understanding of, like, when I look at the original evidence without these narratives on it, do I arrive at a similar conclusion?

And immediately it only takes you like five clicks on random pieces of evidence on that map to realize that it’s clearly not a lone gunman in the Mandalay Bay. Because how would I have this massive cluster of 911 calls coming from the Bellagio, which is like, I don’t know, like half a mile to a mile up the Strip? It’s like a giant block and a half.

If you’ve ever been to Vegas, Vegas is a crazy place of gigantic monolithic buildings of sin, that it stretches on and on and on. And the Bellagio is way up on the northern end of the Strip and the Mandalay Bay is the southernmost building.

And most of these calls come in an hour and more after Paddock has allegedly killed himself. And we’re talking like people that work there, we’re talking security guards, we’re talking victims, people alleging that they’ve seen the shooter, describing the shooter. And it happens in multiple waves.

And then a lot of them are clustered around, for example, those nine body cams that capture audio of multiple bursts of automatic fire. While we’re getting 911 calls from the Bellagio saying that there’s active shooters at the Bellagio, while the police dispatcher is saying, “Got a shooter at the Bellagio.”

So when you dig into this primary source evidence, you very quickly realize that this is not just Paddock, it’s not a lone gunman. And so once I familiarize myself with that, then I expanded out to like, okay, so then what did the people that did all this work? What did they conclude? What was their understanding of this evidence? And where did they take a possible explanation?

And that’s where it gets really interesting. And we don’t know for sure, but I think there’s actually a pretty solid lead. And whatever it is, it’s still at play in the modern information space.

When the Official Story Falls Apart

Because anytime you have one of these shootings or false flag events or anything that gets covered up on this scale, if you buy the mainstream narrative, all bets are off. You know, there’s no facts there, there’s no understanding of reality there.

If you buy the mainstream narrative about 9/11, you have no level of understanding of even how many buildings fell or why they fell, like, let alone who could have brought these towers down the way they came down, who could have guarded these hijackers the way that they were guarded all the way there, funded it, etc.

But once you realize that the mainstream narrative on one of these events is for sure not the whole story, then you actually open up to a whole world of almost any explanation as possible, right?

If it’s a shooting and you don’t even know who perpetrated it, you don’t even know how many shooters there were, you don’t even really know what guns were used, and there’s no forthcoming information from the authorities, well, then journalists have a monumental task ahead of them, right? To A, uncover the evidence and B, try to fit any possible motive and perpetrator to the crime.

And I think that’s the most interesting question in the Las Vegas one in my mind is who has the motive to do such a horrible thing, right? Because, well, it depends what the goal was exactly. Like, why are we doing this?

Because if it’s lone gunman Paddock, I mean, A, he can’t do the things that we actually have evidence happened. But like, even if it’s just a lone gunman, why are you shooting down into a crowd of people? Even a crazed shooter has a motive and you can trace that through their life.

But when you realize that, well, no, that’s not all that happened. I mean, there was spraying of bullets down into this crowd. But then there was shootings happening at all these other hotels, at least at some of them. Even if some of these reports are fake, they can’t all be fake.

And then there’s things happening at the airport that are strange, that there’s some shooting happening at the airport. So it’s like, are we, is this a gang war between, like, the Italian mob and the Jewish mob? Is this a CIA operation that went wrong? Is this like a Jason Bourne movie that then they’re covering up the tracks of, like, Jason Bourne’s killing spree? Is this like a Mossad operation?

And any of those things would need to fit the facts, right? And you can kind of try to, like, in lieu of enough facts, you can always try to fit the, right, you can try to fit a perpetrator to the facts and sort of invent explanations that will work.

The Heinous Crime That Doesn’t Match

But when the crime, for me, what kind of kept sticking in my mind is how heinous the crime against these festival goers was. It just did not seem to match the other stuff that was happening that night.

That was that because we don’t have random women like shot in the face in the Tropicana and in New York, New York and in the Bellagio, at least we don’t know of that. If that happened, it was all covered up.

There was shooting reported in all those places, all these other hotels, all down the strip at the airport and everything. And there are victims that are dead in other places. Mostly there’s like over near the airport and kind of in a few hotels, kind of in the direction of the airport. A couple down by the Tropicana who are dead.

Yeah, and you have to sort through it, really sift through it really carefully because some of them, it could have, I think, were confirmed to be festival goers that were hit and injured and escaping and then died of their injuries further out. And so they can be represented as having died like, you know, over there when technically they were shot at the festival, but not all of them.

And even at the festival, there’s, most of the deaths happen right in the middle of the festival grounds. But there’s a cluster of about six bodies that died at the far northeastern side of the festival grounds. So the opposite side of the Mandalay Bay where the shooter allegedly was, and they were across a barrier. They were on the other side of a barrier that obscured line of sight.

So they were not visible to the Mandalay Bay. And there’s a cluster of four of them along a fence line there, and then two in a parking lot like right next door that died right there that very much looked like they were shot right there, not that they escaped there.

TUCKER CARLSON: Would that be for a, he was shooting .223 primarily, but also .308.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah. They had multiple calibers in the room.

TUCKER CARLSON: Would that be out of range for the gun?

The Impossible Shots

IAN CARROLL: Hey, I’m not the gun guy, but it certainly is. There’s no world where that’s the shots that were taken. Some of the rifles he allegedly shot with didn’t even have scopes on them. He had rifles that did have scopes, but he also had rifles that didn’t have scopes. And he had rifles that had bump stocks. And he had some rifles that didn’t have bump stocks.

And they alleged the official story is that he switched back and forth between different rifles, and some of them he reloaded, and some of them he didn’t. And some of them had scopes and some of them didn’t. And he fired some of the ones that didn’t have scopes at this massive range down into this crowd.

And we have a video from a police body cam right after the shooting, walking through this crowd with all this tragedy around them. And he’s talking to someone, whether it’s a medic or I’m not sure exactly who he’s talking to, but they’re commenting back and forth in a conversation about how many direct, like, center headshots there are, how many people seem to have been executed.

And the people in the crowd, almost all of them believe that there were shooters on the ground, that there were shooters coming into the event venue from the entrances and shooting into the crowd from the ground.

And then journalists picked up on this and started researching it. And I believe John Cullen did a lot of work on getting the autopsy data actually released and then analyzing and realizing that a bunch of these people were shot at parallel to ground trajectories, meaning that the shooter would have to be on the ground.

Because if you’re up in a hotel balcony, like in a hotel window at the 32nd floor, the bullets will hit the ground, they’ll be coming down. And there are a lot of people that were shot at that angle.

And we’ll talk about helicopters in a second, but there are a number of people that were shot parallel to the ground. And it’s like, were they all bullets that ricocheted off the ground and then like, you know, then went off and hit someone at a near parallel to ground angle? I doubt it.

Then there were autopsies found where people were shot directly down from above, like straight down through them. And so as researchers started to pull on these various threats, like through the top of the head, like from the air above them.

The Helicopters No One Talks About

And it didn’t take until those autopsies came out. It was the very first day that people were already alleging that they believed there was helicopters shooting at them. And there’s helicopters in the videos. You can see the helicopters in the videos. And the witnesses talk about helicopters having been there in the air.

And a lot of them say that they suspect that the helicopters were shooting, that they felt like the helicopters were shooting at them. But then when you read the official story, the police reports, no mention of helicopters at all, none of that at all, just the lone gunman.

And then when you look at the flight radar data from that night, there are a lot of suspicious helicopters that take off and land from and at the two helicopter operators in the airport there. Sundance and I’m blanking on the one that, Maverick. Sundance and Maverick.

But there’s also helicopters. John Cullen, do you know who John Cullen is? John Cullen, yeah. We’re going to reference John Cullen’s work a lot tonight because he’s this deeply autistic type of researcher that just has a YouTube channel that very few people have ever heard of. But he’s the sheriff with the glasses and he’s a very funny guy.

But he just went after this story for years and years. And he’s the type of detail oriented person that would get the baseline. Like I’ll watch every Sunday’s flight patterns for six weeks. So I get the baseline and then I’ll track every single flight that went out this night so that I can understand what’s in the air.

And then I’ll look at every single footage and orient it on the map and get the lay with the time. And then I’ll know that, like I know if I’m seeing a flight that’s on the flight patterns or if it’s this thing in the air that we’re seeing in this footage is not documented.

And he went through all this work extensively to very thoroughly prove that there are many birds in the air that night that are not on the flight radar at all. And they seem to have flashing coming from them. They very much seem to be involved in what’s going on.

And so there’s a lot of videos that are on that map I was referring to that as you watch. Some of them are body cam and some of them are cell phone videos. And you can see these helicopters flying around behind the Mandalay Bay and back around and around behind the Mandalay Bay and back around.

And you can see little flashes coming, peppering kind of the night sky from in between the two hotels that are there clearly out in the sky as though there was gunfire coming from an airborne craft of some sort.

And so that got a lot of people thinking of who would that be and how would that happen and how would you get helicopters into one of the most busy metropolitan airspaces in the world? That’s like, this is an extremely surveilled place. I mean, not to mention the surveillance that we should have of all of these shooters in all these hotels. Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Tracked mule deer in the Utah high country. Spear fish in the waters off Montauk, chasing striped bass and bluefin tuna.

IAN CARROLL: See you on the other side.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s called American Game Tales from the Wild Outdoor series. Watch it at Tucker Carlson.com.

The Missing CCTV Footage

TUCKER CARLSON: Las Vegas like leaves the world for CCTV, doesn’t it?

IAN CARROLL: Yeah. And so none of that ever came out. None of it ever came out.

So here’s the thing which you know more about than me. MGM owns like 80% of the Strip or whatever. I’m exaggerating, I think, but MGM owns a huge number of these casinos that are not named MGM. And there is footage of this occurring in one instance, but there’s testimony of it happening left and right of a hotel employee that was working that night, that was told, that was basically forced to sign an NDA that says you’re not allowed to talk about what happened last night. Nothing happened last night. Your lips are sealed.

And it very much was a blanket gag order on all employees of these hotels. None of the hotels gave out any footage. They all just locked everything down and they even fought the police on the story to make the story become something that would not make them look bad. And an example of that is this security guy that I was saying got shot at. That we’re going to come back to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, I remember this.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah. Jesus Campos. Jose Campos. Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Jose Campos.

The Shifting Story of Jose Campos

IAN CARROLL: Jose Campos. So the first version of his story was that he came up, the door was bolted, he went down, he came up the elevator and then it was after the shooting had ended, he gets shot at through this door and then escapes.

Then that didn’t really square for whatever reason and the police changed the story to like, oh, no, actually that was three minutes before the shooting started that he got shot at through the door. So that must have been why Stephen Paddock went crazy all at once, is because he realized he was running out of time. And so they’re like, that’s cool. That’s our narrative. That’s going to work.

But then MGM was like, well, f* you, because that makes us look like idiots. Right? Because then what are we talking? What are we doing here? Like, then we would have had advanced notice if our security guy got shot at three minutes before the shooting started. We didn’t do any response. So like, that’s not going to work.

And so MGM actually got mad at the police, and the police changed their story again to be, no, actually, Jose Campos got shot at about 40 seconds after the shooting started. During the shooting volleys is when that’s the third and final version of the official story of Jose Campos.

And Jose Campos put out a statement that was something like, “I do not contest that statement.” That was like his official statement, very much canned. And then just like, poof, he was gone, obviously.

Wait, didn’t he wind up in Mexico? Yeah, there was a thing where he was going to test his car to Mexico. Yeah. So I think it was that he was going to do a bunch of news stories, and he was kind of lined up for a bunch of news hits, and then he just like, actually, he went to Mexico. Who knows?

But then he got brought back and did Ellen is what it was, right? Yes. And he got brought back to do Ellen. Ellen was sponsored by the casinos because she had all the slot machines. The ultimate dictator. So he did one Ellen interview where Ellen fed him all of his lines, and then he disappeared, and that became the narrative for him.

TUCKER CARLSON: Has he ever emerged to tell his story?

IAN CARROLL: Not that I know of. And to be fair, I haven’t done enough digging into his story yet. I mean, to be fair, I still feel like I could spend another year digging into this, and I still would only be approaching the kind of expertise that some of these other guys have about it, because they did devote years and years and years to this.

And there’s just so much to learn and to look at because it’s such a crazy event with so many pieces of evidence. And Campos is this one really interesting one that exposes a lot of elements of what was going on here in that you had the hotel’s interests and their reputation, their money, whatever was going on. You have the way that hotel employees were a part of this thing, but then had to represent after the thing. You have the police narrative involved in his story, and you have a really important detail.

It just in that like, let’s think it through. If the sounds that we all hear in those videos, this is happening inside of that hotel room, and you can hear it all across the Las Vegas Strip. It’s like these are deafening sounds. Obviously, if Jose is in the hallway right outside of that door, you damn well better believe he remembers if that was happening when he got shot at.

TUCKER CARLSON: Someone opens up with automatic weapons, it resonates.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah. It’s not like Campos doesn’t remember.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thought they were fireworks.

The Hallway Cameras and the Door

IAN CARROLL: It’s not like he changed his story because he didn’t know if there was this cacophony of automatic gunfire happening across the door. Obviously, that is a shifting narrative to meet various needs of whatever the narrative builders need.

But the nature of him getting shot through that door is interesting once you start to put away the mainstream narrative and just look at all the information as it is and try to figure out what the hell was this and what went on here. And we’ll have to kind of rewind at the beginning to unpack that, because there’s a lot of facts that we haven’t even talked about yet that become very important.

But trying to figure out what happened with him and why he got shot through the door at that moment, and maybe even when he did get shot through the door, that’s interesting because it involves the fact that there was cameras rigged up outside the door facing into the hallway to surveil the hallway for whatever, to protect whatever was happening inside the room. They weren’t recording video, but they were live. You know what I mean?

So whoever was watching their feeds could see the other side, could see the hallway. And so as a security guard approaches this door, whenever he approached it, I mean, based upon the fact that the first testimony was that it was not when gunfire was happening actively, I would assume that he approached the door when there was no automatic gunfire happening actively. But I don’t know.

But whoever’s in the room doing whatever they’re doing, and it was guaranteed, it was definitely more than one person. And we can talk about the door locks in a minute. They see a security guard on these cameras, and their response is to shoot a round of fire through the doorway at him to get him to go away or to kill him, you know, whatever.

And that’s really weird. That’s really interesting, because obviously it implies that whatever’s happening in the room, you need him to not come in. You need him to not knock. Obviously, there’s something happening in the room that needs to be finished before the heat comes.

But like, we have pretty strong evidence at this point that Paddock was dead by then. Paddock was not a part of this. And whatever was happening in the room, it’s like, what was happening in the room? What were you doing that needed to be finished before the heat came to that room?

