YouTube personality and alt-right sympathizer James Allsup, who uses his platforms to cater to white nationalist and white identity politics, reacted alongside other alt-right figures to news of the mass shooting in Las Vegas last night by floating conspiracy theories and attacks on the shooter’s immigrant wife.
Fifty people were killed and hundreds were injured after a gunman, identified as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, fired an automatic assault weapon into a large crowd at a country music concert off the Las Vegas strip. After police identified the shooter as an older white man, Allsup began ginning up possible conspiracy theories.
First, Allsup theorized that the mass shooting was “professional work” and not the act of a “lone wolf” attacker, despite reporting at the time from Las Vegas police:
Then, Allsup told his followers to be skeptical of media and government reporting about details of the incident. “If Steven Paddock, has no family, no friends, no professional acquaintances, little social media, watch out,” Allsup warned:
And most recently, Allsup threaded his skepticism into his existing conspiracies about corporate media’s disdain for white people and used the attack to further his anti-immigrant rhetoric:
Allsup’s conspiracy theories and immigrant smears align with his allies among the Alt-Right. Matt Colligan, who identifies as “Millennial Matt” online and also attended the Unite the Right rally earlier this year, shared a video in which a man claims gunshots fired at the Las Vegas crowd were “fake”:
Vincent Law, writer for white nationalist Richard Spencer’s AltRight.com, questioned whether the shooter’s “love for diversity in his bed” motivated him to carry out the mass shooting:
Did Paddock’s love for diversity in his bed make him a more tolerant and happy person, free of hate? Or did it motivate him to shoot up an overwhelmingly White concert?
As of now, the shooter seems to be a fuckin’ white male with an Indonesian girlfriend who shot down on a crowd of 22,000 country music festival attendees from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. To be more specific, the shooter was a 64-year-old, possibly lefty Boomer with a Muslim girlfriend.
And former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke blamed the “sick, bloodlust, twisted, sadistic, ZioWood Culture” he believes has replaced “our values,” referring here to white people, for the shooting:
