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Bill O'Reilly Confronts History's Most Evil Tyrants and Reveals How Their Legacy Threatens America Today
Bill O'Reilly sits down to discuss his new book on confronting evil, examining history's most destructive dictators from Vladimir Putin and Joseph Stalin to Adolf Hitler and Chairman Mao. O'Reilly explores why these men committed atrocities, how they rose to power through exploiting weakness and poverty, and warns that their legacies continue to shape global threats today. He also turns his attention to American evils, from slave traders to robber barons, while addressing the danger of moral relativism and the critical importance of confronting evil before it's too late. With nuclear weapons in the hands of tyrants and progressive movements refusing to punish criminals, O'Reilly argues that understanding evil has never been more urgent for preserving freedom.
Understanding Evil in the Modern Age
Bill O'Reilly defines evil simply but powerfully: when one human being deliberately hurts another, knowing full well the destructive impact of their actions, that is evil. After 50 years of reporting and witnessing atrocities across the globe, O'Reilly has compiled his observations into a book examining history's most vile men and how they continue to shape our world.
In an age of nuclear weapons and existential threats, O'Reilly argues that understanding evil is not academic—it's essential for survival. The destruction capacity exists to obliterate Earth, and those willing to use such power walk among us. For anyone who wants a good society or a good life, recognizing that there are people determined to take it away is absolutely necessary.
Vladimir Putin: The Modern Face of Evil
O'Reilly dedicates 20 pages of his book to Vladimir Putin, by far the largest chapter. Putin is a mass murderer who enjoys inflicting suffering on people, operates with no constraints, and gets away with everything. He has blown people out of the sky, poisoned dissidents in London, and launched attacks on Ukrainian hospitals while feigning diplomatic conversations.
Putin's origins as a KGB officer in Dresden reveal much about his character. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Putin was furious. He confronted a crowd by himself with only a handgun and stared them down. There has always been something behind those eyes—something people can sense as evil.
Putin's childhood perfectly explains his psychopathic narcissism. He had two brothers who both died, and his father worked night shifts and would beat him while often drunk on vodka. Young Vladimir essentially split from his family around age 12 and joined a gang, then naturally graduated into the totalitarian Soviet system where you beat up or kill people who don't agree with you.
Today, Putin is the richest man on the planet, yet ironically cannot spend his money. Designated a war criminal, he has extorted vast wealth from the Russian economy but remains trapped by his own evil. Putin initially tried to manipulate Donald Trump, employing old KGB training to be exceedingly polite and deferential on phone calls. Yet that same night, he would launch attacks on Ukrainian hospitals.
Putin's public assassinations of enemies—businessmen, journalists, dissidents, defectors—send a message that he is above all law, above America, above everybody. Russian activist Alexei Navalny's death stands as just one example of Putin's willingness to eliminate opposition in full view of the world stage.
Joseph Stalin: Putin's Role Model
There would be no Putin without Joseph Stalin, whom Putin idolizes to this day. Stalin completed the Russian Revolution's descent from utopian ideals into totalitarian communist dictatorship. His collectivist economic plans yielded widespread famine, and his purges and Gulag prisons liquidated millions of his own countrymen.
Stalin initially allied with Hitler, only to be blindsided when the blitzkrieg raged across Russian borders. Russia might well have been defeated in World War Two, but Stalin threw limitless lives into the Battle of Stalingrad. Orders were in writing: if any Russian retreats, shoot them. Stalin never cared about losses—lives were meaningless to him, just numbers. He killed millions of his own people through starvation, relocation, and execution.
Seventy-five years later, Vladimir Putin employs the same meat grinder strategy in Ukraine. Like Putin, Stalin endured a childhood of being beaten by a drunk father, trying to shield his mother while living in abject poverty. Understanding Stalin is essential to understanding Putin.
Neo-Marxists and neo-socialists claim that communism would work but for Stalin going too far. O'Reilly counters that there has never been on this planet a socialist or communist government that has succeeded in the long term. Americans, particularly young people in public high schools, lack understanding of what communism and socialism actually mean.
Bernie Sanders, O'Reilly argues, is not a socialist but a communist. Tracing him back reveals he honeymooned in Moscow—hardly a typical tourist destination choice. If you don't understand the viciousness of the communist system—no rights, seizure of all property, arbitrary killings—you remain vulnerable to its appeal.
Stalin was not particularly brilliant or charismatic, nor was he some great economic mind. He was a brute. By brutalizing the population and killing tens of millions, he created a society so terrorized and ignorant that when he died, millions came to Moscow to see his casket, with 40 people crushed to death in the process. In totalitarian countries with no free press and no free flow of information, people simply don't know the truth.