Because they had taken the time to put this tiny little L bracket, this little metal L bracket on the stairwell door so people couldn’t come up the stairs onto the floor right next to their room. But it was like a little Home Depot thing. It was not the kind of thing you need the SWAT team to bust down. And they’d rigged up these cameras.

And so then it’s like, okay, your brain, if you don’t take the narrative, the mainstream narrative at all, it’s like, what is this? Is like a heist? Is this like a casino heist or something? Which is not what I think it was. But it’s just if you start to ask like, what could that be that’s happening in that room? Is this like Ocean’s Eleven and they need to protect part of their heist or something until they get away with the jewels?

It’s like, maybe that starts to explain a piece of this. But that’s what I mean by like, when you look at the original evidence and you try to square it with like an explanation that fits it all, it starts to get pretty fascinating and pretty weird. And in order to do that, we have to rewind past Campos back to the start, because we know for a fact that Paddock wasn’t alone in that room. And we know for almost complete certain fact that he was dead before any of this even happened.

TUCKER CARLSON: Any of the shooting happened.

The Two Blood Stains

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, before any of the shooting happened. And just to kind of, we do our whistle on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We don’t know it for fact, fact, fact. But the actual official photo of Paddock dead in the room, like overhead, looking down at him with the blood stain.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

IAN CARROLL: There’s very clearly two blood stains. It’s very clearly a dry blood stain that’s been dried into the carpet. That is one color. And then a fresh, glistening red blood stain that is much smaller and fresher and redder over top of it.

And there’s blood on his chest in that photo for some reason, although, if you commit suicide, shoot yourself in the head, there’s no reason why you would have a giant, singular blood stain on your chest.

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

The Impossible Crime Scene

IAN CARROLL: And so, really quickly, while we’re in this room here at that moment, let’s unpack some of the other things that very much just debunk this regular narrative that are hard evidence that you can view for yourself.

The SWAT team that they were waiting for to breach his room, they never came. Although Las Vegas has one of the largest SWAT teams in America, one of the largest SWAT teams in the world, they never came. The actual team that breached his room, we have one body cam that shows it. And they put out a report saying who was in the breaching party. It was one SWAT officer. I think it was two canine officers whose dogs they left back in the cars, and then a bunch of other police officers that just kind of hodgepodged in there.

And that becomes very important later when you start to ask, where the f* were the SWAT officers? What were the SWAT doing? Because they were doing something, but they didn’t. The story is that they’re waiting for the SWAT team. And the mainstream media at first tried to run with this crazy—CNN actually has a clip that I can give to you where the next day or two days later, CNN tells a fantasy about how the SWAT team busted down the door and Paddock tried to fight his way through them. And they had a gun battle and Paddock shot one of the SWAT guys in the leg, and he got out into the hall before they neutralized him.

Yeah, they just literally made up fantasy on CNN Live. And we have the recording. I’ll give it to you. And obviously none of that happened at all. And we know now from eventual release of files, documents, and a body cam that it was only one SWAT guy and all these other police officers.

Body Cams Turned Off

And so we have this body cam from Officer Bitsko that they had to fight to get released. And we only have one, because they told everyone to turn their body cams off. And that happened multiple times throughout the night. And I’ve got the clips, and I can share them with you. And they are on that map that I was telling people about so other people can go and find them for themselves, too, where a bunch of officers are around about to do something.

And there’s a couple instances throughout the night where this happens, where then they kind of are like, “All right, body cams off, body cams off, body cams off.” And they’re all going around and turning off their body cams. And for whatever reason, I’m not sure if we ever found out why—it’s possible we did—Bitsko didn’t turn his off.

So Officer Bitsko’s body cam, he’s one of the K9 officers that does exist. And we do have body cam footage of the breach. And they breach the door, and one of them accidentally shoots three rounds. They’re just tripping out. Even though the official story is Paddock wasn’t alive. He was already dead on the ground. He had been dead there for an hour. There’s no reason to shoot his rifle. But they were just hyped up, I guess.

So they breach the door, three rounds go off really fast, which is kind of a nothing. And then they enter the room. And when they enter the room, they’re looking for the window where this guy shot out of. And you can watch it on the body cam. And they go to the windows and they pull the curtains back and they’re like, “Nope, I have no broken window. No, it’s not broken. No, no window.” And they pull the other curtains back and they’re looking and they all are like, “There’s no broken window. There’s no window,” and they’re standing right—

The Missing Broken Window

So we have crime scene photos showing the floor with the hammer that he allegedly used to break this window open. Because Las Vegas has crazy glass that you can’t just break. So he allegedly brought this special hammer that’ll break that glass. And we have a photo of that hammer with broken glass all over the floor with just shell casings. Shell casings. Shell casings. Just all—because there’s a thousand f*ing shell casings in this room at this point, plus 4,000 unspent rounds that he just got bored and didn’t want to shoot and just checked out.

So in the photo, we see the ground next to the curtain of the window with the hammer with all this broken glass and all these shell casings. But in the body cam footage of them going into his room when that photo should already—it should already be exactly like the photo shows us—they can’t find the window. And they’re not stepping on any broken glass or any shell casings at all. They’re looking for it. They can’t find it. And there’s like six officers looking for this window.

TUCKER CARLSON: How long did it take for that body cam footage to come out after the shooting?

IAN CARROLL: You know, I don’t know exactly, but I believe it was months and months and months. It might have been a year or more.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s right.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah. Right. Because it was never supposed to come out. It was never even supposed to exist.

TUCKER CARLSON: But all coverage, as you said at the very outset, all coverage of the shooting had just died and was never spoken.

Media Blackout and Censorship

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, it lasted like four or five days. And you can see graphs. People have kind of charted the number of stories about—and it’s just like everyone’s talking about it for two days and then just gone. Completely gone. And then YouTube started banning accounts for talking about it. Come on. All the different social media agencies started banning accounts for it.

Yeah. And I have screenshots of what things that are—because, well, the grounds was “spreading dangerous conspiracy theories and misinformation.” But there had happened to have been an active shooter drill that was done in the area, like the week before or something like that. The day before. I think it was the day before. And so they’ve been recruiting crisis actors for this active shooter drill that was being run in the area, which, you know, if you learn enough about these kinds of events, you realize that drills are a huge red flag.

But I believe what was done is that then they accuse these conspiracy theorists of basically doing the Sandy Hook thing and they’ve strawmanned the journalism that was happening to say, “You’re claiming that no one died, and that’s so evil, because you’re saying that they’re all crisis actors, and so we’re going to ban you.” And that’s not what anyone was saying. No one was saying that no one died. No one was saying that it was all crisis actors, but they sort of finagled the one thing into the other thing into the other thing to say, “Well, there was an active shooter drill, so it was all legit. And you’re all saying it was fake,” which they weren’t.

And so you’re banned. And so a bunch of channels got taken down, a bunch of journalists got banned off of platforms, and they did their best to shut it all down, but people didn’t stop. People just kept digging and digging.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s crazy.

The Bolted Adjoining Suite

IAN CARROLL: Yeah. So they breach. They can’t find the window. About a minute later, they breached the other room. And this is another impossibility with the official story. Paddock rents these two suites. One is the master suite on the—because those towers, they’re kind of like these three pronged towers. And you can rent this suite that’s at the end of the tower where you have the 180 degree windows of the whole end of the tower.

And he rents the one facing out towards this event, but he also rented—well, it’s not exactly facing towards, like next to—then he also rented the room right next door and they’re adjoining. And so there’s a door that connects the two. And the official story is that the windows in both rooms were broken out and that he was shooting through the one room with his bolt action rifle to try to blow up the fuel tanks over at the airport. And he failed to do so. But he was in the other room shooting his bolt action rifle. And then he was running back to the other room with his ARs and rapid fire bump stocking. With his bump stock that never jammed. That’s the official story.

But then the police get in there and the side room is bolted from the other side. And he’s the only one that’s there. There’s no one else in the rooms, apparently. And the way they say that is because his room was bolted from the inside the side room. But the side room was also bolted and they had to breach it with explosive breaching charges. And it’s on—you can see it on camera. And so—

TUCKER CARLSON: So he was magic is what you said.

IAN CARROLL: He was magic. Right. Because you can’t bolt your side room from the other side while you’re in a mass shooting spree and then wind up in your room and shoot yourself in the head. You can’t do it. And so there’s all these little things that physics intervene. Exactly. That physics. And just reality intervenes once the evidence started to come out. And they’ve never really acknowledged any of that. That’s all just kind of never acknowledged it. I mean, how could you? There’s no acknowledging to be done.

Yeah. And by the way, by then Lombardo was busy being chief of police in Lahaina, if I’m not mistaken.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re not mistaken.

IAN CARROLL: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

IAN CARROLL: So he was at his next important job.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where is he now?

IAN CARROLL: I don’t know. That’s a good question. Someone should track him down and maybe move far away from him. But so that’s the room and just the room. Just the footage of that, just that is enough to say it’s all horseshit. And you have to go back to square one and start over with what actually did happen.

TUCKER CARLSON: And no one who put out that story, no official in charge either—Clark County Sheriffs, LVMPD, FBI—no one has ever explained how Stephen Paddock could have locked himself out, to my knowledge, of his adjoining suite.

Tampered Door Locks

IAN CARROLL: Yep. But they also don’t explain how the locks appear to have been tampered with. There’s a whole bunch of weird locks. So someone—I forget his name, I have him sourced in my notes—he got the door logs from the hotel. I don’t know if he had a source at the hotel or something, but he got the official—because Las Vegas surveils everything, and they have logs of the locks of every single room, of when it’s closed, when it’s open, whether it was open from the inside or the outside, the deadbolt status. And they have the time recorded and everything.

And there’s a shot heard by a witness earlier in the day at like 3 in the afternoon, 3:30 in the afternoon, which is kind of maybe related, but it’s sort of a different story. But then throughout the day there in the afternoon, the deadbolts start doing really weird things where it’s like, open, close, open, close, open, close. And then at one point it—what does it do? The door is open from the inside, logged, and then the next log is deadbolt unlocked.

Meaning that after some weird deadbolt stuff has been happening, then at a certain point it displays something that’s physically impossible, which is that the door was opened before it was unlocked, and then it was unlocked. Which would imply, based upon—this is what other researchers, you know, kind of gathered at the time, and I would agree, based on what I’ve seen of the evidence that they pulled out—is that that means that you have just hacked the key card system so that you can maybe remotely be unlocking and locking these doors, or you have some sort of altered access to these rooms.

And that would start to explain how the locks could be locked from the inside with no one in there. Right. Because if you throw away the garbage Stephen Paddock story, you still have to explain how you wound up with two suites with a dead man inside, with the bolts locked from the inside and no broken windows on either side. Yeah, on either side.

Well, actually, that’s—I believe we aren’t entirely clear because we have some helicopter footage, we have some body cam footage, and we have this bullshit narrative. I believe that the window in the other suite was broken out. And I think that we have that on the helicopter footage. And I think you can kind of see it. It’s a little hard to make it out in some of the photos taken from the ground that night, but there are some HD photos where you can kind of make out that it looks like there is kind of a broken window in the other room, but it’s Paddock’s room, where the majority of the gunfire allegedly came from. That’s where you see this police entrance where they can’t find the window that’s broken out and all that. So—

Not a Close Call

TUCKER CARLSON: So I guess the picture that emerges is one in which the facts not only don’t support the narrative, the story, but they’re completely at odds. It’s not a close call. It’s not like, “Oh, did I see someone on the grassy knoll? I’m not sure.”

IAN CARROLL: Let’s look at the—it’s not like Butler, where you have to get, you know, 10 miles to the report, and you’d be like, “Wait, what is with these cell phones?”

The Evidence Speaks for Itself

TUCKER CARLSON: This is just transparently fraudulent.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah. Like, right in the original video evidence, you can see the helicopters. In the original footage that people put out from their cell phones, you can hear—in the original evidence that was all over the Internet that night, you can just hear the gunfire and know that it’s not ARs with bump stocks. It’s just not right.

And then you can obviously hear all the testimony from all the people of all of these other things that happened that night that are complete lies. They’re all made up. It’s all just people hearing echoes two hours later.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why wouldn’t—so this is why I went out to Las Vegas twice in 2017, but then just got caught up in life.

IAN CARROLL: Always more stories.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Or short attention span. I’m not making excuses, but I didn’t realize that the corpus of counter evidence was so enormous. It certainly merits an FBI investigation.

IAN CARROLL: It certainly does. But here’s the thing—I think they know everything that happened.

TUCKER CARLSON: But was there ever an official FBI investigation?

IAN CARROLL: Well, yeah, it depends on how you define it. The FBI was involved in the original investigation, and I believe that the FBI did rule on a certain element of this. And then the LVMPD put out their own report as well, and they put out a behavioral analysis of Paddock like a year later or something like that.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I remember his—well, two things, but the FBI signed off on the totally absurd official conclusion. They did?

IAN CARROLL: I believe so.

TUCKER CARLSON: And B, his brother, I remember, got busted for kiddie porn.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, I don’t actually know much about that.

The Kiddie Porn Cliché

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t either, but I just—having lived in D.C. my whole life, I associate—

IAN CARROLL: It was a while after the fact, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. And it’s like a joke in Washington, the kiddie—I mean, kiddie porn is disgusting, and I couldn’t be more opposed to it. I hate pornography in general, but kiddie porn specifically has a reputation in D.C., not among ignorant people, but among people who pay attention as like the hallmark of a manufactured story.

Like, “Oh, he got arrested for kiddie porn. He can’t talk,” or whatever. And as soon as I heard that—

IAN CARROLL: I was like, George Nader. Very much like George Nader assassination.

TUCKER CARLSON: So people are laughing about that. Oh, I know. Oh, of course the guy’s busted for kiddie porn.

IAN CARROLL: Of course. Shut him up. Get him away from the—

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not—look, I have no specific evidence about George Nader or about Stephen Paddock’s brother, but that is a very well known—it’s a joke, it’s a cliché.

IAN CARROLL: And especially when it’s just so coincidental that it’s like, yeah, there are sickos out there. But is it just—is it always that the brother or associated the witness—are they always the ones? Are they the sick ones?

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re always into kiddie porn and you can’t talk to them.

Who Is Stephen Paddock?

IAN CARROLL: But so you kind of bring us back to an interesting place here where once you throw the narrative out, you’re like, all right, where do you even start with this? And for me, where you start is Stephen Paddock is like, who is this guy?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

IAN CARROLL: Who is he really? And I need to do even more in this. When back when I got into this story, there was just a million directions and I didn’t go far enough down him. And I was doing that again more recently a little bit, because who is Stephen Paddock? Right? And why the f* would he even have been there?

