#87 Las Vegas, Charlie Kirk, Trump · And the Questions That Stopped Getting Asked

The deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history didn’t fade because it was resolved.

It faded because asking questions became unwelcome.

In this episode of Think First, we revisit the 2017 Las Vegas shooting — not to advance a theory, but to examine what happens when explanations arrive quickly… and then stop evolving.

Drawing on a recent long-form interview between Tucker Carlson and researcher Ian Carroll, we explore how narratives stabilize, why timelines shift, and what it means when transparency pauses instead of progresses.

Along the way, we consider parallels to more recent events — including the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the murder of Charlie Kirk in Orem, Utah — where public clarity never fully arrived.

This episode isn’t about telling you what to believe.

It’s about modeling how to sit with unanswered questions — calmly, carefully, and without rushing to conclusions.

Chapters

• 0:06 Chaos On The Strip
• 2:00 Setting The Inquiry
• 3:18 Official Story Vs Lived Experience
• 5:15 Airport And Strip Anomalies
• 6:53 Method Over Conclusions
• 9:27 Revisions That Bend The Story
• 10:41 Timelines, Bodycams, And Omitted Helicopters
• 12:28 Inside The Breach And Missing SWAT
• 14:19 Motive, Pressure, And A Geopolitical Hypothesis
• 16:03 Grief, Memory, And The Human Cost
• 18:03 The Questions We’re Told Not To Ask
• 19:37 Silence, Overlaps, And Unsettling Facts

Transcript

SPEAKER_06: 0:06

What sounded like automatic gunfire ranning out late Sunday night, the bullets spraying into a crowd of roughly 22,000 concertgoers on the Las Vegas Strip. These videos captured the chaos unfolding on the ground. There was confusion about where the bullets were coming from, or even if they were bullets. Some were frozen in panic, others fled for their lives.

SPEAKER_05: 0:36

And all of a sudden we heard countless of times. And we all thought it was firecrackers. And then it kept on going, and then he fied for a bit, and then he fired another 15-20 rounds, and that's when he realized it was a fully automatic. Police say the gunshots came from above.

SPEAKER_07: 0:55

We are um still going through the uh search warrant actively at this time, um, but it's in excess of 10 rifles.

SPEAKER_06: 1:03

The suspect is now dead, and authorities are still trying to piece together the scope of the carnage.

SPEAKER_04: 1:08

Right now, we need your truck.

SPEAKER_06: 1:10

We just need to get people over to the hospital, okay? The injured were scattered all along the Las Vegas strip. Bystanders tried to get those hit by gunfire to the hospital any way they could.

SPEAKER_01: 1:21

Some were falling and some were screaming and yelling and running, so everyone was just like literally laying on top of each other trying to get out of the way.

Jim Detjen: 1:57

I just listened to a long interview that left a lot of things unsettled. Tucker Carlson, sitting across from independent researcher Ian Carroll. No shouting, no verdicts, just documents, timelines, and one problem Carroll says never resolves cleanly. So today, we're going there. This is Think First, where we don't follow the script. We question it. Because in a world full of poetic truths and professional gaslighting, someone's gotta say the quiet part out loud. Las Vegas, a country music concert, gunfire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay. The explanation arrived quickly. A lone gunman. Steven Paddock. No accomplices, no motive, no manifesto. Authorities say he fired for several minutes, then stopped, then killed himself. That explanation was treated as complete, not debated, not reconstructed publicly, just finalized.

SPEAKER_11: 3:10

I want to know what we know about the biggest mass shooting in American history.

SPEAKER_12: 3:17

The official story is that Stephen Paddock, barricaded in his room up on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay, shot more than a thousand rounds from that room, and just committed suicide with no motive, no manifesto, no explanation of why. But everyone that had been there had experienced something completely different than that. Some of these machine guns are in different locations while they're simultaneously firing, just from the way they sound. Like an hour and a half after this guy's allegedly shot himself in the head. We have at least nine different police body camps. All of them in different locations around the strip record like seven to five volleys of automatic gunfire. Basically, something is happening at almost every casino on the strip. Then there's stuff that happens at the airport. At 1035, air traffic control says we have an active shooter on the runway. The runway? On the runway. Someone comes onto that radio call and says, I want you to kill the lights on this runway and that runway.

SPEAKER_11: 4:12

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

SPEAKER_12: 4:18

Well, the only 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.

Jim Detjen: 4:29

Ian Carroll doesn't begin with theories, he begins with memory. Most Americans, he notes, no longer remember that this was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. That's not an emotional observation. It's a structural one, because events of this scale usually stabilize into a shared explanation. According to Carroll, this one never did. It simply went quiet. Before we get into specifics, listen to how Ian Carroll thinks about inquiry itself, not conclusions, but process.