What Putin admires about Stalin is simple: absolute power. That's what Putin wants and what he has in Russia.
Adolf Hitler: Evil Without Disguise
Adolf Hitler brought Germany under Nazi rule, started World War Two, and ordered millions killed in the Holocaust. O'Reilly chose to paint a personal portrait, opening the Hitler chapter with the Night of the Long Knives, where Hitler turned on his best friends and killed them.
Ernst Röhm, Hitler's friend who helped him gain power through intimidation and violence with the brownshirts, was murdered on Hitler's orders. Hitler was there on the scene as his hitman walked into the lobby to neutralize everyone, including his best friend. Hitler enjoyed this—that is the essence of evil.
One of the most striking aspects of Hitler's rise is that he told the German people exactly what he wanted to do, then did it. He wrote Mein Kampf while in jail in the 1920s because he was such a threat from the beginning. He didn't try to disguise his evil, yet was elected anyway. The Nazis never got a majority vote, but they were high enough to win power.
Hitler was very brave in World War One, winning the Iron Cross as a corporal. He was robust and evil. He took advantage of the harsh Treaty of Versailles that devastated German society, then exploited the Great Depression when people had nothing to eat. Harsh conditions always breed the opportunity for such maniacs to gain power.
Hitler told Germans they were the master race, better than everyone else. Though they had nothing now, voting for him would right all wrongs, and the people persecuting them—the banks and buildings, the Jews—would be dealt with. Forty percent of Germans responded positively to this message.
Hitler was thoroughly addicted to narcotics, given daily doses of hormone stimulants, methamphetamines, and opioids. He needed barbiturates to sleep. He was crazy the whole way through, but at the end became a raving lunatic living in a surreal world removed from reality. He was so megalomaniacal that nobody could even tell him Germany had lost on the beaches of Normandy.
All these dictators have one thing in common: they live in a bubble that nobody can penetrate while they're in power, because they'll be killed. If Hitler wanted narcotics, there was a guy there to inject him every hour if that's what the Führer wanted.
Americans see Nazis as the most evil that have ever existed, yet people compare Trump to Hitler and call ICE agents Gestapo or stormtroopers. This diminishes terrible evil into triviality. Saying that rounding up illegal migrants is at the same level as ordering people put into ovens, including babies and women, is idiotic and diminishes the poor souls who suffered through World War Two.
Ayatollah Khomeini: Hitler's Most Effective Heir
Anti-Semitism persists to this day in many groups and forms, but Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini was Hitler's most effective heir. Khomeini came to power leading the Iranian revolution of 1979, bringing an era of religious zealotry, politically motivated murders, and international terror that continues to menace the world.
Osama bin Laden, Yahya Sinwar who led Hamas in the October 7th attacks, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIS all trace back to the Ayatollah. He was the guy who put into motion all these other extremists. Once you have a head of state saying every Jew on the planet should be killed, the consequences spread.
The Ayatollah often said he was confronting evil—viewing the United States as evil. He got into power because the Shah exploited the country and the Persian economy went down. Khomeini, exiled at the time, recognized an opportunity and worked through mosques to get all the imams on board. The departure of the Shah was not the final victory, but the pre-phase to victory.
It follows the same pattern in almost every society: strongmen evildoers replace corrupt weak rulers. The October 7th attacks carried out by Hamas, all roads lead back to Iran. Outfits like ISIS and Hamas couldn't exist without Iran's weapons and money. The Revolutionary Guard and real fanatics want to kill every Jew—that comes from the Third Reich. Hitler's legacy lives in the Middle East, posing an obvious threat to the world.
Chairman Mao: The Worst Human Being Who Ever Lived
Today's communist China is both America's most vital trading partner and its biggest global rival. A single shipyard in China now produces more ships every year than all American shipyards combined. For that, we can thank Mao Zedong, who in O'Reilly's opinion was the worst human being ever to live.
Rising from the rubble of brutal Japanese occupation during World War Two, Mao's communist revolution toppled the corrupt nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek. Once in power, Chairman Mao pursued his vision for communist utopia, beginning with a totalitarian police state that abolished individual rights.
Then came his Great Leap Forward. Instead of progress, the collectivist economic program brought widespread famine and the deaths of millions. Mao not only killed tens of millions of his own people, he starved them to death on purpose because they wouldn't conform to his insane view of running the economy. He didn't care one bit about his own people. Everything was the state. If they told you to live on 800 calories a day, you lived on 800 calories a day because they were taking the food. His army got the food while little children starved to death.
Later, Mao built a cult of personality around himself and turned on his comrades. His Cultural Revolution mobilized youth into Red Guards that purged society of alleged capitalist elements. The Red Book of communism presented a very simple doctrine: you can't do anything. You have no rights, can't own property, must live where you're told.