Because it is factual that he did have all these guns in the room. It is factual that he did rent the room and he was there. And there’s—you know, the picture emerges a little more when you look into his backstory, which is the basics is that he was 60-ish years old at this point.

And back in like the ’80s into like the late ’80s, he had worked at a defense contractor that was a predecessor to, I believe it was Lockheed Martin. And it’s not like he was like some commando shooting guns, as far as I’m aware. I think he was in some sort of office element of this defense contractor.

And then he—I don’t know. I forget if he hopped directly into real estate. I think he had one sort of like intermediary where he was doing, not sales, but he was still kind of like adjacent to the defense industry kind of end of the ’80s. And then he got into real estate and then allegedly he developed a gambling problem.

And so he had a net worth of several million dollars, allegedly. But then he allegedly gambled it down. Over time, there was a lot of dispute over whether he was making lots of money gambling or not, but I remember that. Yeah, right.

But that little detail about him having worked in the defense industry in the past and then going into like the nondescript real estate is like—that’s not suspicious on its face. You know, lots of people change careers over time. But it is a little interesting that a guy that used to work—and I don’t have any proof of what I’m about to say. This is just kind of conjecture based upon that.

But it’s interesting that a guy that used to work in the defense contracting industry back in kind of his prime years, like in his 30s, sort of—then he goes into sort of a nondescript industry where your income can be fluid and things. You can be traveling, you can be in property, all these things.

And then he winds up at what looks like an awful lot like a kind of deep state sort of an arms deal sort of thing. An arms deal that’s involved in this absolute mass shooting. That does give me pause and question of like, was he a private citizen?

Because we’ll get into the evidence that he thought he was doing an arms sale in a little bit. But I believe that he thought he was going to sell those guns, and I think that’s why he had them all there. And that comes down to the three women that were on the room with him.

But the moment that you realize that you’re being lied to about him being the shooter, you need an explanation for why the hell is he there with all these f*ing guns? Because I don’t—I’ve been to Vegas, and I didn’t bring a whole arsenal of weapons with me and a whole arsenal of loaded magazines as well.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. I mean, you don’t bring six rifles to go deer hunting or any—how many rifles did he have?

IAN CARROLL: I believe it was 25. Right. Well, it was—what was it? It was 25 weapons in the room. I believe was the final count might have been 24 in the room. And he had one revolver and one bolt action rifle, and then all the rest were AR platforms.

And then he also had a whole bunch of weapons at his other two houses as well. He had like 25 other guns at his other houses. And he just bought a bunch for this.

TUCKER CARLSON: And he was knowledgeable about guns. I remember that.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

The Three Women and the Arms Deal Theory

TUCKER CARLSON: But who were the three women, and why do we think he was planning to sell them?

IAN CARROLL: Well, at first, they didn’t exist, but then investigative journalists dug and dug and dug, and they found out that there were three other women on the hotel reservation. Officially, their names were on the hotel reservation. The hotel knew they were there.

And I believe that they were checked into the side suite, basically, is my assumption. I don’t know if that was proven or not, but the side suite was booked with Stephen Paddock’s girlfriend’s credit card, Marilou Danley.

And these three women, I have their names written down. We know their first names because it was—their first names were said. I believe it was on one of the police body cameras that was eventually released during the night. But we don’t know their last names.

Witnesses described having allegedly seen him gambling that day or the day before with women that looked to be of Hispanic descent or like Central South American descent. And so their names kind of match. Maybe they were some sort of Latina women.

He had tannerite in his car, is a key piece of this. He had 50 pounds of tannerite in his car, which is usually used when you want to make things go boom. Not like, “I’m going to blow up a building,” but like, “We’re going to go shoot in the desert.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Totally.

IAN CARROLL: Have a great time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Fifty pounds is a lot of tannerite.

IAN CARROLL: A lot of tannerite.

TUCKER CARLSON: So tannerite is—

IAN CARROLL: But he also had a lot of guns.

TUCKER CARLSON: Ammonium nitrate.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you can buy it in gun stores. And it detonates not with fire, but with velocity, with force. And so you hit it with a rifle round, and it explodes. And it’s powerful. Fifty pounds is enough to take your house out. Yeah.

IAN CARROLL: And so we don’t really know why he had that or what he was doing with it. But my understanding is that tannerite can be used for lots of things, but it is often used to like stage like a fun gun shooting moment.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like, I’ve never seen it used for anything other than that.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And it’s dangerous. I mean, for sure. I’ve had some problems with it. Definitely powerful.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah. And so the tannerite, a lot of people speculated, and I tend to defer to their speculation about it because I have never shot tannerite. I don’t know about it. People speculated that given these multiple kind of points of information, is that maybe one line of reasoning would be that he thought he was selling a bunch of weapons to someone rich.

This is not something that’s fact based. Like, we know for sure. But we do know that three women, first name only, that we’re not supposed to talk about, were registered to this room as well. And we do know that he had the room full of guns. And we do know that he didn’t do the shooting. At least I feel pretty confident that I know that.

And so then it’s like, well, why the hell would you have a room full of guns? And it is not uncommon to sell guns in Las Vegas. I mean, go to SHOT Show, right?

And so one possible explanation that might start to put some of those pieces into place is maybe he met some beautiful girls that knew a guy, something along those lines that was like, “Hey, I know this really rich guy that wants to buy some guns and you know guns, right?”

Maybe he got honey potted. Maybe it was some sort of operation targeting him to recruit him for this thing. Because you don’t have to just explain it from Stephen Paddock’s brain of like, why is this maybe arms sale happening? But you have to explain it from like the big picture explanation of why did whatever organization orchestrated all of this—why did they get Stephen Paddock into that room to do that thing, right?

I lean towards speculatively that he was probably selected as a patsy for being some like vulnerable, unimportant guy that was down on his luck a little bit maybe, and wanted to make some money selling guns. Who—maybe he was more involved, maybe he had some intelligence connections, I don’t know.

But I suspect that he was basically recruited by some hot girls to sell some guns to someone rich or something along those general lines. And so he’s bringing all these guns to Vegas, or he’s stocking his room with all these guns to go out and shoot in the desert the next day.

Maybe he didn’t bring the tannerite up to his room, he left the tannerite in the car. But if you went to Vegas, you probably wouldn’t leave an arsenal of guns in your car. You would want those secured in your room.

And he has all these magazines loaded, right? All these magazines are loaded. And that would make sense if he’s trying to do a mass shooting. But the moment that you realize that the evidence just does not support him doing the mass shooting, then it’s like, well, why are the magazines all loaded? Why is this arsenal here ready like this?

And if you were going to go shoot in the desert, that would be a thing you would do—you would load a bunch of magazines so hard. We don’t really know exactly why those pieces fit together. But that’s one of the most common theories is that these three women that were on the room with him in the side suite, probably that they probably had some sort of middleman connection, because how do women use it?

The Search for Motive

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you see any motive? I mean, did the authorities ever give us a hint of a motive? Because to murder strangers…

IAN CARROLL: No, they objectively said we have no idea what the motive was. They said that out loud. Yeah, exactly. And you can watch our favorite sheriff. He has a couple different versions of the quote of like, “We figured out the what, the when, the where, the who. The one thing we don’t know is the why.” But the why is the…

TUCKER CARLSON: One thing that matters.

IAN CARROLL: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s so often a theme that runs through these things. And when there is a clearly articulated motive, as in a manifesto, sometimes it’s suppressed. It’s like, I mean, Osama bin Laden’s manifesto was suppressed. It’s still being suppressed, even though it…

IAN CARROLL: Went viral on TikTok recently.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. So I do think it’s essential to know he used a weapon. Of course he did. He killed people. I know, but why? I’ve got a million weapons. I would never kill anybody. So what’s the difference between me and him? That’s the thing you need to know.

The Saudi Connection

IAN CARROLL: You bring up Osama bin Laden, right. It’s a good time to start talking about the Saudi angle on this thing, which is super interesting. Because you’re right, the why for Stephen Paddock is nonexistent. And that’s the official narrative, is that there’s no idea why.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I just give the context, the political context? This is less than a year after Trump’s election.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is a Jason Aldean concert. These are Trump voters. Jason Aldean is not a political activist, but he’s open about his politics and they’re Trump aligned. He’s also a great guy.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, I will say, but…

TUCKER CARLSON: So these are Trump voters who get killed at the time, less than a year after Trump’s election. All anyone’s talking about is Trump. People are extremely exercised about it, so it’s hard to ignore that.

IAN CARROLL: I think it’s impossible to ignore it. But, and here’s where we get into these… like, there’s different theories and they all hold certain amounts of weight and merit, but most of them sort of have a hole in that they explain this piece, but none of that pieces. They explain this thing, but not that. Right?

And so one possible narrative is it’s like a government false flag to get gun control. Right? Just like do a mass shooting, construct a mass shooting incident, and then more gun control. And there’s a similar compelling kind of concept of more mass surveillance. And Vegas is a really compelling place to put, you know, experimental mass surveillance technology, because you get… the whole world comes to Vegas. You get all sorts of different genetic, like, compositions of people that flood in. And it’s all private property where you can kind of do your thing.

And so two parallel storylines of like, kind of a false flag to bring in more… more of the gun control or more of the surveillance or both. And that would be a reasonable…

The Gun Control Angle That Wasn’t

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I just ask you a question? I thought about this at the time, trying to think through what is this? And the gun control is almost always the first thing Democrats call for when there’s a mass shooting. They leverage the death of other people for a policy aim, of course. Always famously, Sandy Hook and the rest. They didn’t do it that much after this.

IAN CARROLL: No, they shut the hell up real fast.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. And I noticed that at the time.

IAN CARROLL: Real fast. Yeah, they did try to bring in more mass surveillance technology in Las Vegas. They brought in more like body scanners and stuff. They tried to do this big new techno thing in Vegas, but it basically failed because no one’s going to walk through the airport scanner. Like, they actually installed some of these, like, LIDAR scanners in Vegas the following years. But, like, no one’s going to walk through that every time they’re trying to get into their hotel or go to the casino floor and all this shit. It’s like, that’s just not good for business.

So ultimately that initiative basically backfired, at least in those big overt measures. But I don’t know what kind of increased biometric scanning and cameras and surveillance technology kind of got sold to all those casinos after the fact. We know that Las Vegas is one of the most surveilled places on the planet. And it was that night, too. Despite the fact that we have none of the footage, we have none of that surveillance.

But that’s where it’s like, certain… like, it would make sense to be like, if you’re a conspiracy theorist, is like, “Oh, it’s a gun control false flag.” But then they’re not going to push the gun control. And furthermore, why are you going to false flag, like, attack all the concert goers and then have this further engaged conflict of multiple suspected gunmen all across the Las Vegas strip, over at the airport, mysterious helicopters that we know are up there? It’s like, it doesn’t explain any of that.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, it’s not at all.

IAN CARROLL: Right. You would just, literally, if it was about gun control, you would actually just have a Steven Paddock type character get a rifle and walk into the crowd and start shooting. Right? So that’s where it’s like, okay, we need to square all these weird pieces. And how do we square all of these weird pieces?

And so you might think about things like a heist gone wrong or a this gone… like, a lot of the other versions that are more like, you know, the average person might come up with them because you’ve kind of seen movies, right? And if you kind of just like, glance at all the evidence, you might be like, “Oh, it’s like if Ocean’s Eleven got really messed up in real life.” But it’s not. Because in Ocean’s Eleven, there’s no reason to murder 60 concert goers with automatic gunfire, probably coming from helicopters. That would never be a part of a heist. Like, you would never do that.

And furthermore, how would you convince any American, no matter how slimy? Like, how would you even convince, like, Hillary Clinton and Anthony Weiner if they got into the helicopter together? Like, are they going to shoot, like, automatic gunfire into 60 civilians out of the helicopter? Like, probably not. Let’s be real. Like, I know we don’t like them, but, like, you need to square…

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s a big step.

Who Would Do This?

IAN CARROLL: Who the hell would shoot all of these concert goers? And how do you square the concert shooting with whatever else was happening? And this is where I stumbled across the work largely of John Cullen and Jason Goodman got big into this as well, and a bunch of other people did, too. Mindy Robinson mentioned it a bit in her documentary and many, many more that I’m not mentioning right now. But John and Jason, they really dug into this for a long time, for many, many years. And they teased out this narrative over time.

And when I first stumbled across it, I didn’t have the depth of understanding or the context of political awareness and intelligence kind of history to really understand what they meant. And so I heard it as, like, the baseline. And we’ll tease this out a fair bit, I think. But the baseline of the theory is, like, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, is in Vegas for, you know, the night or whatever, and he’s staying at his cousin’s hotel, which is the upper floors of the Mandalay Bay, the Four Seasons.

Alwaleed bin Talal owned 45% of that hotel chain at the time. And so he’s like staying in the hotel. And so it was an assassination attempt on him. And there’s, we’ll dig this out a lot to try to understand what we do and don’t know about it and let people make their own minds. But the first encountering of it, when I thought about it, I was like, so that would explain an assassination attempt on someone like bin Salman, might explain all this gunfire across the Strip, where there’s like an evacuation happening and there’s operatives running around, and there’s like two…

Because all those shootings in all these hotels where there’s no civilian victims really to note, that to me implies two armed forces fighting each other. You know what I mean? Just like basic logic is if you have a bunch of gunfire going off all across a city and no civilians are getting shot, then it’s because you have people with guns shooting at people with guns, I would assume.

And so it’s like, okay, that explains maybe that kind of stuff. Maybe it explains the airport stuff. Maybe it explains like an evacuation, explains helicopters, like turning off their transponders and hovering over the Mandalay Bay, which we saw them do and didn’t see them do, so to speak. So it explains a lot of these pieces. But it’s like, but how does that explain shooting up the concert?

It’s like at first it was like, are they shooting up the concert to create, like to trigger his evacuation protocol? That doesn’t make sense. Like, I don’t get it. And it’s because I didn’t understand the historical context of Saudi Arabia and of Wahhabism and of Al Qaeda and of the power struggle that had been raging in Saudi Arabia for years at that point and had really intensified right at that moment. And I still don’t understand it because it’s so freaking complicated.

But once you look at Saudi Arabia and their history, their royal structure, their political structure, and the political seismic shift that has happened around the Salman line right now, that piece starts to click into place. Because when you look at something so horrid as the Las Vegas shooting, who is going to shoot like 20 year old girls in the face with just reckless abandon like that? That is like the definition of a terrorist attack.