SPEAKER_11: 5:02

So I, you know, uh my personal explanation is you're just 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.

SPEAKER_12: 5:16

I used to be a teacher. I was raised by teachers. I'm supposed to be like my spark is for learning and for like sharing learning. Because teaching is not really teaching, teaching is sharing the experience of learning. Exactly. Right? It's the sharing the spark. And 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. Exactly. And so if you really want to change or inspire kids or like teach kids, you got to be where they're looking, which is in here.

SPEAKER_11: 5:42

Yes.

SPEAKER_12: 5:42

Right. And I knew that four years ago when I had kind of stopped my last teaching gig. I guess it was like three. Um, but I was scared to take the leap. And somewhere during COVID, eventually it was just like, whatever I'm into. 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 like growing up on 9-11, it's like, well, what the hell happened there? And and it really teaches you you have to be willing to like listen to crazy theories and digest crazy ideas. And of course, maybe they're not true, but you got to make sure they're not. And so I had thought that like 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 like, holy shit, there's a lot of weight and gravity in what we do here. 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 like acquiesce to the gravity of the situation and then like stiffen up and become like calcified and just and just stay within your lines and be careful all the time. Because sometimes you have to say audacious things, and sometimes like sometimes unbelievable things are what's really happening.

SPEAKER_11: 6:53

You have to certainly think audacious things. Exactly. And if you don't, if you don't allow yourself, if you live you know, in a mental prison, you're you know you're gonna miss things.

Jim Detjen: 7:06

As Carol walks through the public record, something subtle happens. The story doesn't collapse, it bends. Early timelines are revised, key moments shift, the actions of a hotel security guard are redescribed more than once. Carroll's point isn't that revisions exist, it's why they exist. When new facts force clarity, revisions usually tighten a story. According to Carroll, these revisions exist because earlier versions stopped working. This is where the interview becomes uncomfortable, not sensational. Carroll points to police body camera audio that he believes captures sustained gunfire well after authorities say Paddock was dead. He references 911 calls logged from locations far from Mandalay Bay, including the Bellaggio, the Mirage, and the Tropicana, occurring well after the official timeline says the shooting had ended. He also cites air traffic control audio in which pilots report an active shooter near the airport. These aren't rumors, they're artifacts in the public record. Carroll's argument is that none of them are meaningfully reconciled in the official explanation. Carroll also highlights flight tracking anomalies. Aircraft appear, disappear, and later reappear over restricted airspace. He interprets some of these anomalies as helicopters. The official reports do not address helicopter activity at all. No denial, no explanation, no acknowledgement, just omission. That absence becomes part of Carroll's case. This next moment isn't about Las Vegas specifically, it's about how real explanations behave.

SPEAKER_12: 8:49

Some of them might be in 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? Yes, when you know the real explanation, everything fits. Um and it can be bizarre, it can be anomalous sometimes, but it has to be that that real explanation will suddenly click into place.

Jim Detjen: 9:19

In other words, the facts have to drive the explanation rather than the explanation driving the Carroll and Carlson spend time on the breach footage, the hotel room from which over a thousand rounds were allegedly fired. When officers enter, they appear to search for expected damage and hesitate. According to Carroll, they don't step over shell casings. They don't immediately identify shattered windows. They seem uncertain that the scene matches the story they were briefed on. Then, there's the adjoining suite. Both rooms were bolted from the inside. No official explanation has been offered publicly for how that configuration fits the lone gunman narrative. Not rebutted, not clarified, just left unresolved. Las Vegas maintains one of the largest SWAT operations in the country. Yet the breach team consisted of a single SWAT officer alongside non-SWAT personnel. According to Carroll, several responding officers' body cameras were either turned off or never released. Only one continuous recording from the breach is publicly available. Carroll keeps returning to a simple operational question. One he says has never been answered publicly. Where was SWAT? Listen to where the pressure goes and where it doesn't.

SPEAKER_11: 10:44

Here's what I don't understand. There's been an enormous amount of rage. Like I get it. Exactly. And there's no pressure on them. Even the question of motive, like again.

Jim Detjen: 11:13

The interview does explore a theory, a geopolitical one, involving Saudi internal power struggles and US Saudi relations at the time. You don't have to accept that theory. Carroll doesn't ask you to. Carlson doesn't insist on it. The value of the theory isn't that it's proven true. It's that, according to Carroll, it attempts to explain all the evidence at once. The official story does not. No comprehensive surveillance release, no public federal reconstruction, no moment where authorities say, here's how all of this fits together. Just an expectation that everyone move on. That's not an accusation. It's an observation. And it's a pattern that shows up elsewhere. Something I explore more fully in distorted. It's also worth hearing how Carol holds the human cost alongside the investigation.

