Show Notes
“Evil is on the rise in America, and overseas,” says author and talk show host Bill O’Reilly. “Evil is very simple: It’s when one human being hurts another human being on purpose with no remorse.”
Like Charlie Kirk’s killer. Like Vladimir Putin. And about 15 percent of the world’s population, O’Reilly thinks. He came onto The Drill Down to talk about his new bestseller, Confronting Evil: Assessing the Worst of the Worst. The book explores evil, from Caligula and Genghis Khan to Henry VIII, 19th century slave traders, 20th century robber barons. Stalin and Mao. Hitler and Hamas. The Ayatollah Khomeini. The Mexican drug cartels. Collectively, they are directly responsible for the death and misery of hundreds of millions of people. But through their ideas, they all extended evil far beyond themselves.
“Can ideas or ideologies be evil,” host Peter Schweizer asks.
“Yes. I mean, if you believe that Jews should be put in ovens and fried to death, even if you’re not an SS guy doing it, you’re still evil because you subscribe to it,” O’Reilly says. “Sometimes, like with the Persian people, they empowered the Ayatollah Khomeini, and he killed indirectly hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Are all the Persian people evil? No. Some of them are naive, some of them are disinterested.” But the fact remains that if evil is not confronted, it will grow more powerful.
Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers wonder about the eeriness of the timing. Just a day after O’Reilly’s book was published, Vladimir Putin committed an act (flying drones into Polish airspace) that could lead to World War III and conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was murdered on a Utah campus by a sniper radicalized by the far left.
“It really isn’t. I wrote the book because I knew that evil was on the rise, not only in America, but overseas,” he says, likening the situation to the 1930s. “But I believe Putin would use a nuclear device. He’s a psychopath. There’s a real increase in the threat of evil in this world. Thus, the book.”
O’Reilly, who left Fox News seven years ago, has been a friend of President Donald Trump’s for more than 30 years and spoke with him at Yankee Stadium in New York just a few days ago. In June, he was surprised to receive an invitation from the Chinese government to visit Beijing. He tells Schweizer and Eggers why.
“The reason it happened was YouTube. Most social media is banned in China, the Chinese people don’t know what’s going on,” he says. The government watches me on YouTube all the time and they know I have a relationship with the president.”
The Chinese, he thinks, have an “under-siege” mentality that dates all the way back to the Mongol hordes under Genghis Khan, citing the Great Wall as the manifestation of that.
“You have to understand that if you want to deal with them. Xi [Jinping] is not Mao, even though Mao killed 20 million Chinese and his picture is everywhere. What if some American killed 20 million Americans? Do you think his picture would be everywhere? But the Chinese people have no blanking clue,” O’Reilly says.
“Xi is a businessman. That’s why with Trump and Xi, there’s a potential for détente. He is an ideologue, but it’s more of a control mechanism for the Politburo in China,” O’Reilly says. They know they’re not going to make America communist. They [just] want to have a very prosperous country to keep their billion and a half people in line.”
Schweizer has written extensively about the Chinese involvement in the fentanyl trade and asks what they said about that.
“The only contentious meeting I had at the Chinese Politburo was over fentanyl,” he says, sharing a story he’s never shared before.
“They were saying, ‘we want Donald Trump to come to Beijing.’ I said, ‘you’re lucky to get me.’ But, I’ll tell you what, in order for him to come here, you’re going to have to give him something. So, the director of security, toughest guy in the country – little guy – he looks at me, and says, ‘Well, what would that be?’ And I said, ‘You have to get out of the fentanyl business.’ Now, this is eye-to-eye now, he goes, ‘Well, we’re not in the fentanyl business. We just make the precursors.’ And I said, ‘Do you really need to do that?’ O’Reilly says.
“Silence. I mean… silence. And I didn’t say anything further,” O’Reilly told them.
His book has a full chapter assessing Vladimir Putin, who he believes is also not an ideologue, but is “an evil guy.”
Schweizer and Eggers return to the Charlie Kirk shooting and the problem of the political left calling Trump a Nazi and Hitler. “I think most people have enough sense to say that’s a ridiculous parallel, but is there a residual problem with doing that? Are we kind of cheapening “evil” in our country when we’re tossing around comparisons like that about regular politicians?”
“The progressive left that champions that kind of rhetoric has damaged its own credibility, almost beyond repair. The Charlie Kirk assassination put them over the cliff. The Stephen Kings of the world, [Harvard law professor] Lawrence Tribe up in Boston, all of these people who try to excuse this heinous assassination, that really damaged the progressive movement,” O’Reilly answers. “That is going to be Charlie Kirk’s main legacy.”
He adds that Trump was very upset about Kirk’s murder and the political invective that led to it, yet says, “It’s not fair to say, that one person’s overheated rhetoric on The View is going to cause some nut to go out and hurt somebody. Very hard to do that. What you can do is condemn a pattern of behavior. And the radical progressive left uses invective – Hitler, fascist, racist, homophobe – uses those things as a policy to marginalize their opposition. That’s flat out wrong and every American should condemn it.”
“That’s evil,” he says.