And so if you don’t know anything about the incident, how do you even come up with a perpetrator that could ever bring themselves to do such a thing? Like, is it North Korea, is it Russia, is it Iran? Is it, you know, who hates American people that much?

TUCKER CARLSON: The American brain can only explain that by attributing it to a crazed lone gunman which is seized by mental illness or something. But the American brain cannot fathom any organized group, exactly, of people doing something.

IAN CARROLL: And certainly not like our own. Like, you can be the craziest conspiracy theorist with, like, literally wrapped in tinfoil, sitting in your own microwave, but you still can’t… like, it is still not a legitimate argument to say that, like, a CIA officer is going to get onto that helicopter and shoot a minigun at civilian Americans. I don’t believe that. Not a chance. Nope.

TUCKER CARLSON: And if I start believing that, I’m leaving.

IAN CARROLL: And no, like, even the most horrendous, like, even Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, take your pick of, like, the most vile people in American history. They’re not going to do that. And so it’s like, who would? And when you look at the history of Saudi Arabia and the sort of warring factions of their religious and political ideology and the Wahhabism hardliners that very much are sort of aligned beside Al Qaeda and that are sort of where Al Qaeda, like, you know, fractioned off from, and you know this far more than me, that is very much an ideology that is perfectly okay with killing Western young people with reckless abandon.

MBS and the Hardliners

TUCKER CARLSON: And the interesting thing is that MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, then the crown prince, still technically crown prince, but the man who runs Saudi, I mean, he’s just crushed them. He’s changed everything since then. Just crushed them. But specifically, he’s gone after specific people, those people.

IAN CARROLL: So let’s unpack this a little bit.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, before we go further, just the key question. Do we know that he was in Vegas that day?

IAN CARROLL: No, we do not. And there’s this one video that that question hinges around because people started to talk about this theory, you know, in the months following this and in the years following it, and this video emerged and went viral. And I have questions over whether this was orchestrated in order to discredit the theory. As often happens where when a theory that we’re not supposed to talk about gains power and steam and traction, people start talking about it. You release something that is supposed to be a piece of that theory that is easily disprovable, right? And this video goes viral.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m watching that right now.

The Viral Evacuation Video and MBS Disguise Theory

IAN CARROLL:

Exactly right. This video goes viral of this evacuation that happens that night where there’s these two guys surrounded by armed police officers, clearly clearing the area, evacuating out of one of the hotels, and someone gets it on cell phone camera.

And the two guys that are not police officers, that are not armed—one of them is wearing red shoes and a white baseball jersey. And he’s carrying a little bag that looks like an important Las Vegas kind of money or something bag. And the other guy’s in a suit.

And the idea is, it’s like, is this guy in the white jersey Mohammed bin Salman? Which is—at first, it’s like, what are you talking about? Like, dressed like that? I don’t think so. But who knows? Maybe it was constructed to be like, he’s in disguise.

The short version is, we know for a fact that that was not Muhammad bin Salman. He was one of the chiefs of security at that hotel. And he posted online, was like, “No, that’s me. These are my shoes. I’m a sneaker head. Here’s all the corroboration you could ever need. That’s me. I was called into work because I live nearby. And because they had not yet cleared that building, I came in with that team as they cleared the building.”

And then you can see in the video, right at the end of the video, the cops keep going straight, and him and the guy in the suit, they veer off to the right towards something, and they have a little dialogue where it’s like, “Hey, you go to the offices.” And they go to their offices to start working on the crazy security situation that they’re in the middle of.

And so that video is not at all related, has nothing to do with it, but it got fed into the narrative right at this critical moment where I suspect that it was supposed to discredit this, make sort of muddy the waters of this question of, was bin Salman in Las Vegas at that time?

And I have not even begun to scratch the surface of the research that these other folks have done over years of trying to verify where he was that night. And the best that anyone has gotten, as far as I’ve seen, is that there’s a hole in his schedule where no one knows where he was. And we know that he was other places before, and we know he was other places after.

But that specific little window of time, a couple days around Las Vegas, around October 1, 2017, no verification of where he was at all. So we do not know.

The Saudi Royal Succession and Hardliner Factions

So Ibn Saud that founded the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he had a bunch of sons, and it’s been his sons ever since. And so the king of Saudi Arabia has been getting older and older and older because as one has abdicated or been overtaken, whatever, it’s just been like, first they were in their thirties, and now they’re in their forties, and now they’re in their sixties, and now they’re in their seventies.

And now King Salman took—I said office because I’m American—he took the throne in his 80s. Right. So the last three kings of Saudi Arabia, King Fahd, King Abdullah and King Salman, super relevant to the current power struggle that’s happening.

And King Fahd was 1982 to 2005. I’m no expert on religion, on Islam, on Saudi American politics, but it’s not hard to figure out that King Fahd was pretty hardliner. And a lot of these guys are pretty damn hardliner. This kind of Wahhabism, this very conservative religious government that they run.

And King Fahd, he oversaw a whole bunch of terrorism. And let’s not forget that. Yeah, there’s a lot of things that happened on 9/11 that I don’t think the official narrative accounts for. But we do know for a fact that Saudi Arabia was very involved. Like, Saudi Arabia represented—what was it? Like, 17. What was it?

TUCKER CARLSON:

17 of 19? I think.

IAN CARROLL:

Yeah, I think it was less than 70. I think 15 or 16 out of 19. But it was a significant number. Right?

TUCKER CARLSON:

Overwhelming majority.

IAN CARROLL:

Majority. The hijackers, whatever role they really played, you know, whatever conspiracy theory you want to be on. And then Saudi Arabia also was involved in sort of the intelligence around it. They were involved in—they were baked in.

And when you get deeper into sort of the CIA’s analysis, postmortem analysis of what happened, Saudi Arabia stonewalled the hell out of them. I mean, Osama bin Laden was born out of this sort of Saudi Wahhabist mindset. And he took it in this direction towards politics, away from just religious perspective and towards political violence and political movement, kind of born out of America getting in there and doing what we always do. Right.

And there’s all sorts of depth there that I don’t understand. But you don’t have to understand all the depth of it to know that it has an interesting relationship with that era. Because whether he was—you know, regardless of how involved he was during that era, Osama bin Laden was creating and growing Al Qaeda and doing whatever it is you think Al Qaeda was involved in, not just in 9/11, but in all these other terror attacks too.

And so these hardliners, these brother kings, there’s this divide that emerges in more recent times with King Salman and his son Muhammad bin Salman.

TUCKER CARLSON:

Right.

MBS and the Progressive Reform Movement

IAN CARROLL:

And there’s other people that are sort of aligned with them, but they’re obviously the two figureheads of this newer Saudi Arabia. They are very different. Muhammad bin Salman especially, but King Salman has been very much more progressive.

And Muhammad bin Salman is very much like he wants to give women’s rights and he’s throwing giant music festivals and he’s trying to, you know, move their investments away from just oil. They’re allowing alcohol. Exactly. They’re doing all these things that are—that from the hardliners’ perspective, you’re destroying the faith, you’re destroying the nation, you’re destroying them.

TUCKER CARLSON:

He’s been, in the regional context, he’s been radical for sure.

IAN CARROLL:

And there is—there’s a lot of articles, news articles from the Middle East predating the Las Vegas shooting, in the years and months. There’s some of them that are two years ahead of that where it’s princes—because there’s thousands of these princes. But some of them are very important and some of them are lesser important.

And there were very important princes basically creating kind of manifesto level texts saying, “We need to stop these f*ing weaklings from taking over and destroying the kingdom,” and basically calling on these hardliners to get together and kick these guys out and deal with them.

And there is a history of political violence. Back in, I think it was the 60s, was the first time that the king was assassinated and he was assassinated by his nephew. I believe it is. I believe it was his cousin.

TUCKER CARLSON:

I think that’s correct.

IAN CARROLL:

And ever since it’s—I mean, even before that, but ever since it has very much been this Game of Thrones kind of place where you have a kingdom that has religion baked in. It has this oil wealth. It has, and it has this history growing of political violence and of infighting for the throne, vying for the throne.

TUCKER CARLSON:

High stakes stuff.

The Power Consolidation and Intelligence Apparatus

IAN CARROLL:

Yeah, for sure. Very high stakes. And so as you approach the Las Vegas shooting, and this is stuff that John Cullen and Jason Goodman dug a ton into. And you can go to John Cullen’s YouTube channel and dig back through it all because he did it all in these one hour long podcasts and sort of exposés that takes a long time to get through.

But he very much lays out his version of the theory. And he’s not the only one, but he’s the most deep into this theory. And I very much think it’s the most likely. I think it’s the most fleshed out and logical theory all the way from explaining why we saw terrorism that night, but also why we saw these other things.

But also it fits into this historical perspective of what was actually happening in Saudi Arabia at the time that we as Americans aren’t aware of, because the succession had just shifted. Bin Salman—King Salman, not Muhammad bin Salman. King Salman was on the throne. He took the throne, what was it, in 2015? I believe. Yeah, 2015, Salman takes the throne and he changes the succession.

I believe it was earlier in 2017. It was maybe six months or so before the Vegas shooting. And he changed it from one of these hardliner guys to his son bin Salman, Mohammed bin Salman. It’s very confusing with these names. If you’re American, you’re not used to Arab names.

But then the moment that Bin Salman gets in there, there is reporting about his actions. You have to kind of triangulate it from watching what he does. But he immediately starts to consolidate power. And one of the examples is he moves to dismantle their sort of intelligence apparatus and move it under the jurisdiction of their Defense Department, sort of, which he’s the head of.

And the guy that was in charge of the intelligence apparatus at the time was one of these hardliners from one of these other kind of family lineages. And so it’s things like that where he’s kicking people out of their positions, he’s changing around who’s in charge of positions, and he’s trying to take away power from these various hardliners that have had it out for him for years and do not want this shift to take place.

So he’s replaced a guy that doesn’t want him there, and now he’s the crown prince. He’s going to take the throne. And his dad might abdicate at any time, right? His dad is in his 80s. At any moment, he could either die or get sick or just decide that he’s over it, and his son is now the king.

And so Bin Salman’s not a dumbass. And he knows that he needs to do something about all these opposing family members that are actively trying to take him out. And they’ve been talking about trying to take him out for a long time.

And what I just explained about the head of intelligence and the nature of the power of the intelligence networks, that’s just one piece of what he’s doing here. And he’s doing that for months leading up to 2017, to the date of October 1st, when this shooting happens.

And when the Las Vegas shooting happens, it’s right in the middle of this building of tension, this shifting of power that we think is over there. Right. It’s over in Saudi Arabia, obviously. And it’s understandable that that would be happening in Saudi Arabia. So we kind of have a burden of proof to explain why would this be happening in Las Vegas.

And I don’t know as we’ve met that burden of proof in the way the theory has developed over the years of people kind of digging into this and trying to piece it apart.

Alwaleed Bin Talal and the Four Seasons Connection

But Alwaleed Bin Talal, one of the richest of all of the Saudi princes, he’s—I mean, I guess it’s changed over the years, but we’re talking like a multi, multi billionaire. In 2017, he was like the 40 something richest person in the world by Forbes or whoever. Something like 16 or $17 billion net worth, if I remember correctly.

He is like the Saudi Bill Gates is the way a lot of people referred to him. And he owned a 45% stake in the Four Seasons Hotel chain. And the Four Seasons Hotel chain owns—well, they cooperate—the top, I think six floors of the Mandalay Bay above where Paddock was, allegedly where Paddock’s room was.

And so the theory started to dig into—people started to look at this like, well, so we have a faction, this sort of Wahhabi hardliner faction that we know would willingly kill massive numbers of Americans for whatever reason, even if it’s just incidental to something else. They would be happy to kill Americans.

It’s not like every Saudi Arabian person is this way. That’s not what’s being claimed by anyone. It’s that there are people with legitimate terroristic ideologies in those factions.

TUCKER CARLSON:

And they’re very opposed to MBS.

The Saudi Power Struggle and MBS

IAN CARROLL: They’re very opposed to MBS. To them it’s an existential threat. They need to—and they’re not quiet about that. They have been talking about that two years and more. And the clock is ticking because MBS’s dad is going to abdicate and MBS is going to take the throne.

And MBS knows this. And so in the months leading into this shooting, MBS is actually going after them. He’s seizing some of their money, he’s restricting their travel. He’s reallocating power and consolidating power very actively and overtly. Not like we have to assume this was happening. We know that those things were happening.

And so their clock is ticking and their window of power and freedom is closing because they’re getting their travel restricted. They’re getting their elements of power being taken from them. And so you actually are looking at a faction that is willing to do the thing we see being done with motive to do it in the timeframe that we see it done in.

And then we have this window of lack of information of where was MBS at the time? And we don’t know. We talked about that video. That was probably just kind of misinformation fed in. We do not know if he was in Las Vegas at the time. No one has shown anything to prove that he was or wasn’t.

It is worth noting that his brother, his son, KBS—is KBS his son or his brother, Khalid bin Salman? He was the ambassador to America. I think he’s his younger brother. I think that’s correct. Khalid bin Salman, I think is his name. He is the ambassador to the United States for Saudi Arabia, and he is very much in the same faction.

So various people think that this has to do with MBS. Some people think it has to do with his brother, Khalid bin Salman. But we don’t really know if they’re there or not.

The Saudi Purge and the Night of a Thousand Swords

But right after this mass shooting happens and whatever the hell it was, bin Salman goes on this—what was called the Saudi purge, and it includes the Night of a Thousand Swords. It’s this kind of mythical night where he—my understanding is that he invites all of the crown princes in for something. Like, it was—what was it? They were going to unveil something. Or he had this weird event planned.

Oh, it was that they were going to give citizenship to an AI robot named Sophia. It’s this very bizarre little side quest where he’s like, “We’re going to be the first nation to give citizenship to a robot,” is my understanding here. And so it’s like this big—and everybody come here and we’re going to have this big party kind of thing. And then he locks them all in a hotel and he—

TUCKER CARLSON: Carlton.

IAN CARROLL: The Ritz Carlton. And there’s this whole—there’s all this lore and legend around it that you have to kind of sort through to figure out what really happened and what is like storytelling.

But what really did happen is that over that night and then the weeks and months following, he seizes billions and billions and billions of dollars of assets from all of these hardliner guys, all these guys that are aligned with these people that had been slighted, people that had been—that he had sort of stepped in their places of people that would hate him and want him dead.

And it totaled up to almost $200 billion confirmed that he has seized from all these different people over the, you know, that this year, two time frame here after the shooting. A couple of them die in mysterious things like plane, like helicopter crashes.