SPEAKER_12: 12:11

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 it's a real tragedy. And it's easy to get into conspiracy land only with it. Um, 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 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 a bun 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, 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 and that's where it really hits home, where it's like, you need you need an explanation that it that explains why something so evil would happen.

Jim Detjen: 13:39

60 people died, hundreds were wounded, and the questions didn't disappear. They were discouraged. So maybe the right place to sit isn't with a theory, but with a few honest questions. What evidence would authorities have to release for you to feel genuinely confident the story is complete? And why hasn't that happened here? If the official explanation were solid, why did it require so many revisions? And why did those revisions stop so abruptly? Why do some events generate years of investigation and transparency while others seem to close themselves? And why does the lived experience of so many witnesses diverge so sharply from the final narrative? You don't need all the answers, but you should question the ones you're handed. Until next time, stay skeptical, stay curious, and always think first. One of the strangest things about Las Vegas isn't any single unanswered question. It's how quickly everyone agreed to stop asking them. Not angrily, not through censorship, just socially. Because once curiosity starts getting labeled unhelpful, asking questions begins to feel impolite. And once curiosity feels impolite, silence doesn't need enforcement. It volunteers. There's also a detail people tend to mention quietly. The Las Vegas Metro Police Department captain, who served as the public face of the Las Vegas response, later became the police chief in Maui and held that role during the devastating 2023 Lahaina fires. That fact doesn't explain anything. It doesn't imply wrongdoing. It doesn't require a theory, it's simply an overlap people notice when major events resolve without satisfying explanations. There's one more documented detail that's even harder to sit with. Reporting after the 2018 Thousand Oaks shooting confirmed that some people who survived the Las Vegas massacre were also inside the borderline bar that night. At least one Las Vegas survivor was killed there. Some survivor accounts, cited at the time by outlets like HuffPost, estimated that dozens of Las Vegas survivors were present, with some placing the number as high as 50 or 60. That doesn't mean there's a connection. It doesn't suggest a pattern. It doesn't explain anything. It's just a fact that feels unsettling when people are already struggling to make sense of events like these. There's a reason conversations like this feel risky. To figure out what's actually going on, you sometimes have to let yourself think audaciously, to entertain explanations that might sound uncomfortable or unfashionable, without committing to them. That doesn't mean believing everything. It means giving yourself permission to examine ideas long enough to rule them out, instead of rejecting them on reflex. Las Vegas isn't the only case where questions quietly outlive the headlines. There are other recent incidents, including the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the killing of Charlie Kirk in Oram, Utah, where public explanations arrived quickly and then largely stopped evolving. We're not drawing conclusions, we're just paying attention to what doesn't get clarified. Anyway, if this episode made you feel slightly annoying for noticing things, that's normal. It usually means you're paying attention. If you want to hear the source material in full, you can download the Tucker Carlson interview titled Ian Carroll on America's Deadliest Mass Shooting and Unanswered Questions They Don't Want You To Ask. No obligation, just primary source, uninterrupted. If you want to see how this story has been explored visually, here's a short trailer from the documentary Eleven Minutes, a Paramount Plus production released in 2022.

SPEAKER_02: 17:59

Vegas was always one of the shows for me that I always look forward to.

SPEAKER_08: 18:03

Welcome back to Route 91. Harvey's finished!

unknown: 18:06

Are we ready to party?

SPEAKER_00: 18:08

October 1st, 2017, I woke up in Vegas. Was the best thing ever.

SPEAKER_02: 18:13

It was like any other day. Crews are out working, getting ready for the show. That was my first country concert. I was excited.

SPEAKER_04: 18:19

I was like, all right, let's do this. It was great. Music sounded great, crowd was pumped. The place was it was just electric. That's when uh the the world changed for us.

SPEAKER_03: 19:06

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

SPEAKER_00: 19:12

I just felt the worst pain of my life. You did not survive cancer to die here tonight.

SPEAKER_12: 19:18

I told her I got her. I've already lost two girls. I'm not losing another one.

SPEAKER_07: 19:26

I just heard lose the only thing keeping me going. I was like, if I'm gonna die, I'm gonna help somebody. I'm leaving. I can't say what made it have to go back in, but it's the right thing to do.

SPEAKER_10: 19:45

We're trained to take the fight to the person.

SPEAKER_11: 19:51

I'm looking at what the heroes did that night. People risking their lives for other people.

SPEAKER_03: 19:57

There's a very heavy weight. That goes with being the storyteller. It's important that people know the truth.

SPEAKER_10: 20:04

I don't think there was any one of us that thought we were coming out the same way that we went in.