The Tucker Carlson Show
Ian Carroll on America’s Deadliest Mass Shooting and Unanswered Questions They Don’t Want You to Ask
02 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What are the key facts about the Las Vegas shooting?
Ian Carroll, I have wanted to meet you. I'm grateful you're here. Thank you. Thanks, man. So I just want to understand one story. I want to know what we know about the biggest mass shooting in American history in Las Vegas, 2017. I spent a full year looking into it, got nowhere, other than increasingly skeptical of the story we were told. But I really don't. There's a lot I don't know.
So will you lay out what we do know?
Yeah. I mean, first, the most important thing to highlight is that I'd bet that a lot of people, when you started that sentence, don't know what the most deadly mass shooting in American history is. Because I think that most Americans have forgotten about the Las Vegas shooting because it just got...
poofed right out of the news after like a week, and they just never brought it up again, basically. And then there was actually disinformation poured in to try to stop journalists and investigators and regular citizens from uncovering basic truths, from getting basic disclosure. Can you be specific?
Chapter 2: What suspicious events occurred regarding witness testimonies?
What does that mean, disinformation poured in? Well, I think we'll get there in the story. Sure. But before we start the story, it's important to give myself context in that I wasn't there and I wasn't researching at the time.
And so the actual work of what we do know was done by a bunch of citizen journalists, a bunch of really incredible researchers at the time, which I'm going to try to kind of shout out as we go through it. because I didn't do any of the original research. I came in long after the fact and did my research and found all of their work. Well, you have a talent for synthesizing.
I mean, that's what I try to do is I'm good at getting eyes on stories.
Chapter 3: What details surround Stephen Paddock's actions leading up to the shooting?
And a lot of the best researchers and journalists are just good at the information. itself, that's the journalism. And we kind of need these different people in these different lanes to sort of help each other out and work together in order to get the story done, but then also get it out to as many people as possible.
And this one is so important as I think we'll talk through here, not just in that it's the most deadly mass shooting in American history, but in that it has very direct political and geopolitical implications for what's happening today on the world stage, depending what theory you subscribe to about what really happened. But
The basics of what happened is we're told that Steven Paddock, this disgruntled 60-something real estate guy, ex-gun guy, thought he was a hotshot but was failing at life, and he...
was slipping in his mental health he had a gambling problem and you know all these little explanations they kind of give after the fact and he wound up going to las vegas um and there's so many places here where i'm going to have to sort of say first they told us this and then they told us this and then they told us this and first they said he checked into the hotel the day before the shooting um but it was later revised because it was obvious that he had checked in uh like five or six days before the shooting on the 25th of september
And he checks in and over a series of days, he lugs up, I think, 22 bags of weapons and ammunition to his hotel room, suite 32135. He had two suites, 32135 and 32136 that were adjoining. And he rents it alone with no one else on the room, though we later learned that that wasn't true. And he stocks it with all these weapons, which were mostly all AR platforms with bump stocks.
Very important that you know they were bump stocks because that's evil and makes no sense.
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Chapter 4: How did the police response unfold during and after the shooting?
And then there's this country music concert on October 1st down outside of the Mandalay Bay across the street in this big parking lot. with thousands of attendees. And we'll kind of circle back to this endlessly, I think, as we unpack what really happened and what people really discovered about it.
But there's some stuff with the security guard that gets an alert about the doors or about what's going on in the room. And he winds up up there and gets shot at through the doors. And initially, we were told that that happened
after the shooting then it was revised to before then it was during the shooting so there's some security guard stuff in the hallway but what the public found like experienced was there at this jason aldean concert and at 1005 in the evening a couple of distinct pops ring out over the concert that we have on on footage we have footage of all sorts of shit around this story and you can hear the pops individual like pop
pop pop pop kind of things and then about a minute later at uh 1006 automatic gunfire just starts cracking in the night and people start to run they start to scatter uh 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 like from right there at the stage um
by the second volley which came a little less than a minute later jason aldean realizes he gets pulled off stage and everyone's scattering and then over the course of about nine ten to nine to ten minutes twelve volleys of automatic gunfire uh ring out in the night and are captured on body cams they're captured on cell phone videos they're captured on you know various recordings and you can hear them all across the las vegas strip
And then the official story is that Steven Paddock barricaded in his room up on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay, who 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. um 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. In the meantime, the concert's tripping out.
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Chapter 5: What is the involvement of Saudi Arabia in the Las Vegas shooting?
Overwhelming majority, yeah. 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 like the CIA's analysis, post-mortem 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. 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
And 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
And so these hardliners, these brother kings, there's this divide that emerges in more recent times with King Solomon and his son, Muhammad bin Salman, right? 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. Mohammed bin Salman especially.
But King Salman has been very much more progressive. And Mohammed bin Salman is very much like he wants to give women's rights. And he's like 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... From the hardliners' perspective, you're destroying the faith.
You're destroying the nation.
You're destroying the kingdom. In the regional context, he's been radical for sure.
And 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. Yeah.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of the changes in Saudi leadership after the shooting?
nephew i believe it is i believe it was his cousin i think that's correct 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 uh and it has this history growing of political violence and of infighting for the throne vying for this high stakes stuff yeah for 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 like one hour long podcasts and sort of exposes 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 secession had just shifted bin salman king salman not muhammad bin salman king salman was on the throne he took the throne uh what was it in 2015 i believe
Yeah, 2015, Solomon takes the throne. And he changes the succession. I believe it was earlier in 2017. It was like maybe six months or so before the Vegas shooting. And he changes it from one of these hardliner guys to his son, 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...
the jurisdiction of their like defense department sort of which he's the head of um 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 like 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 uh 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, you know, 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.
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Chapter 7: How did the Las Vegas shooting relate to broader geopolitical tensions?
Al-Waleed bin Talal, one of the richest of all of the Saudi princes. He's like, 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 like co-operate 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...
There are people with legitimate terroristic ideologies in those factions. And they're very opposed to MBS. They're very opposed to MBS. To them, it's an existential threat. And they're not quiet about that. They have been talking about that for 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, you know, 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.
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Chapter 8: What are the unanswered questions surrounding the Las Vegas shooting?
and then we have this window of lack of information of where was mbs at the time and we don't know we 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 uh his son kbs is kbs his son or his brother khalid bin salman he was the ambassador to america yeah i think he's his 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.
But right after this mass shooting happens and whatever the hell it was, bin Salman goes on this mission what was called the Saudi perch. And it includes the night of a thousand swords is this like kind of mythical night where he, he, my understanding is that he invites all of the crown princes in for something like, it was like, what was it?
They were going to, um, unveil something or he had this like weird event planned. Oh, it was that they were going to give, um, a 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 like, 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. The Ritz-Carlton. And it totaled up to almost $200 billion confirmed that he has seized from all these different people over this year or two timeframe here after the shooting. A couple of them die in mysterious things like helicopter crashes.
Some of them are... So, for example, there's this... I guess it's a story, but it's 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-Walid 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
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