The Torture of Al Waleed bin Talal

Some of them are—so, for example, there’s this—I guess it’s a story, but it’s like corroborated by a bunch of reporting and journalism. And I think it’s intentionally leaked out because he wants—bin Salman wants everyone to know this story—that he takes Al Waleed bin Talal, the guy that owns the Four Seasons Hotel, the richest of all of these hardliner princes that is against him. And he strings him up by his feet and he actually gets Blackwater guys, apparently military contractors from Blackwater, American military contractors over there, and they torture him.

They hang him up by his feet and they torture him for who knows how long, maybe days, beating him and all this stuff and humiliating him. And we don’t really know what comes of it. But his assets are stripped. He’s basically—his power is neutered.

And that’s done to a number of people. But there’s a lot of lore around what was done to bin Talal, and there’s a lot of theorizing by American journalists around this Las Vegas shooting that bin Talal might have been sort of the big money and sort of the big guy behind a big element of the planning of this thing. Because it starts to be—the theory starts to be maybe it was an assassination attempt on bin Salman or his brother. We don’t know for sure.

The Palace Attack and Subsequent Assassination Attempt

But what we do know is there was another assassination attempt later that year. I think it was in—or I guess it would have been the next year. It was in June of 2018, I believe, and it was at the palace in Riyadh, and there’s video footage of it. And once again, it’s like one of these moments where actually it’s like automatic gunfire going off and kind of like—I don’t know if there’s explosions, but it’s like—and they stormed the palace and tried to kill Mohammed bin Salman.

And actually, it’s pretty well speculated that he actually got shot at some point in that assassination attempt because he disappeared from the public eye for like eight weeks or twelve weeks or something like that.

And so you start to put these pieces of this puzzle together, just the contextual stuff around it where we don’t know for sure that he was there that night. And we don’t really have evidence of anything super concrete Saudi there until we talk about the helicopters.

But we do have context for this turf, this war over immense power and wealth. And we do have context for why they might be there in this hotel, this location. We do have context for there are assassination attempts happening on his life, obviously by those factions.

And then a year to the day, to the almost to the hour, maybe after the Las Vegas shooting happens, Jamal Khashoggi gets chopped up into little pieces over in the embassy.

TUCKER CARLSON: That was a year to the day.

IAN CARROLL: To the day. Right. Was it in 2018 or was it after that? Was it 2019 or 2020?

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t recall. I think it was around 2018.

The Khashoggi Connection

IAN CARROLL: I think it was 2018. But what I’m remembering is specifically John Collins reporting on this, because this is one of the things that he zeroed in on that people then were like, “Whoa.” Because when you account for the time zone difference from where he was—he was in Turkey, I think it was.

TUCKER CARLSON: He was in Istanbul.

IAN CARROLL: In Istanbul. Right. And when you account for the time difference, it’s pretty damn close to actually—because he got chopped up, I believe it was on October 2nd. But when you account for the time difference, it was actually the night of October 1st, the exact anniversary of this shooting, this possible assassination attempt.

It’s like, okay, well, what does Jamal Khashoggi have to do with this? Well, the Khashoggi family is this deep power family in Saudi Arabia. Adnan Khashoggi famously was one of the world’s most powerful arms traffickers that did business with Jeffrey Epstein and sold Trump his boat and all these things, but they were tied in much more significantly politically than that.

And Jamal, specifically, before he was a journalist working for the Washington Post, he was actually working for the head of Saudi intelligence, I guess, doing journalism for him. Right. And then you actually go further back, and some of these guys dug up reporting and photographs, news reporting with photographs, that he was actually in the Mujahideen, hanging out, holding a rocket launcher way back in the day.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, he certainly supported those elements. There’s no doubt about it. Even though his life didn’t mirror their—exactly their beliefs. But there’s no—I mean, I don’t know the answer, but there’s no question that he was not murdered because of his Washington Post columns.

IAN CARROLL: Exactly. That’s like so stupid. And so the question becomes, he was—

TUCKER CARLSON: Critical of MBS, the Washington Post. Like they care.

IAN CARROLL: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, there’s more than that.

A Message of Vengeance

IAN CARROLL: And so then you start to ask yourself, the question is like, what? Why was he murdered? Not just murdered, but why was he murdered so brutally and intentionally in a place that was like a public spectacle? And it looks like it’s to send a message. It very much looks like it’s to send a message.

And you start to wonder, like, okay, well, when he does the Night of the Thousand Swords, when he grabs, when he confiscates all these people’s wealth, he strings bin Talal up by his feet and beats him and then seems to intentionally let that story get out. And then this really public murder of this other guy that’s aligned with those factions happens on the like one year anniversary of this event.

You start to see this triangulation of vengeance of something there. And this is obviously speculation to connect all of these things, but this context matters because again, 60 people were murdered and there is an explanation, and it’s obviously not the mainstream narrative.

But then you have to explain, how did 60 people die and why? And there’s a reason for everything. Even if it’s like, even if it’s an asteroid, just boom, random collision, there’s still an explanation for why it happened. And so you need to find a scenario that actually is reality, that does fit with the facts that are true, that explains the horrific thing that we saw.

And you’re starting to see the reason why this theory took so much root and why so many people are interested in it, myself included, is that it explains how you could do something so horrible to innocent American civilians. But it also explains all the other weird operations. Not that we know for sure what happened in all those hotels, but that you start to understand why you would have reports of armed gunmen in tactical gear over there and over there and over there at the airport, why you have these weird helicopters going on.

The Helicopter Question

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so the helicopters. So I said, just to recap super quick, the story you’re telling is remarkable, by the way, and it does seem to fit all kinds of disparate pieces together into what appears like a coherent whole. But you don’t know.

So I said, do we know that MBS or his brother or any of his relatives were in town that day? No, we don’t. But you said there’s the question of the helicopters, which I think you’ve already made a compelling case, were involved in the shooting.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you mean? What helicopters?

The Ghost Helicopters and Operation Red Dawn

IAN CARROLL: So we know that there are helicopters in the air that don’t show up on the transponder data. And we know that there’s weird transponder data on helicopters that came from the Maverick and Sundance helicopter tour operators and all that. But the question is, even before you have seen John Cullen’s research on the fact that there’s some helicopters that never have transponders on that aren’t on any of the flight radar data—as in, like, there’s literal ghost helicopters there that seem to be shooting—before you even know that, if you’re speculating that there’s some foreign assassination kind of attempt in there and there’s helicopters involved, it’s like, well, where the hell did they get the helicopters?

How do you get helicopters halfway around the world from Saudi Arabia? You can’t just fly over the ocean in a helicopter and go shoot someone. And so these guys started to look into it. And this is very—this is directly taken from the research of John Cullen and Jason Goodman, who did amazing work on this stuff. We all owe them a great debt on this because they started to look, where would they—are there helicopters around? And they stumbled across the thing called Operation Red Dawn.

It turns out that for the entire month of August, the month before—well, one whole month before the shooting—this hotel called the W in Las Vegas was rented out for the Saudi Royal Air Force because they were bringing their guys over to actually do a giant training operation, a joint training operation in this thing called Operation Red Dawn in the desert outside of Las Vegas.

Simultaneous to that, Saudi Arabia had done this gigantic weapons deal with American defense contractors. And I mean, America, because you have to go through our government in order to do those contracts, as you know. And they had bought a whole bunch of military hardware from various defense contractors, and that included a whole bunch of helicopters from Boeing.

And there’s this new kind of helicopter that had just been designed by Boeing called the AH-6i that was just finishing its first run of production, and it had not been delivered to anyone else yet in the world. And you can look these things up. They’re these compact—they’re like combat stealth reconnaissance helicopters designed to be extremely mobile, extremely small. You can fold the rotors up and pack them into a shipping container like on a truck, and they can slide right into a truck back, but they also can have miniguns on them.

They are extremely stealthy. They’re very quiet, they’re very small. They have just two seats in them. So they are sort of a really specific type of helicopter that was just getting finished in 2017. They were delivering their first shipments in 2017. And they were actually there at this operation, Operation Red Dawn, where the entire Saudi Royal Air Force was in the Las Vegas area just like a month before the shooting goes down, like two to one months before the shooting goes down.

And people did all sorts of digging into the description of the helicopters from victims and what these helicopters look like—they’ve got this giant camera bulb on the bottom. But the fact is that it’s like, oh, wait a minute, there’s literally Saudi helicopters stationed right over there in the desert just a hop away from Vegas for this giant operation where the Saudi Royal Air Force is literally been on location just before this thing goes down.

And those helicopters are specifically a kind of helicopter—you couldn’t do this with a Blackhawk, for example, but you could pack one of those helicopters into a box truck and drive it off into the desert and just park it there and no one would ever know there’s a helicopter parked there because it’s inside of a box. And then you can just take it out, unfold the rotors and you’re off.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing.

Connecting the Evidence

IAN CARROLL: And so it’s like, wait a minute, what? Because again, you have to remind yourself that in journalism, in the pursuit of truth, you have to find true circumstances which you can evidence hopefully corroborate as well by multiple sources that explains what you’re seeing.

And what we saw is we have footage of helicopters, we have reports of helicopters and we have flight transponder data that seems to indicate at least some helicopter activity that’s suspicious from the airfield, but pretty good evidence that there’s helicopters that aren’t even transponder on.

And when you hear that gunfire, it’s like, oh, that would explain why the gunfire sounds like belt-fed machine guns. Because that’s what’s on these kinds of helicopters. That would explain why we see these flying things coming around behind the Mandalay Bay and going with little lights in the back, off in the darkness. That would explain why there’s trajectories of fire that are coming down directly from overhead on some of these people.

Yes, that would explain why—it would start to fit into a narrative where the helicopters that we do know were on the transponder data—there’s a couple groups of them, there’s one group of three that takes off earlier in the night, they take off from by the tour helicopter operator and they fly over to the Mandalay Bay and hover over top of it and they turn their transponders off and their transponders are off for the entire shooting.

And then their transponders turn back on after the shooting is over and they fly over and join this group of eight that are taking off in the minutes after the shooting and flying north away from the strip. We know that. Yeah, it’s on. Yeah, you can go and watch all the footage. People record—multiple people corroborated it and recorded it from Flight Radar 24 at the time.

Now, transponder data is only historically kept for up to three years, I think. And Flightradar24 is the most—has the widest time horizon. If you pay the $500 membership, you can get, I think three years of data. So it’s long gone now from public access. But many, many different journalists published video footage of this transponder data, corroborated it between each other.

And yeah, we know that lots of weird helicopter stuff happened on the transponder data. And then that’s where John Cullen took it one step further and triangulated everything and realized that he pretty well proved that even aside from that, we have helicopters that aren’t those ones at times when we know where all those ones are.

And there’s—I still see a helicopter in this footage right now that has flashing what looks like gunfire. We also have a plane on that transponder footage that is flying under the call sign of a Southwest Boeing 747. And it flies over the airport and then does a right turn the way a helicopter would, and then flies over the Mandalay Bay, or I guess it was the Delano, not the Mandalay Bay for this one. And then it hovers over the Delano for a while and then it goes off and it’s under the call sign of a Southwest passenger plane, like a Boeing 747 that also was somewhere else.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s a helicopter.

IAN CARROLL: It’s obviously a helicopter just by the way it flies. It’s obviously a helicopter because it’s a fixed-wing—

TUCKER CARLSON: Aircraft don’t hover.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, yeah, you know, you know, they—

TUCKER CARLSON: Tend to fall out of the sky.

The Air Traffic Control Mystery

IAN CARROLL: You fly around America on that one. Can’t hover, but this one could. This one, though, it was apparent it was labeled as this Southwest Airlines passenger plane. It flew and took a hard right turn at speed over top of the airport and then went and hovered over the Delano and then took off.

So we have all this weird sh*t going on in the air. And so it starts to corroborate the idea that helicopters are involved. And there’s more than—and there appears to be more than one thing of helicopters going on, because you can’t explain helicopters shooting civilians from helicopters that are taking off from Sundance. And I always forget the other one—from these tour operators, right?

Maverick and Sundance are very much a part of the community there. They run tours all over Vegas every single day. Their helicopters are known at the airport. The air traffic control knows them. They talk to them all the time, right? And we do have some weird sh*t going on with air traffic control. We do have the audio of air traffic control.

And air traffic control didn’t even know that the shooting was happening until several minutes after it had finished. And we have the audio of it. It’s almost tragic. As the shooting is happening, they’re just directing traffic like normal. And then as the shooting is sort of finishing, right around 10:14, 10:15, 10:16, air traffic control starts asking the helicopter operators, because there’s these tour operators that are apparently launching tour helicopters at the time.

It’s like, “Hey, Sundance or Maverick, can you see what’s happening over at that concert over there? What’s going on? I see a lot of police lights and stuff,” and they’re chattering back and forth of like, “Yeah, I think the concert just got out.” But unbeknownst to them, 60 people are dead on the ground, and the shooting has already fully happened, and everything is—at least that part of everything is done.

And then they start to get—in the next eight minutes, they start to realize what the hell is going on. And then air traffic control starts rerouting everybody and starts trying to deal with it, keeping the runways clear. And then it’s 30 minutes later where traffic control comes through and says, “We have an active shooter on the runway.” And then they ask to turn the lights off.

So that’s where it became like, if helicopters are shooting people, you need to figure out where those helicopters came from, because they almost certainly didn’t come from these tour helicopter operators.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right?

IAN CARROLL: Where—we haven’t even talked about the shooting that happened in those hangars, by the way. That was reported shooting in the hangars. Multiple people reported shootings in those hangars and in other hangars in the area, airport as well. But we can come back to that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, were those—do we know anything about those shootings?

The Hangar Shootings

IAN CARROLL: All we know is that there were three different 911 calls that came in sequentially that were from relatives and friends of people that were in the hangars. Because apparently the people in the hangars were trying to call 911 and couldn’t get through. Almost as though they were being jammed or something like that, somehow got comms out or something.

And so it was like a boyfriend of a girl that was in there. And it was reported that there was a woman down who had been shot. We don’t know if she died or not. We don’t have an autopsy from any woman that died in those hangars, but it was that a woman had been shot and that there were gunmen in the hangars somewhere and there was a bunch of civilians trying to hide from them, trying to sort of run and hide from—

TUCKER CARLSON: Is this during the shooting at Mandalay Bay?

IAN CARROLL: Those calls all come after the shooting at Mandalay Bay by a woman down.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so it’s not like—I mean, this whole time I’m thinking, well, maybe it’s just the echo of transpired into the—

IAN CARROLL: We have a woman down in that hangar. We have guns picked up in the street and handed to police officers in other parts of the city. We have long guns. No, no pistols. There are magazines that are found in other parts of the city around the concert venue. There’s AR magazines. There’s a magazine found out in front of the Tropicana. There’s a bunch of casings found in the parking lot of the Tropicana.

