Christian Fundamentalist Believes Gay Nazi Death Squads Were Responsible for Las Vegas Shooting

End times evangelist Rick Wiles thinks he knows who was really behind the Las Vegas shooting: LGBTQ people.

Wiles claimed during a Thursday broadcast of his TruNews radio program that the Oct. 1 tragedy, which resulted in the death of 59 people, was caused by secret “death squads” controlled by a “gay/lesbian Nazi regime.”

How does he know this? Because the security guard who stopped the gunman appeared on Ellen.

Jesus Campos, an officer patrolling the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, was the first to apprehend 64-year-old Stephen Paddock as he fired on a crowd of concertgoers attending a three-day country music festival. Paddock had at least 47 firearms stashed in a hotel room on resort’s 32nd floor.

Wiles believes that the only reason that Campos appeared on Degeneres’ daytime program on Oct. 18 to discuss his heroic actions is because he might “spill the beans about the shooting timeline” if interviewed by a “real” journalist.

To translate: Because Degeneres is a lesbian, she won’t expose the gay conspiracy behind the shooting.

“I stand by my claim that this country has death squads,” Wiles said. “We have death squads in this country and it’s being run by a super secret agency, but there is participation at the state and local level. There will be a day that they tell law enforcement [officers] to execute your children right in front of you and they will do it.”

“America has become a Nazi state,” he continued. “The deep state is a Nazi state.”

Wiles, returning to a frequent talking point, further claimed that the Third Reich “was a militant homosexual fascist takeover.” He alleged that Hitler was “bisexual” and that the top leaders in the Nazi Party were gay men.

“That is what is taking place in America today,” Wiles said.

The claim that German fascism was a homosexual movement is patently untrue, especially given that gay men were among the minority populations sent off to the concentration camps. But this allegation has been propagated by numerous figures on the far right, including Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association.

But the Las Vegas shooting, which surpassed Pulse as the deadliest massacre in U.S. history, isn’t the first tragedy that Wiles has blamed on the LGBTQ community.

After the record devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey killed 77 people, Wiles said that the August storm was God punishing Houston for electing a lesbian mayor, Annise Parker. Parker, who stepped down in 2016, presided over the Texas town during the successful campaign to repeal the city’s LGBTQ inclusive nondiscrimination ordinance. Critics cited a debunked claim that the policy would allow trans people to target children in the bathroom.

“Here’s a city that has boasted of its LGBTQ devotion, its affinity for the sexual perversion movement in America,” the conspiracy theorist claimed. “They’re underwater.”

Wiles, though, has a long track record of saying absurd things about LGBTQ people.

The right-wing fundamentalist has said that the legalization of marriage equality would result in God sending a “fireball from space” to destroy earth and that Russia would nuke the United States over its support for LGBTQ rights. He also believes that gay people havecaused the widespread death of bees and are responsible for the massive droughts in California.