How did Mao make this appealing? He lied, promising everyone would have the same—nice house, nice garden, everything they wanted. That's what all communists do, and it never works out. The Chinese people were suffering, had nothing, hated the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese who had slaughtered them. Mao said he hated the Japanese and would take care of them. Everyone responded positively. It's very simple, not complicated.
We don't pay enough attention to what Mao did and what he created, which continues today. China could go either way—becoming an existential enemy requiring possibly military confrontation, which would be the most catastrophic event in human history, or reaching some kind of arrangement with the West.
When O'Reilly spoke to the Chinese Politburo in May, he asked wealthy Chinese billionaires how being a billionaire squares with communism. They looked at him and said there is no other way to govern 1.5 billion people. They believe or have talked themselves into believing that the most hellacious police state on earth has to exist because you couldn't control all these people otherwise. India next door has democracy, but China insists their system is necessary.
King Henry VIII: Personal Evil
Not everyone on O'Reilly's list is a 20th century tyrant, but the consequences of King Henry VIII's actions are still felt today. Henry broke with the Catholic Church so he could divorce the first of his six wives. He beheaded two of them while betraying his closest friends and advisors in a reign that would change both England and the world forever.
O'Reilly included a chapter showing how evil people can be to their wives, best friends, and children—personal evil that is rampant in this world. Though it might seem like small potatoes compared to genocide, Henry's story matters because of how he treated those closest to him.
Thomas More was Henry's best friend, a man who wanted to help peasants and served as the king's confidant. Henry initially respected him. But when More told Henry he couldn't disrespect the Pope because they were all Catholic, Henry responded by sending More to the Tower of London. More wound up with his head cut off—a personal betrayal that illustrates how evil operates on intimate levels.
Henry extended this treatment to everybody in England, Scotland, and Ireland. He created the Protestant-Catholic wars that ravaged Europe and killed millions of people over the centuries. It was all because Henry wanted a divorce—he wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. If you didn't deliver, you went to the Tower of London.
Henry gets a pass in popular culture with movies and celebrations. The British people don't want to admit a lot of wrongdoing. O'Reilly, speaking as an Irishman whose family had land confiscated for no reason, wanted to show the complete disregard these people had on a personal level. They're eating, drinking, keeping mistresses, taking narcotics, all while declaring they'll do what they want.
American Evil: Slave Traders
Americans have vanquished evil governments in Germany, Japan, Russia, Iraq, and other far-off places. But O'Reilly features examples of evil in the United States as well, profiling African slave traders Isaac Franklin and John Armfield, who at one point were the richest guys in the world. The American government and American people allowed it.
The slave trade ran from Virginia down to New Orleans and back up the Mississippi. The slave industry was the worst thing that ever happened in the United States. The New Orleans slave market was the largest in the world. A thousand slaves would wait to be sold, separated by gender and age. One by one, they climbed atop a wooden box as buyers inspected them. Males were prodded, slapped, and forced to jog across a gravel pit without shoes. Females were subjected to demeaning examinations to prove their fertility. Children watched in horror as their parents were sold to the highest bidder. More cargo arrived the next day.
Slavery was at the heart of the American economy, but O'Reilly parts ways with the 1619 Project thesis. Slavery was exclusively for the benefit of the aristocracy in the South. The reason it wasn't outlawed was because the South would secede, and everybody knew it. Those who want to denigrate America say slavery built the country, but that's not true. What is true is that the legacy of slavery harms African Americans to this day, and America has tried to rectify that mistake.
The Civil War was fought over slavery, yet statues to Confederate generals still stand. Some want those names and statues back, bases named after Confederate generals. O'Reilly wants those names out there so people can see who these men were, because they're all different. There's a difference between having a name out there and celebrating it.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the worst people who ever lived in America—a Confederate general and founder of the Ku Klux Klan, as evil as they come. There's no justification for having a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Robert E. Lee presents a different story. O'Reilly doesn't justify what Lee did, but Lee believed in states' rights and that his Virginia shouldn't be told what to do from people across the river. It wasn't that Lee was particularly pro-slavery or enthusiastic about it, but he decided to do what he did. He was wrong, but that's different from being evil in O'Reilly's opinion.
The Robber Barons
Slavery was unquestionably a force for bad in America, with lots of awful things resulting from it. Yet American capitalism has been the single greatest thing to happen to the world and the advances because of it. O'Reilly places the robber barons next to African slavers as American evil.
J.P. Morgan, the shrewdest, smartest robber baron, bought up companies and paid his people nothing. He put them in mines where they were beaten and crushed, in plants where they were lit on fire. No working conditions, no safety standards, children as young as eight or nine working. Morgan was doing all this and knew he was doing it. He wasn't putting people in ovens and gas chambers, but he was evil nonetheless.
