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On 12 October 2017, conspiracy trolling network InfoWars and its YouTube-ranting editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had wiped the phones of eye witnesses to the 1 October Las Vegas mass shooting before returning them to their owners. For proof of what one would imagine to be an explosive claim, Watson cited only Facebook posts he had seen: InfoWars has been busily stitching together a cover-up narrative that the FBI and local law enforcement are actively seizing evidence of a second gunman in a far-reaching conspiracy to hide yet another false flag operation (a false flag is conspiracy jargon for a catastrophe engineered by the government; the false flag is often presented as a precursor to taking Americans' guns away, something that has demonstrably not happened over the decades of mass shootings in the United States). David Knight, host of a show on InfoWars called The Real News put it this way in a segment about Las Vegas: We reached out to the FBI and got no response; however, generally speaking, the Bureau does not comment on ongoing investigations. On 10 October 2017, the FBI began returning personal items to the crowd of 22,000 concert goers who had abruptly fled the hail of gunfire ten days earlier — everything from cell phones, to purses, wallets, jewelry, and clothing. The shooter's electronic belongings were taken to the FBI's laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, according to news reports. Whether any of the returned cell phones were damaged or had missing data is unclear. InfoWars blurred out the names of two people who allegedly posted about it, making it impossible to reach out to them. But the FBI didn't wipe witnesses' phones to hide evidence of a second shooter. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD), which is leading the investigation, found no evidence anyone other than Stephen Paddock, 64, of Mesquite, Nevada, shot at the Route 91 Harvest Festival crowd that night before turning the gun on himself. The report cobbled together by Watson — based on no evidence other than the hearsay of a Facebook conversation — was picked up by a swarm of disreputable web sites eager to prove their pet conspiracy theories, including quack health site Natural News and the rabidly anti-Muslim MadWorld News and Geller Report. It was also shared far and wide by individual Facebook users and pages like The Daily Sheeple, which has more than 60,000 fans. Since the deadliest mass shooting in recent American history, in which 58 were killed and hundreds injured, conspiracy theorists have, as usual, cherry-picked bits of information that fit their own narratives. Many have latched on to the fact that during the course of the investigation, details like the timeline of events and Paddock's check-in date at the Mandalay Bay hotel, from which he fired on the crowd, have changed — although Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo and other high-ranking law enforcement officials have already said that should be expected due to large number of people and agencies involved in the incident, from which information had to be collected and organized. As a case in point, apparently dissatisfied with the anticlimactic fact that no motive has yet been ascertained and that Paddock has no currently known ties to foreign terrorist organizations, conservative media personality Ann Coulter wrote for Breitbart.com: In a previous interview about the conspiracy theories surrounding the investigation, LVMPD officer Larry Hadfield told us that no matter what they say about the facts gathered in the course of the official investigation, police can't convince those who are determined to believe their own preferred narrative:
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