And I’ve got all sorts of video footage of this stuff that I’ll give to you, and you can splice in wherever you want. And then people can go on to that map that I talked about. And the vast majority of what I’m referring to is on that map. And you can actually click on it and see the footage original for yourselves.

And then there’s also all the gunfire that was recorded after the fact and the chatter of armed suspects, gunmen in all sorts of places being observed. We know very well that there were lots of other things happening, but we don’t have a lot of other bodies except for this woman in the helicopter hangar that was allegedly shot. We don’t know if she died.

TUCKER CARLSON: We don’t know anything about her.

IAN CARROLL: I don’t know anything about her. Yeah, I don’t think that we ever got any answers on that.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is the craziest story ever. And the craziest part is how people sort of let it go and didn’t—the biggest mass shooting in American history. We never talk about it. No one ever followed up on any of this stuff. No federal agency ever said, “Wait a second. We’re going to cut off highway funding unless you answer these questions.”

The Aftermath and Geopolitical Realignment

IAN CARROLL: Well, what did happen after it, which is kind of where we were there, is that MBS goes on this purge of his political opposition in Saudi Arabia. The next time that Trump flew to Saudi Arabia, he got the sword dance welcome. Right? Do you remember that?

TUCKER CARLSON: I do, yeah.

IAN CARROLL: That is not a thing you just give out to Donald Trump because you like him. That is a whole different level of respect in Saudi Arabia is my understanding. That’s where we get that photo of Trump with his hand on the globe with the other Saudi guys is from that trip.

Also, simultaneous to that, Mohammed bin Salman invested what appears to be $2 billion with a fund started by Jared Kushner in the year following this shooting, which is an interesting choice. I mean, it’s not a completely unthinkable choice, but a lot of alignments start to happen.

Trump has been very pro-MBS for a long time. And Al Walid, this other guy who owned the Four Seasons and got strung up by his feet, he’s hated Trump for a long time. And you can actually, there’s archived tweets of his that are like, “Trump, you’re a f*ing idiot. Why would you do this?” kind of stuff.

And so after this shooting in Vegas, you start to see deep alignments strengthen between Trump’s government and Bin Salman’s government. And Bin Salman is rounding up his political opposition. He’s modernizing Saudi Arabia. He’s trying to turn them away from just oil and this old Wahhabist way of thinking.

And it’s obvious, from an American national defense and national security standpoint, that’s one of the most obvious things you could ever desire is for Saudi Arabia to stop being sympathetic to Al Qaeda style terrorism. Right? Because there are factions in Saudi Arabia that are still very much like, “No, f* the infidels,” certainly not all of them, for sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you never thought you would see it in Saudi Arabia because it’s the seat of their religion, because Mecca, Medina, the top two holy places are in the country. Right? So they didn’t have—it was believed that government didn’t have the latitude to become more pro-Western because every Muslim has to go to Mecca.

IAN CARROLL: Exactly. And so it’s an interesting moment in the political shifting of the Middle East, world-changing moment. And that’s as the Middle East is rising in wealth through not all the best means. There’s a whole other episode to do about the genocide in Sudan and the gold being smuggled to the UAE, which is atrocious.

But you can see, it’s like, it feels like a currency shift is coming, and it feels like the Middle East is rising into their modern incarnation. There’s no question. And it feels like all these things are happening.

The Missing Piece: Why Shoot Up a Concert?

TUCKER CARLSON: But may I ask one thing just to—I mean, it’s an amazing explanation, true or not. But the piece that’s missing in my mind is why, if you wanted to murder Mohammed bin Salman, would you shoot up a Jason Aldean concert?

IAN CARROLL: That is a good question. And that’s the question that first got me hung up on this whole theory. And I don’t really know. It’s still the most endearing mystery of the whole thing to me in that we have aligned on a story that has a perpetrator that we know is perfectly morally capable of doing so.

Essentially we’re saying the most extreme jihadi terrorist factions from that region. But it’s like that still doesn’t explain why it would be a part of the plan. Right? And different people come to different theories here, and none of them really satisfy me.

One is that we have rounds that were fired at the fuel tanks at the airport. So across from the Mandalay Bay, diagonally ahead of it is the concert, but across directly is the airport beyond the concert. And there’s these giant white fuel tanks, these giant metal white fuel tanks over there that got shot by bolt action fire.

And I mean, the police story is that one of them penetrated but didn’t ignite. But they say that officially eight rounds were fired at the fuel tanks. I don’t know how they know eight, specifically. Two of them hit the fuel tanks, didn’t ignite.

And so there’s a certain kind of faction of people that think that the goal was to ignite those fuel tanks and basically explode them, which to me speaks to distraction or chaos, cause pandemonium as some reason or some part of a plan. There’s a lot of reasons why you might want pandemonium in something like this, but it’s hard to say what that means.

But in that theorizing, you could then say, okay, well, if the tanks don’t ignite, then just shoot the concert goers. That’ll cause pandemonium. That’s never really satisfied my question or curiosity.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the idea that it was a diversion makes sense.

IAN CARROLL: I mean, of course it does make sense to have it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Have any evidence? So if the Crown Prince was in the hotel, he likely would have been above Stephen Paddock in the Four Seasons portion of the hotel. Do we have any evidence anything weird was going on up there?

Activity at the Mandalay Bay

IAN CARROLL: Not to my knowledge, other than the fact that we have helicopters that took off from the tour operator, three of them early on before everything started that go fly over top of the Mandalay Bay and then turn their transponders off and they’re off for the entire duration of the shooting. Don’t really know what happens there.

We have helicopters that appear to be shooting that are circling around the Mandalay Bay in the footage. And much later we have reports of an armed gunman. First, it’s a possible suspect on the fourth floor of the Mandalay Bay. We’re talking like an hour to an hour and a half later.

And then just shortly after that first call—and I’m pretty sure this one was reported by police, not like a 911 call but on police radio, I could be wrong about that—it’s first a suspect and then it escalates. A few minutes later it’s like we have an armed gunman on the fourth floor of Mandalay Bay and then we have no follow-up on that. We have no context of what happened there. Whether that was real or not, we don’t know.

But other than that, there’s actually a serious lack of anything happening in the Mandalay Bay. There is the explosive breaching of the police team getting in there. The one SWAT guy with his team breaching into Paddock’s room. That’s a question we don’t know. But other than that there’s not a whole lot of reported activity.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

IAN CARROLL: One thing that I believe it was Cullen again that noticed this is in the photos of the room, he noticed that there were loaded AK-47 magazines, AK style magazines, but there was no AKs in the room.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they were loaded with 7.62 by 39 rounds.

IAN CARROLL: They were full, completely filled as though you had a case that you were going to go shoot in the desert or whatever. The actual explanation for why Paddock thought he was there, whatever that was.

He speculates—I don’t have a better explanation—but John Cullen speculates that the shot that we hear earlier in the day, that was reported by someone on the floor, they said it was like 3:30 or so. Someone reported that they heard a shot in the Mandalay Bay, a single shot. He speculates that that’s when Stephen Paddock was killed.

That they get in, they open his door. Whether they’ve already manipulated the key cards or they just knock and walk in and shoot him, I don’t know. But he speculates that that’s when Paddock was actually killed.

But if you are, if you’re playing out this narrative to try to make that make sense, if you are Saudi hit squads and you walk into this room of Paddock’s filled with all these weapons, you’re going to pick up the one you’re familiar with. Right? That would make sense in my mind.

The Missing Surveillance Footage

TUCKER CARLSON: Has the—I should have asked this earlier—has the hotel ever released all the relevant surveillance footage?

IAN CARROLL: Not a single ounce of it, no. Even though there is endless surveillance footage, obviously.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course. Every—

IAN CARROLL: And it’s not that they released footage that disproved people. It’s not that there were 911 calls and we were all—people were conspiracy theorizing. It was like something happened in the Bellagio. So they released footage that showed nothing happened in the Bellagio. That’s not what happened. They didn’t release anything at all.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s incredible.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, yeah. And they put gag orders on all of their employees and everything. It was just this whole—I actually don’t remember at the time. I’m trying to remember if this guy was publicly traded. He got—yeah, this guy got into politics. The CEO of MGM, he sold off—oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, man.

This is the thing about this story is there’s so many details that are like, “What the f*?” The CEO of MGM, I should almost refer to my notes, he sold off 80% of his MGM stock like six months before the shooting happened. It was—I’m probably going to get the numbers wrong. It was a lot of money. But the number 80% I feel pretty dang confident about.

He sold a shitload of his MGM stock in the months leading into this shooting. I think it was six months before. He later on was chosen to be the head of the COVID task force in Las Vegas, if I remember correctly. There’s a lot of insider stuff like that of like, perfect, okay, what the hell is going on?

Government Response and National Security

TUCKER CARLSON: Has anyone ever asked, you know, the US Government, the Saudi government about any of this?

IAN CARROLL: I mean, other than journalists online, podcasters that have sort of posed the question. John Cullen is very fond of posing the question. Mindy Robinson made a documentary where she rhetorically posed the question very angrily of like, “What the f* is this, guys? Are we ever going to get answers? Are you ever going to answer for this?”

And obviously there’s no response to any of that as far as I’ve ever seen. I don’t think anyone has ever really posed the question. And I think that, you know, you could explain it as a conspiracy theorist of like, they never—it’s like they’re not going to tell us about 9/11, so why would they?

But when you go—the thing that’s really interesting in my mind about this Saudi theory, which is very much just a theory, is that it does explain why it would be geopolitically relevant and sensitive to this day. And why, because then you’re actually talking about US-Saudi relations right now with the soon-to-be king of Saudi Arabia.

You’re talking about Trump’s family relationships. Because Trump was the president at that time and he was fresh in. And I’m sure that he had something to do with, if that’s what happened. I’m sure that Trump had something to do with the response and the security and whatever happened.

But then you’re also talking about US-Israel relations because Bin Salman’s relationship with Israel is very different than this more hardliner, old school faction’s relationship with Israel. Right? And so there’s all of these relationships that shift around Trump’s presidency in the United States and his relationship to Bin Salman and Bin Salman’s ascendancy in Saudi and their relationship to everyone else in the Middle East, which is so critical.

And so it’s like, well, that does start to explain in my mind why it might not just be that they’re covering it up because they’re embarrassed and don’t want to tell you, but they might actually have this sort of trump card, so to speak, of national security. There’s a legitimate reason why we’re covering this up. So I really—shut your mouths because it’s hard. How do you cover—

TUCKER CARLSON: Even though those would be the victims in this attempted murder, if in fact that’s what it was. I have seen that before where people are on the wrong side of, you know, an act of violence or the victims of it, but they don’t want to talk about it.

IAN CARROLL: Well, not especially when you’re a king of a kingdom so powerful you don’t want to expose a weakness. You don’t want to—

TUCKER CARLSON: And also I’ve seen that you don’t want to—

The Intelligence Community’s Dilemma

IAN CARROLL: I mean, you certainly don’t want to expose, let alone the methods, techniques and procedures of, you know, the things that intelligence agencies don’t want to ever give away. It’s like the way we do covert operations and covert extractions and all that.

But even beyond like giving away state secrets like that, it’s like you also don’t want to expose all of the collateral damage that was caused in the wake of this thing because inevitably, let’s just imagine that Muhammad bin Salman, they tried to kill him in Vegas and he was the good guy in the story, even though, you know, that is not what’s being said here. But life is all shades of gray.

But there’s almost no version of that story where a civilian isn’t killed because of his team as well. And, you know, an American isn’t killed because, you know, the SWAT team wasn’t there to do that because they were over there doing that.

Which, by the way, where the f* was the SWAT team? Right?

So now that we’ve gone through all of this narrative and evidence just like kind of teasing out and then we come back to where was the SWAT team? It makes a lot more sense, I bet in the audience’s mind.

And this is for me, this was how my own digging into it happened. Because I came into this naive and I look at all this journalism and early on I stumble across the body cam footage of them breaching the room. And it doesn’t really stick out to me that there’s only one SWAT guy with them, even though I acknowledged it, but it was like, that’s weird.

But then like after this snaking journey through, trying to learn all these other elements of what was going on, and you start to learn about the airport and you learn about the other hotels and you learn about the possible extraction of like a king, then it’s like, okay, so where was the SWAT?

TUCKER CARLSON: The possible extraction of the king? Do we have any suggestion that that happened?

The Missing SWAT Team

IAN CARROLL: No, no, we do not know. And honestly, now that I’m mentioning it and I’m kind of thinking it through right now, one of the only, and I’m not saying this is concrete evidence, I’m actually saying the opposite because one of the most concrete pieces of evidence is that the SWAT team was not at the place where they should have been.

They should have been at Stephen Paddock’s door. This is the most, this is one of the most decorated, experienced and well funded biggest SWAT team, one of the biggest SWAT teams in America. And they had one guy, they had one shooter in one room that they should have been breaching.

But when you actually look at the true story, there’s all these other things happening that might have needed their attention more. But my understanding is that SWAT is actually used for protection of high level dignitaries, used for extraction of high level. Like that’s the kind of thing that I could imagine them actually being diverted to. Right. For sure.

Because if this event was this more complex thing of some sort, they’re not going to send them to Steven Paddock’s room. That actually that’s the last place you want to send your SWAT team. Right. Especially once the shooting from Paddock’s room has stopped.

Because if you’re already getting reports of something going on at the airport, or like if what we’re talking about is happening at all, then you’re probably getting reports directly from this, whoever high level dignitary or person that’s trying to be assassinated. There’s probably deeper levels of intel being fed to whoever makes the decision of where the SWAT team goes.

And so it’s, you suddenly have a pretty obvious explanation of like the SWAT team wasn’t there because something more important was happening.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

IAN CARROLL: And I don’t think, and we know the SWAT team wasn’t at the concert. We don’t have evidence of the SWAT team being at the hotels. I don’t have any evidence of them being at the airport, although we don’t really have enough evidence to say whether they were or not at the airport. But where were they? Because that actually I think is one of the biggest pieces of this puzzle.

TUCKER CARLSON: And he would have Secret Service as well.

IAN CARROLL: Right.

The Victims and Their Families

TUCKER CARLSON: So you said about 60 people were killed. Over 100 I know were shot.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, I think it was 400 plus were wounded in total.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s a lot of survivors. That’s a lot of families of the murdered. Have any of them raised these questions?

IAN CARROLL: A lot of them did early on and I think a lot of them still do. But a lot of people, I think, feel voiceless and in a lot of ways are voiceless. If no one’s going to go to you, if the media is not going to investigate it, if there’s never going to be a federal investigation, then they have no recourse. And so what wound up happening was independent media started going to them.

