Tucker Carlson pushes conspiracy theories on Las Vegas mass shooting – By Taylor Link (salon.com) / Oct 26 2017
A perplexed Tucker Carlson insisted Wednesday that there were unanswered questions about the Las Vegas shooting that took place earlier this month. But his inquiry has nothing to do with the white shooter — Stephen Paddock — who killed 59 concert goers and injured 546 people. No, instead, Carlson had questions about Jesus Campos, the security guard who allegedly confronted Paddock on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay just before the massacre.
Carlson began a segment on his Fox News program, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” by fueling a conspiracy theory that Campos was somehow involved with the shooting. He pointed to a trip Campos took to Mexico as a shady chapter to the overall story.
“We received this document from a confidential source this afternoon. It’s a Customs and Border Patrol form, and it shows that Jesus Campos entered the United States from Mexico at the San Ysidro border crossing in San Diego county almost exactly, to the hour, one week after the Las Vegas shooting at the beginning of October,” Carlson said.
Carlson apparently has had producers of his show look into Campos, and they found that he had traveled to Mexico once with his own vehicle in January and then “what appears to be a rental car with California plates” in October. This somehow implicated Campos in some serious wrongdoing.
“This information raises a number of questions about the Las Vegas investigation and the crime itself,” Carlson said. “Jesus Campos is the only eyewitness to the biggest mass shooting in modern American history. At the time he was in Mexico, the press was reporting that investigators thought Paddock, Stephen Paddock may have had an accomplice in these killings. Why did authorities allow Campos to leave the country just days after the shooting, while the investigation was still chaotic and of course ongoing? How did Campos, who reportedly had a gunshot wound to the leg from a high-powered rifle round, manage to travel to Mexico?”
Carlson said his team tried to find out if Campos was a licensed security guard in the state of Nevada, since little is known about him.
One of Carlson’s producers called the Clark County Sheriff’s Office to find out what a person needed in order to be employed as a security guard in the state. Carlson said the agent was cagey and hung up on his producer.
The whole segment Wednesday was rank of paranoia and further demonstrated Carlson’s ability to target a person of color in a story about the evils of old white men. This was just par for the course for Carlson, who has been called a pundit who has “white nationalist leanings.”
PB/TK – Of course Campos should be under conspiracy, err I mean suspicion there was a lot of time between getting shot and calling for help to be questioned. But the biggest issue was that he told his story to Ellen and not a prominent political talking head who would use it for political purpose later on.
