Confronting Evil with Bill O’Reilly

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1:18Confronting Evil. This is the latest book by Bill O 'Reilly, and he tells basically the stories of everybody from Stalin, Hitler, Mao, to Genghis Khan and Caligula, all the way up to the modern drug cartels and Vladimir Putin and a bunch of others. And he basically tells their stories. I learned a lot. It's almost like a modern history book. But also, why does he write this book? He writes it because now we're seeing incredible evil. We're seeing the war in Ukraine. We're seeing all the stuff going on, you know, with October 7th and Israel and everything that's happened all around that. And we're seeing the shootings in the U S and not only the mass shootings, but then you have things like Charlie Kirk or the, the girl from Ukraine who was throat was slit in the subway and it's disturbing and it's scary.

2:10And the question is, is this new or is this part of this historical trend that's happening now? If things are going to get better, how do things get better? And Bill and I discuss this and we do end on a note of optimism, but a lot of people, I know what a lot of people are thinking too, which is like, well, Bill O 'Reilly's a Republican or he's this or he's that. And you know, you can't, you know, Democrats might not like hearing what he has to say. And I think this sort of partisanship, obviously, you know, anybody who's totally just partisan is probably not very smart. Like people on both sides of the aisle have great things to say.

2:51Most of the country actually is, is centrist. I think we all know this. And, And Bill O 'Reilly is somebody who has covered evil for decades as a journalist and a news anchor and so on. And I think, and we've discussed this in other episodes as well, we just have to start listening instead of fighting. You kind of have to say whenever you're angry that what really is happening internally, you know, anger is often just fear clothed, right? So we're afraid of what will happen if another Hitler rises. So we knee jerk react to whatever everybody around us is saying, or we're afraid what happens if certain people get elected or certain people have a say in what's going on.

3:35But think to what you're personally anxious about. How do you deal with it? How do you have conversations about it? How do you learn from the past? All of these things are really important right now. If we're going to survive this period where there's greater mass shootings than ever, war is happening around the world. I don't know. It is very upsetting and disturbing, but I'm glad I had a chance to talk with someone like Bill O 'Reilly about it, and here it is.

4:09Now, you've obviously been covering evil for decades. You've been, you know, as a journalist, as an observer of geopolitics, you've seen evil everywhere you've turned. Again, you've covered it. You've interviewed it. You've interacted with it. What personal experiences inspired you to write this particular book? It's a little different than your other books. It's not like one story. You really dive into all these stories of Mao and Putin and Genghis Khan and Khomeini and so on. Yeah, there are 15 miscreants that we profile and the confronting banner. I switched over from killing books to confronting, with our last one, confronting the presidents.

4:56And it takes a year to research and write these books. So when we finished presidents, I had another book to deliver to the publisher. And I said, you know, I'm seeing a rise of evil in the United States and around the world. And I think people are looking away from it. So let me shock them. We'll write a book about the worst evil people have ever lived. And maybe they'll get back and say, you know, we got to do stuff about this. Now, here is the ultimate ironing. Book comes out September 9th. I get up September 10th, and Putin is lobbing missiles into Poland. Putin's on the cover along with Mao, Hitler, and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

5:39And then a few hours later, Charlie Kirk gets assassinated. so one interviewer said to me that's so eerie that your book would come out and all this stuff would happen and it is um and there's no reason or rationality attached to it other than coincidence but we are seeing uh evil envelop the world i think at a quicker rate than any time except the 1930s and the rise of the totalitarian regimes. And people got to pay attention to this, James. You know, and I agree. It seems, obviously, it is very scary. But then you look at overall statistics, like death by violence per capita has gone down century over century for forever.

6:35What's different about this evil now? More personal evil. and when you had a world where there were not civility, you had a bunch of countries that were just totally chaotic, then of course you couldn't have a higher level of violence. But in our modern age, we're supposed to be people of civilization. We're supposed to have protections. We're supposed to be acting in a humane way. And most of us do. But the 15%, that's the number I put on it, of evildoers are causing an enormous amount of problems. You can see that with the mass shootings in the USA. Almost every two or three weeks now, we got some idiot, some mentally ill person walks in and mows down people who are completely innocent of anything.

7:31and we have to, as a society, A, recognize the problem and then B, deal with it on a level that's effective. I learned so much from this book, as always with your books. I didn't know that much about Genghis Khan. I didn't know that much about Caligula. Even details of October 7th and the Iranian Revolution, a lot of these details that you've researched, I did not know, even though I've read a lot of things about this. So it's fascinating as a history, but I am really just curious on a personal level, your experiences with evil. In your years as a journalist, who would you say you've talked to or confronted personally that you felt was the most evil person you've ever dealt with?