TUCKER CARLSON: So there was no in the, I mean, I was in the fabled mainstream media at the time. I don’t remember anyone really pushing on this very hard. Do you know of anyone?

IAN CARROLL: As far as I’m aware, you’re the one that pushed the hardest.

TUCKER CARLSON: It wasn’t that hard.

IAN CARROLL: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, we did get hassled by the police in Las Vegas, which was striking because, yeah, you work at Fox News, basically pro cop. All the cops know that. You know, I’ve never had any problem with any cop. They’re always so nice. And I think the only time I’ve ever had in the last 20 years anyway, I’ve ever had a hostility from the police was in Las Vegas.

And they tried to block us from our camera position, which was in a vacant lot. I’ll never forget this. And it was at night and they tried to make us leave.

IAN CARROLL: And I thought that’s, I remember saying.

TUCKER CARLSON: To a producer, man, we’ve never gotten that treatment.

IAN CARROLL: Interesting. Were you, was it on any specific lot?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it was right. It was a camera shot. So we were, you know, we were, I was doing like a stand up facing the area where the shooting took place. And.

IAN CARROLL: They just weren’t about it.

TUCKER CARLSON: No. And they were weird about it too. Really weird about it. And hostile. And that was just so striking because again, if you work at, ask anyone who works at Fox, you know, you see cops and they’re just so nice because everyone hates cops except, you know, the Fox News anchors. That’s their view anyway. So I’ve never, I never experienced that before.

The Human Toll

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, yeah. And it was, it was weird. The whole government just shut up about it. And the mainstream media, it was like three days later, the story just died. Most, most horrific mass shooting in American history.

And those victims, like a lot of them are still alive, but they’re paralyzed. A lot of them have brain damage, A lot of them like lost limbs or eyes or things like that. It’s a real tragedy.

And it’s easy to get into conspiracy land only with it. And I do think it’s important to try to uncover what really happened, obviously to try to dig out what the hell is this. But it’s also, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that like, that was hundreds of Americans and then by extension, thousands of Americans. Thousands and thousands of Americans whose lives will never be the same because of that, who lost family members, lost loved ones.

And they, and these were like, it’s really sad. On that map that I was telling you about, Vegas shooting map, they have death reports of like all the victims pinned onto the map. And it gives you like, their age, their name, their profession, and in some cases it gives you a little description of who they were and what their life was like and what they were doing.

And it’s just so sad to read because, like, a lot of them is like “was there with her boyfriend to celebrate their anniversary,” like “was a kindergarten teacher” or you know, things like that. That’s just, and that’s where it really hits home where it’s like you need, you need an explanation that explains why something so evil would happen.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

IAN CARROLL: And I think that’s the enduring question that keeps the investigation open, but it’s also the enduring question that makes it so that it wasn’t solved by just like these basic explanations. Because we easily debunked the mainstream narrative. But then there was lots of other sort of like half baked versions of maybe it’s this, maybe it’s this. But none of them explained how evil it was. And none of them explained the scope and scale of what it was.

And to this day, there’s no one proven theory. I’ve just sort of laid out what is the most explored and I think by my standard, the most credible version of a theory. And a lot of people are pretty much on that theory at this point that they think that that’s the, the, the, the one that is a version of true. But it’s not the only theory. And it’s far from proven, that’s for sure.

And it wouldn’t be, I mean, there’s a thing you ask, like, has there ever been any investigators? I’m sure the government already knows, of course, like, that’s the reason why you get the cover up of this magnitude is because they know what happens.

The Pattern of Non-Investigation

TUCKER CARLSON: Obvious. Whenever there’s not an investigation, it’s not because no one’s interested. And we’ve seen that a lot. In fact, we’ve seen it so much that you sort of wonder at what point it’s just impossible to have like a functioning justice system because nobody believes anything.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah. And it’s just over and over again when something happens, we feel like we’re not like Charlie Kirk is months, months ago now. And to this day, I think the most Americans still feel like we don’t have an honest set of answers.

Whether you believe it was Tyler Robinson or you believe it was some version of some other conspiracy, I think that a lot of people feel very underwhelmed by the way it was handled by Cash, the way it was handled by every government official involved. And that should have been the most basic one.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, Sue, I didn’t want to talk about this because I’m, you know, I know everyone involved very well and I feel emotional about it. And I’m going out, you know, day after tomorrow to speak at Turning Point at Charlie’s request. But I don’t so my, the hostility that, I don’t know what that was. The onus is on the government to prove it was a lone gunman. Okay, that’s up to them, not up to me.

IAN CARROLL: That’s their job.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not accusing anybody. I don’t know exactly what happened. There is a lot of evidence that Tyler Robinson was involved, at least from what I read. If those text messages are real and the murder weapon is, you know, like, I’m willing to believe anything, but I do think it’s up to them to prove it to us.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah.

The Burden of Proof

TUCKER CARLSON: Here’s what I don’t understand. There’s been an enormous amount of rage. You know, different people with different views getting mad at each other. There’s been almost no pressure on federal law enforcement to cough up the freaking facts and to tell a story that makes sense just in this got internal coherence that like, oh, that makes sense.

IAN CARROLL: Like, I get it. Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: And there’s no pressure on them. Even the question of motive. Like, again, I want to believe it was a lone gunman who was a tranny or something. I want to believe that.

IAN CARROLL: A lot better of an answer. A lot more comfortable.

TUCKER CARLSON: 100%, I want that. By the way, I’m a middle aged man, I’m a normie. I don’t want to believe anything other than what they tell me, but they’ve made it impossible for me, so.

But I don’t understand the motive. Like, they’re like, well, transgenderism, which obviously I’m opposed to, but, okay, was he transgender? Was he on hormones? Was he, how do you go from being this seemingly normal person to murdering a stranger with almost a dead certainty you’ll be punished? You’ll spend life in prison or be executed for it? Like, that’s a lot. That’s a deep commitment.

Okay, yeah. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. Of course it does. But like, how did it happen in this case?

IAN CARROLL: Yeah. And tell us the facts. Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, yeah. And it’s like, shut up.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah. And it’s like this, it’s a parallel to the Las Vegas in the sense that just one piece of evidence. In the case of Charlie Kirk, it’s one piece of evidence. In the case of Las Vegas, it’s like 5 trillion.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the Las Vegas thing, the story is just like.

The Power of Video Evidence

Well, what I was going to say is that the video is—we know they have it. Like in Vegas, we know that there’s surveillance footage of the entire city. We know that every hotel has footage of everything that happened. And we know that they could release it, and we could see these alleged gunmen, we could see these fake 911 calls, right?

And in Charlie’s case, we know that the camera that they released footage of—of this guy running across the roof—that camera sees the whole roof. That camera sees the shooting position clearly. I went there myself.

And so it’s like, if you have the video of the shooter running to get off the roof, you have the video of him taking the shot. And so it’s these little things where you don’t take that step to release the evidence that is so in our faces, to just give a little bit of trust to the public to clarify things. It’s like, why don’t you take this step for trust? Because, like, you’re saying, it’s their job to prove these things. It’s their job to.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not up to you or me. I mean, I’ve stayed out of it mostly. I’ve really tried my hardest to stay out of it, but I feel emotional about it. But you’re watching the Trump coalition turn against itself, eat itself, and—okay, fine. I mean, there are legitimate disagreements, of course. I’m always for that. But no calls for the FBI or authorities in Utah or the college. Like, there’s no pressure on them.

IAN CARROLL: What is that? Yeah, well, you wouldn’t want a tainted jury pool.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, it’s kind of dumb.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you know what crimes I’ve covered? I was a police reporter, and the first thing that happens is the authorities call you up and they tell you this. Exactly. What? This. They tell you their story.

IAN CARROLL: Yep.

TUCKER CARLSON: That taints the jury pool. Yeah, it does. In favor of conviction. So I’ve never—I mean, I’ve been around this for over 30 years. I’m not an expert in anything, but I’ve certainly seen law enforcement respond to—

IAN CARROLL: A crime a lot.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I’ve never heard anybody say anything like, this doesn’t make any sense.

IAN CARROLL: Like, what is it?

TUCKER CARLSON: What does it even mean?

Growing Up in the 9/11 Generation

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, and to me, being younger and newer in this thing, having more naivete—it’s hard growing up. So I’m like the quintessential 9/11 generation. I was like, seven, eight, nine. What was it, 2001? I would have been nine when 9/11 happened. And so to me, with my life experience, it’s just hard not to be—like, when you see the government act this way, it’s because they’re covering up one of these things that I don’t know what they are, by the way.

TUCKER CARLSON: When I act that way, I’m covering something up. When you do too. That’s a human thing. If I’m hiding something, if I’m lying about something, there’s a reason I’m not doing it. Unless I’m like some total sociopath freak, I’m not doing it for fun. I’m doing it because I’m trying to conceal something.

IAN CARROLL: Exactly. And I think that we’ve just—I mean, we’ve always had them throughout history. We had them in Vietnam, we had them long before that. Like they’ve been everywhere in history. But I don’t know if it’s information increasing the frequency that they feel like they’re happening at, or if it’s corruption increasing as the empire sort of late stages itself.

But it just feels like we’re in this era now where every couple years we get another one that is so big it’s hard to imagine a bigger one. And then boom, COVID hits, right? And it’s like, what could even be weirder than the—and it’s like, I’m not saying that one is more important than the other, but I think it’s just striking that over and over there’s always more gigantic world events that feel viscerally like cover-ups, where there’s no reason for there to be a cover-up of the assassination of someone like Charlie.

Especially when Trump, like, who Charlie got into power, is in power when that’s their—and it’s not like it’s Trump’s job to solve the crime, it’s just that, you know, you would hope that he has a coalition in place and that his government and his FBI and his people, that they should have no greater motivation ever than to solve this crime.

Turning Against Each Other

TUCKER CARLSON: But what about all of the people who, you know, knew Charlie or who are sad or every American, why are they turning against each other and not against the authorities whose job it is? I would always think this about the race crap. It’s like blacks should hate whites, whites—

IAN CARROLL: Should be afraid of blacks. Okay, got it.

TUCKER CARLSON: No one ever mentions like private equity. It did feel like a fight amongst yourselves scenario. And this does too.

IAN CARROLL: I think it’s exactly what happened during COVID. And obviously I have a big bias here and people should only listen to me about Charlie Kirk through my bias around my reporting on it. But to me it looks like the same sort of mass formation psychosis that happened during COVID. It’s just that that was better at targeting the left because it was like collectivism of collectively we’re going to protect all the sick people. And leftists are, you know, nevermind.

This one is targeting the right because they shot our guy and we loved Charlie and like—and these damned leftists hate us, right? And we’ve got this—we’ve got our leftist tranny guy and we hate—and they’re whipping it up on that. And all the news is parroting the same thing and all of the—I’m not going to name any names, but all the talking heads on social media that are not independent and they’re all saying the exact same narrative. And so you get this spiraling narrative that is building this.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t even know what the narrative is. Like, I’m happy to buy into your dumb narrative. Just tell me what it is. And as I said, my preference is for an easy to understand, non-sinister or less sinister explanation that involves one guy. But if you’re telling me the trainee did this—actually, the trainee seems to be in federal protection right now with no charges against him.

Even though by the text messages they released, he knew about it and didn’t go to authorities. So how is he not an accessory? Why is he under protection? What’s this? So we can testify—we have the text messages. You don’t need—like what? Shouldn’t a guy who knew about the crime but didn’t report it, who lived with the gunman, shouldn’t he be charged with something?

What about the people who predicted this on the Internet before it happened, where they—and like—okay, so I don’t really even know what this—what story are you telling me? I don’t even get it.

IAN CARROLL: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sorry, I’m upset.

IAN CARROLL: No, I totally hear it. And it’s—I think it’s a rage that a lot of Americans feel and they look for outlet because—

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

IAN CARROLL: Some people see this piece that didn’t make sense, and some people see that piece that didn’t make sense, and others see—others just feel—just feel a weird vibe from it.

Questions About the Shooter

TUCKER CARLSON: But was the shooter transgender?

IAN CARROLL: Is that what they’re saying? Okay, then what does that have to—

TUCKER CARLSON: Do with it all?

IAN CARROLL: He became like gay for the transgender guy, but it’s just like it doesn’t have anything to do with it. Unless you can prove with the facts that like he actually had the motive, the means, the weapon, the location.

TUCKER CARLSON: But what was the motive? That Charlie had said bad things.

IAN CARROLL: I mean, look, a few times I—

TUCKER CARLSON: Know that people were, you know, the left hated Charlie.

IAN CARROLL: Fact.

TUCKER CARLSON: They celebrated his death. Fact. But to kill somebody you’ve never met, it’s a pretty abstract thing.

IAN CARROLL: To do and to plan it out and to go through with it 100%.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’re either completely deranged or your ideological motivation is so profound you’re a suicide bomber basically, because you know that you’re not going to—you’re going to die because of your murder. So that’s just such a big step. I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I’m just saying, tell me how, tell—

IAN CARROLL: Me how the 4.0 student that, like, nearly aced his ACT became that.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s insane. And then the rage of like even asking that question, it’s like—and I never say this, but I just will say it. I knew Charlie really well. Like, not, you know, not just green room friends. Like, I knew him really well and, you know, loved him. And so—and I know for a fact that his whole life was testament to this. He was for inquiry, you know, honest questions.

So people like, “Oh, just asking questions,” Charlie. Be like, “Yeah, just asking questions. As is my birthright.”

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, as an American citizen.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, you think? And so you’re—so what you’re saying is that mass formation psychology clearly has taken hold among a bunch of people where it’s like they just can’t think clearly.

State-Sponsored Information Control

IAN CARROLL: Well, I don’t think that it takes hold by accident. I think that it’s the kind of thing that only happens when you have a massive propaganda campaign and basically a state-sponsored operation to control the information space is what it is.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, there’s definitely, I mean, there’s definitely—

IAN CARROLL: Some of that flat out.

TUCKER CARLSON: We know because I’m watching it and I’m not going to, you know, whatever. I’m going to just shut up now because I know too many people involved and I love them all, honestly.

IAN CARROLL: And it’s like with the Vegas shooting, with a lot of these things, it can kind of get swept under the rug, right? It can kind of get put away. And with Vegas, they managed to sort of just stop talking about it. And a lot of like, you know, independent journalists were loud, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on. And none of them really had massive platforms. And we weren’t in the era of the Internet we are in today yet. And so it was enough to just kind of sweep it under the rug.

And they never had to like, build some big complex alternative narrative and flood the zone and have shills kind of doing—and Charlie’s is just a different thing. And it’s like, each time, like with COVID we got our own slice of what is weird going on. Here with Vegas, we got our own slice of like a cover-up, right? Different suspicious crimes that aren’t explained, require different cover-ups.

And it’s like everyone has their own opinion about what’s going on with Charlie. I have mine for sure, but the people are getting wise to this “it’s not adding up” thing. Like it shouldn’t be a mystery. Like when you have a regular crime in your town and you get a regular sheriff to come and explain the crime and show you the evidence and you get a regular court trial about it. I don’t think that’s usually like some grand mystery of like, “I think that the local sheriff is covering up the fact that this robbery happened.”

It’s like, no, it’s just like you’ve got evidence, you’ve got photos, you’ve got—it is what it is. But there’s these certain moments in history where not because everyone’s wanting everything to always be this way, but because sometimes the facts don’t line up. Like they just don’t line up with what we’re told at all. And Vegas is one of the most intensely powerful, tragic, violent and deadly of all of them. And it’s one of the ones where the facts line up less than any other.

TUCKER CARLSON: I totally agree.

IAN CARROLL: It’s one of the most interesting.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m actually shocked by this conversation as someone with like a passing familiarity with that I thought, but I just didn’t realize how absurd the story is. Like, it’s absurd.

Open Source Evidence

IAN CARROLL: And the crazy part is how much there actually is right there, open source, like just vegasshootingmap.com that I was telling you about. Just that one webpage has just hours and hours and hours of stuff that immediately disprove the mainstream narrative. Well, that’s COVID.

The Rise of a Digital Truth-Seeker

TUCKER CARLSON: It was all there. I mean, vaccinated people you knew got Covid. I mean, what I remember this was happening. Not that I knew a lot of vaccinated people I tried not to spend time with. I was always uncomfortable around the vaccinated. But I did know some and they all had Covid. And I’m like, this is clearly a lie.

And then every day you’d be. They never got over, can I still have Covid? But then you’d watch on TV, safe and effective. You can’t get Covid. It’s like, how can they say that? I just sat like a dog with my jaw open. Like, is this, I’m watching this.

So I got to ask you one last question. So I’ve never seen anybody. It’s about you. I’ve never seen anybody sort of come to prominence faster ever in our world. And that’s led to a lot of speculation that you’re a CIA officer in disguise.

IAN CARROLL: Or I’m like Mossad.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I hadn’t even seen that. But yeah, probably Mossad, I guess. And so I, you know, my personal explanation is an amazing explainer and a diligent researcher, and you’re really interested in what’s true. And those are the three qualities that make a successful person in our world.

However, it’s worth asking, like, how the hell did you get so famous so fast? Where did you come from? And how did you decide to do this?

From Kitchen Line Cook to Digital Investigator

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, I’ve told this story a few different times, but I’ll never get used to it. It’s wild, it’s bizarre to go from the life I had three years ago to the life I live right now. But it was a combination of luck and skill and timing, I think, as far as I can tell, in that I did study the social media landscape to try to figure out how to get into it, because I wanted to get into it.

At first I thought I was going to get into it with Ultra Running content because I thought you need to do something unique that’s really special. And I thought, well, Ultra Running is cool and unique, but ultimately that’s not. That’s this weird ego mindset. That is not the way to do anything in life, least of all beyond the Internet.

And so in doing that for about a year—

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you explain what that means?

IAN CARROLL: Just that there’s a lot of dudes, especially women, have the same problem, but it presents differently. There’s a lot of dudes with ego on the Internet trying to show off how freaking cool they are and you should subscribe because they’re cool. And that is a hollow reason to follow someone.

And it’s a hollow way to build an audience and it’s a hollow way to build your platform, your job and your life. Because inherently it’s a dog eat dog world where everyone is just out for themselves. Right. It’s a world where everyone that’s doing it for those reasons is just going to try to do what’s going to make them look the coolest and be the best.

And inherently you’re not the coolest.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, exactly.

IAN CARROLL: You’re not the coolest. You’re just a dude. We’re all kind of absurd, actually, unfortunately, by the time I was kind of. Because I had worked in kitchens, I’d worked in education and teaching, I’d worked I’d traveled and done travel work. I’d done all sorts of stuff throughout my life.

And by the time in my early 30s, I was kind of wanting to get into this largely because of COVID because I was like, f*, working in kitchens. I’m done with that. And I used to be doing kitchens, line cooking, kitchen managing. I love cooking on the line, so cooking everything from breakfast cooking to pizza to fine dining.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you a good cook?

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, yeah, really good cook. I mean, I’ve got eight or nine years of experience cooking all sorts of different genres. Some really amazing coworkers and chef, actually. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I worked at a hand thrown pizza place for a long time and I—

TUCKER CARLSON: How’d you stay so thin?

IAN CARROLL: I have Crohn’s disease. Oh, yeah. And so it’s that then that’s actually where the ultra running was. A really interesting thing is that for me, nutrition and health and food has always, ever since I figured out what was going on with my health, nutrition, health and food has been a huge part of my life. Getting right.

I had no choice, thank God, because then once I got my health right, I was like, whoa, it feels amazing to feel regular and amazing. And then I just dove into fitness and running and all these things.

And so by the time I had kind of COVID had clearly woken me up to, I don’t want a dead end job and I don’t want to work in kitchens and I don’t want to live this life anymore. And I used to be a teacher. I was raised by teachers. I’m supposed to be, my spark is for learning and for sharing learning. Because teaching is not really teaching. Teaching is sharing the experience of learning.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly right.

IAN CARROLL: It’s sharing the spark. And I know that. And I knew that. And so. And I knew that learning happens where people pay attention, not where teachers tell people to pay attention.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

IAN CARROLL: And so if you really want to change or inspire kids or teach kids, you got to be where they’re looking. Which is in here.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

The Pivot to Truth-Seeking Content

IAN CARROLL: Right. And I knew that four years ago when I had kind of stopped my last teaching gig. I guess it was three. But I was scared to take the leap. And somewhere during COVID eventually it was just, whatever I’m into, fine, let’s start.

And I started in running content, but it was just, it was wrong. And I knew it was wrong, but I learned a lot. And I studied the industry while I was doing it. And then eventually I shut that down. I was, because if you’re going to do this, it’s going to be your day job. Right.

And so if my day job is to make ultra running content and look really, be really cool and stuff, then I have to go on an adventure every week. I have to go do some new crazy, athletic accomplishment every week to try to be cool on the Internet, which is a horrible, horrible thing to do with your life.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

IAN CARROLL: And it turns all of your fun adventures into work. Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

IAN CARROLL: And it’s a bad business model. If you’re just thinking about a business model and it’s, well, I should be doing information for a million reasons. And I flipped and switched and right away I, I mean I had some skills that were really applicable and I had a lot of luck along the way of people that I met and people that saw my stuff and people that enjoyed my content.

But I had really good timing too, where I started on TikTok, right when the censorship wasn’t too bad and they’re pushing longer videos. Then I got onto X right as Diddy was happening and then Candace found my Diddy reporting and kind of boosted me there.

And then I got into. I intentionally got onto YouTube after Trump was elected so that I wouldn’t be throttled by old YouTube policies. At least that was my theory. So I’ve had a mixture of factors, but ultimately, I don’t know, man, it’s been crazy. It’s been a wild ride.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I mean, you went from anonymous to famous faster than it was.

IAN CARROLL: Uncomfortable. Yeah, it’s the kind of thing where fortunately I don’t have, I can only imagine if you had some weird f*ed up life in your past and then suddenly you are famous and you’re, oh gosh. Because fortunately I was just a hippie that ran around in the woods and had taught kids and it’s cool. Whatever. I’m perfectly proud of my life. I have no issue.

TUCKER CARLSON: No felony record or anything.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, exactly. Nothing. No criminal record, Nothing crazy. And it, and it’s. But it still is a weird shift of how your privacy is. What does your family think? How do you kind of keep your family safe from the public eye in general too? It’s just a crazy transition.

And it’s crazy to transition from being able to say whatever I wanted when I was first starting because the whole point was to just do. I started the first TikTok account called “Cancel This Clothing Company.” As in cancel me. I’m going to say some crazy shit. I’m just a conspiracy theorist. I’m just going to do tinfoil.

But I was always actually just trying to do evidence based, trying to figure out what the hell is going on out here. And I knew that you need permission in yourself to go anywhere in order to figure it out. It’s growing up on 9/11, it’s, well, what the hell happened there?

And it really teaches you, you have to be willing to listen to crazy theories and digest crazy ideas, and maybe they’re not true, but you got to make sure they’re not. And so I had thought that I had started this whole thing just kind of saying whatever I wanted, doing whatever I wanted.

And as I kind of grew really, really fast, it’s, holy shit, there’s a lot of weight and gravity in what we do here.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sure.

Balancing Authenticity with Responsibility

IAN CARROLL: And it is. And we are in a really charged and important time. And I try to hold both those truths at once. Now somehow so important, because you can’t acquiesce to the gravity of the situation and then stiffen up and become calcified and just stay within your lines and be careful all the time.

Because sometimes you have to say audacious things, and sometimes unbelievable things are what’s really happening.

TUCKER CARLSON: You have certainly to think audacious things. And if you don’t, if you don’t allow yourself, if you live, you know, in a mental prison, you’re going to miss things.

IAN CARROLL: And you got to stay authentic too. If you let you know the scope of the task or the scope of the audience or whatever limits you and constrain you, suddenly you’re not authentic. You’re not doing what you’re really doing. But also you got to be careful to not, you know, be authentic in a way that you will regret.

Which I actually love. My favorite thing about this industry and about this world, this job, is that social media in general. And I think I’m a huge proponent that other people start making things online. Not everyone should, but there’s a lot of people that are just scared to start, but they’re on Twitter, anonymously contributing to the conversation.

I’m, dude, make a video. It’s way easier for us to interact with you. It’s way easier for us to understand you. And the reason why I think this industry is so wonderful is because it’s sort of the. It’s your whole human self is here in this because you’re communicating things.

You’re not just communicating facts and information of it like a journalist. You’re also communicating how to live, how to be. Who are you? What’s going on here? What do you believe? Right. People choose what conversations to be a part of.

But ultimately, who you are while you do this journey is immensely connected to how good you are at the job.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, absolutely.

IAN CARROLL: And how well you convey your messaging.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, absolutely.

IAN CARROLL: How well you sort of figure out the facts and so. And you can go anywhere you want. I’ve set up my platform in a way where I can go make running content if I want, or I can go to a burger joint and eat a burger and support a family owned burger restaurant.

It’s I just launched an app that’ll let me support family and founder own businesses and stuff. And it’s, I can do anything I want here. And the only limiting factor is if I’m whole and healthy and happy and true to myself, and there’s really no other job like that.

Teaching is kind of like that. And that how you show up in the classroom is you’re doing this full human experience with other humans, interfacing with them. And that’s one of the coolest things about teaching. And in some ways this is very similar. But making pizzas isn’t like that. You know, delivering food isn’t like that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve done them both.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, it’s fun. And I highly recommend that everyone do some honest, real restaurant work, blue collar work, construction work, all that kind of stuff. It’s so freaking good.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I was forced to do it, but I just. On principle.

IAN CARROLL: You know, growing up, I was a pizza delivery boy.

TUCKER CARLSON: I was a factory worker.

IAN CARROLL: Yeah, I had a lot of fun.

TUCKER CARLSON: At a gas station. Yeah, dishwasher. But no, I completely agree with that. So where will you be sort of starting research next?

IAN CARROLL: I am pretty dedicated to sticking with the Charlie thing for a while until we figure it out. But it’s. But that’s not your question, but.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that is my question. I mean, so that’s where your energy is focused right now.

Final Thoughts on Current Investigations

IAN CARROLL: I firmly, firmly believe that. Here’s my perspective and my bias just to qualify what I said before. I’m sure people already know this, but I believe that what happened there was not what we were told.

And just like, as with Las Vegas, the moment that what you’re told is not true, a million other things immediately come into play because why the f* are you lying about it? And then like, why is—so what is this? Because suddenly if it’s even slightly not true, we’re looking at a cover up. Plus we’re looking at a different perpetrator. We’re looking at something else here.

And so when I look at Charlie Kirk’s murder, I see what looks like a cover up and I see that that’s not true for many reasons. But then I can’t square any other version of the story that is not one of the most important political moments in our time right now in terms of the political factions involved, in terms of the shifting geopolitical relationships in the world, in terms of what’s going to be happening to my people in America today and now in like the unity or disunity that we might experience over the next 10 years here and beyond.

And so when I think about what’s the most important story that I can devote my time to figuring out right now to hopefully ensure a better America for my children to grow up in, it’s Charlie Kirk. And I don’t know—I don’t really believe that we’re really going to ever get an answer, which is unfortunately a hallmark of these types of things. But I’m damn well going to spend my time to try.

And that doesn’t mean I’m going to exclude everything else. Like, for example, I’m actually now that you kind of brought this Vegas shooting back up, I’ve gotten inspired where I want to go back and learn a shitload more about that and kind of dig even deeper and get more familiar with that because that will inform the other thing and then that will inform the other thing.

So I’m very much focused on what happened to Charlie Kirk and watching this trial play out and watching the spider webbing branches of that play out. But I’m also trying to shift back to—I would mention this—I’m shifting back to focus on corporate corruption in America as well.

Because in a lot of ways, like the big tin foily, like 9/11 kind of things, they’re fun, but like how your food is being poisoned and how the corporations are being incentivized to basically shit all over us and take all of our money—like those sorts of things affect our day to day lives, right? Private equity affects real people every day in America. So that’s a very much more grounded thing that I’m trying to focus on.

And then the other thing is, well, actually I shouldn’t really talk about that story yet, but I have a friend that is on a story that is kind of like a financial thing that we’ll look into later. So.

Closing Remarks

TUCKER CARLSON: Ian Carroll, thank you for spending all this time.

IAN CARROLL: It’s been a pleasure, man. I feel like we could have talked about it.

TUCKER CARLSON: I was about to say I’ve been a longtime fan, but you’ve only been here three years. But I am a fan, and I think you’re brave and really interesting and trustworthy. So thank you.

IAN CARROLL: It was an honor. Thanks.

Related Posts

• Scott Ritter: Full-Scale War as Iran Attacks All U.S. Targets (Transcript)
• Seyed M. Marandi: Israel & U.S. Launch Surprise Attack on Iran (Transcript)
• Joe Rogan Podcast: #2461 w/ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Transcript)
• Tucker Carlson Show: w/ Catherine Fitts on Control Grid, Banks’ Role in War (Transcript)
• Megyn Kelly Show: w/ Tucker Carlson on Epstein, Iran, America’s Gender Divide (Transcript)