8:18Boy, I don't know if I can put a capper on that. Ted Bundy. What was that like? I chased him across the country, and I didn't get him, but I was very close when he got arrested in Lake City, Florida. And we talked to his mother, and we had a correspondence with him. That's about it. It's hardcore evil. Two types of evil, James. There's a personal evil. That's Bundy. And then there's a collective evil. That's Hitler. The Ayatollah, those people who just mass murderers. They'll mow you down. Genghis Khan, one of those guys. But in my career, I covered four wars. You know, I was in El Salvador. I was down in Argentina, Falkland's War.

9:06Northern Ireland, Middle East. And you see horrible, horrible things take place every day. Like what? The justification is, well, I was in Belfast, and I actually took my son there last summer to show him where I was in a place called Davis Flats housing project. And it was a clash between the British Army and the IRA people. And they grabbed a 12-year-old boy who was a messenger for the Irish. And they took all the shoes and socks and made them walk across broken glass. These are the soldiers, the British soldiers did that. I mean, that's the kind of stuff. In El Salvador, they shot nuns dead.

9:49But I mean, it's one after the other, after the other, after the other. And so they all justify it by whatever crazy stuff they can come up with. But it's a constant. I mean, look at Putin. Putin's just murdering people every day. He likes them. He enjoys it. He's a psychopath. Blowing up towns, blowing up hospitals, blowing up schools. They don't have to do that. That's not war. All right. He's just lobbing missiles and drones in there to kill civilians. He knows he's doing it. Russian people put up with it, which is incredible. But, you know, I've seen a lot of evil in my life. That's for sure.

10:26So, like, let's take an example of, like, just the guy who's considered the most evil in modern days or maybe of all time, Hitler. Let's say you were to talk to Hitler personally in, I don't know, 1935, 1936. he's still evil and he's always evil, but it was before all the real atrocities. What could you say to him that might have an effect or an impact? Nothing. These are all mentally ill people. So Hitler wrote a book in the late 1920s, Mein Kampf. We kind of laid out the master race theory that the German people were Aryans and they could do whatever they wanted to the lesser races. So everybody knew.

11:13German people knew. This guy, if you give him power, he's going to start to wipe out Jews and gypsies and communists and whoever else he didn't like. Okay? But because the German people were suffering from economic hardship because they resented the Treaty of Asai in World War I, a whole bunch of reasons. They said, ah, yeah, he's not that bad. We'll give him the power. He'll get us back on track. And then boom. The same thing in China with Mao. Mao's the worst mass murder on earth, 20 million of his own people. He starved them to death because he wanted a different type of society. But you can't talk to these people because they're not, it's not like you and me talking right now.

11:55They're not real people. They're damaged in a sense that they don't live in our world. They live in a world of self-gratification and violence. And there's a lot of them. and now there's a trend in the United States not to punish those people, not to isolate them. Let them do 15 or 20 crimes. Look at a guy on a bus in Charlotte, slit that poor woman's throat. Never should have been out on the street in a million years. Judge let him out. For what? For what? Why did you let him out? Judge doesn't answer any questions. There's a Thomas Sowell quote that says, mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

12:37Well, that's a good quote. He's a brilliant man. But it's now in the system. And the system and the progressive left says, we're an unjust society. We're a racist justice system. So, yeah, you can't really punish people harshly. It's not really their fault. They're going out mugging some old lady and breaking her arm. I mean, it's totally insane. And we've seen this for our history. What's particularly worrisome too is people now can see this is the, the evil is being televised. Uh, you know, like the, the, the situation you just said, the girl who was her, her throat was slit on the subway, that video, we've all watched it.

13:18Charlie Kirk being shot was maybe the most shocking video I've ever seen. Just the brutality of it. And of course the, the videos coming out of October 7th in Israel. So we all see this now. Do you think this is giving society this collective PTSD? No, I don't, I don't agree that society, uh, is tilted by exposure, but here is a key. The allegation of Mr. Kirk, his family knew that he was going down and his father, who was a sheriff's deputy in Utah, told the authorities, look, we saw that he was on the internet in these evil, dark sites, absorbing this kind of information. We saw his deterioration mentally.

14:14Okay, that happens with more frequency than ever before because we didn't have the internet before. So somebody who's mentally ill but may not act upon their illness, they now have a club on the internet where people are saying, yeah, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it. And some of them get pushed over the edge. So my question for the father, and I do this with all due respect, I think he's a good man, was why didn't you intervene? If you saw your son acting in an a rational way and you knew what he where he was uh you you had to step in there but you know that that is what society needs to come to grips with we have to intervene and but i wonder though how difficult it is in the sense that these echo chambers of violence and evil are being normalized Look, you have guys like Nick Fuentes, popular guy.

15:12You stumble on any of his videos. He's just ranting about black people and Jews. And he gets tens of thousands of likes. Like these echo chambers of evil have millions and millions of people in it. It's now become a normal conversation to say the most racist, anti-Semitic things. And people don't judge you for that. It's remarkable compared to when... And it's remarkable to me even compared with like 10 years ago. Well, I think a lot of people do judge. But if you have 15 % who are evil to the core, we live in a country where you've got 340 million people. So do the math on that. That's a lot of folks.

15:54And now they have a clubhouse, the Internet, where they all get together and spout this garbage. Now our freedoms work against us here. Because you just can't sanction people and shut them down because they may have violent thoughts. You threaten somebody individually, you can't. But collectively, you can't. And so in a totalitarian society like Singapore, for example, you don't have this. Because the inkling of evil is enough to bring the authorities in to isolate you. they don't have any real rights over there. The government tells them what they can and can't do. Same thing in China. When I was in China in May, it's the biggest police state in the history of the world.

16:43But in a free society, this is allowed. And I don't see a solution to that problem.

16:52Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. email me at alcatra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

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22:32Being an entrepreneur is a 24-7 job. And when you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. For one thing there, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates at the end of the day. The most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates.

23:04And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small, medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. We all learn about these things in school and we read about them and then everybody starts misusing like calling this person hitler that person hitler but you you this was a real documenting of all these different acts of evil and i really found it eye-opening and it didn't make me think of modern times like you say in a free society it's not possible to basically police this evil and yet we have to or or are you saying we're just doomed as a world.

24:03We're not doomed, but we're going to be suffering as we always have. That's the state of the world. You're not doomed. You still survive because there are more good people than evil people, but the suffering is not going to stop. And anybody who's been the victim of a crime or lost people like on 9-11, I opened Confronting evil with uh october 7th in uh israel and the hamas raid and i did that to show people contemporaneously it's happened now it happened in our lifetime what these hamas terrorists actually did to babies and grandmothers and no reason no reason they weren't going to get any benefit from doing this, pure hatred, all right?

24:54And I said, I wanted to shock the reader into, this is real. What's the solution to this? There is no solution to it, but you can contain it to some extent. But now in the United States, that containment measure is starting to decline with the progressive left saying, oh, no, don't punish him. No, no, no, no. We'll have a discussion. We'll send a social worker in. You can't do that. But it's happening. At what point does it become also like an, almost like an IQ issue? Like you have all these groups, like let's say Queers for Palestine, when people in Hamas or people who support Hamas clearly state, hey, we'll kill you if you're gay and you go over to Gaza.

25:49And at what point are these people just stupid who are defending the people who would kill them? A lot, there are a lot of stupid people. Constitution gives you a right to be a moron. That should be written in there. There are a lot of dumb people. And the people that fit into that category are apathetic. They don't care. They don't seek information. They live in a bubble. they create their own world, their own world is limited, or they're lazy. And the school, public schools in America, you said they teach you, they don't teach you, they don't. You go into any junior class in any public high school in this country and you ask them about the 15 miscreants I write about in Confronting Evil, they don't know anything about them.

26:40But you know, every one of those men, and I couldn't find any women to even come close to what these guys did, they all relate to today. The evil deeds that they did relate to our lives now. Even Caligula, the Roman emperor, Rome fell. The whole thing shattered because of him and the subsequent people who came after him, but he set the tone. If Rome could collapse, certainly the United States could. And that's why I included these people in the book. You know why, like you say, a lot of these people are, or all of these people are mentally ill, but they also justify their behavior in very, you know, twisted, dark ways.

27:30And that's how they get the population kind of on their side or supporting them. Like you mentioned how Hitler kind of played into Germany's economic collapse and then used that to sort of take power and start doing what he was doing. But, you know, look at Rome as a great example where you have a guy like Augustus, you know, one of the first emperors, you know, the first emperor after Julius Caesar, and they kind of call his reign a reign of peace. It was the most peaceful time during Rome. And yet in order to get there, he basically first killed everyone who opposed him. So when would you say someone like that was evil as well, but then kind of used that initial evil to establish a good period?

28:17These are sort of the confusing periods for me. Well, there's not a lot of data to support what was in Augustus's mind. We know him because he was reigning when they nailed Jesus to the cross. So he certainly wasn't a benign leader ever. There have been times in history where what they call strong men have taken over and then they impose order. That's what they do. They impose order on a certain population. um i deal with the people who uh rain led to disorder so world war ii 100 million dead i mean my god uh so yeah i mean it's not a straight line always and there are evil people who've accomplished some good yeah and so you know you you have the hitlers the stalin's the Mao's between between the three of them like you say maybe it's 100 million maybe it's even more when you throw in Mao's uh deaths in the in the 60s all the people who died from starvation from Mao's policies did they ever turn around like does Mao ever think to himself maybe I did something wrong you know none of these people showed any remorse at all then that's one of the classifications to make the book.