Rockefeller would not ship oil to certain parts of the country in winter so people couldn't heat their homes. He'd do that for a month or two, let them be chilly, then jack the price up five times more than it used to be. These guys were the worst.
Should we have statues to them? Should we have Rockefeller Center? All of these robber barons gave enormous amounts of money to charity—Carnegie Mellon, Vanderbilt—trying to buy redemption, trying to buy their way into heaven.
Is there not a similarity to Jeff Bezos on his yacht at his $50 million wedding while there are slaves literally in China making all the stuff that Amazon sells? You have to stretch it there, O'Reilly says, but it's similar to the robber barons. In the 1990s, the country was changing again with new high tech, and a handful of guys made billions and billions of dollars. But O'Reilly hasn't seen the same evil level—they're not nearly in the category of the robber barons.
Confronting Evil: What Can Be Done
The saying goes that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. But why haven't we figured out that you have to confront evil at the beginning? Because it's easy to look away, and most human beings take the easy path. There are very few George Washingtons, very few George Pattons. They're extraordinary human beings. Most of us are weak.
Does O'Reilly have any faith or hope left? Absolutely. He thinks the good always outweighs the bad in the sense that the United States is the most powerful nation in the world because it's essentially a noble nation. All the evil nations have gone down and most are destroyed. We're dealing with China and Putin, but O'Reilly doesn't expect they will ever rise to where America is. The good people outnumber the bad people.
But there's the idea of moral relativism—not only do evil men justify evil, but lots of people justify looking away from evil with valid excuses. If you're living on the south side of Chicago as an honest, hardworking person, and every day you walk out and see guys with guns selling fentanyl and heroin doing horrible things, and you know if you report them you can be killed, that's a pretty good excuse.
Then you go into a system in America where the left doesn't want to punish criminals. How insane is that? That alone is evil. We live in a system now where the progressive left does not want to punish criminals because they feel it's society's fault that these people are doing heinous things. That is evil because the criminal will then go out and hurt more people.
The right in America, MAGA in America, the America First movement says let Putin have Ukraine, we don't care, it's not our problem. But that's a very small minority. Polling indicates most Americans understand Putin is evil and want Ukraine to be helped, though they object to sending vast amounts of money.
Standing for good isn't enough—you have to stand up to evil. If America doesn't do it, nobody else will. That's why people who badmouth America are so misguided. America alone has freed billions of people. The Cold War was won by America.
But America could become a totalitarian society if the education system continues to decline and the selfishness of society continues to rise. Those are the two elements you would need.
A Message of Hope and Warning
The message is both hopeful and cautionary. It's up to Americans in ways both big and small to make sure evil never takes over America, to embrace what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. We each decide for ourselves how to do the right thing. But make no mistake—doing nothing is never an option.
Understanding evil, confronting it at its earliest stages, and refusing to look away are the responsibilities of every generation. The faces of evil may change, but the patterns remain the same: exploiting weakness, promising simple solutions, brutalizing populations, and living above all law while others suffer. Only by recognizing these patterns can we hope to prevent their recurrence and preserve freedom for future generations.
Video Transcript
The day after
the latest attack of pure evil Charlie Kirk murdered
at a university in Utah. This is a political
assassination. Bill O'Reilly taking
on history's monsters in this morning's fashion. The man who lusted for power
lives to havmore meaning. They weren't just numbers. For money. J.P. Morgan. He's doing all this,
and he knows he's doing it. And for sex. Personal evil is rampant
in this world. Who inspired America's
current enemies? Foreign. Hitler's legacy lives
in the Middle East and domestic. The left doesn't want to punish
criminals. That alone is evil. Bill O'Reilly is pulling
no punches. I can't go to Moscow now. After writing this book. Bill O'Reilly, Confronting Evil. Good evening, I'm Leland Vitter. The word evil elicits
a visceral response from us. Normal, kind, human beings,
and with good reason. Evil is something we often look away from,
something we are scared of. But that's the very reason Bill O'Reilly just wrote a book
about confronting evil. In it, he delves deep into the lives of history's
most vile men. Bill s down with us to talk not only about the horrors
they committed in the past, but how they continue
to shape our world today. All right, ORiley, let's start
with two words confronting evil. My definition of evil is
if one human being hurts another human being on purpose knows that they are delivering
a destructive blow to a person and doesn't anyway. That's evil. How are we confronting
these people that the world already knows
so much about and universally agree
we're evil? But they don't know
so much about them. We're coconfrontinthem
by exposing them. I tell you why they did what they did, why they did it,
and how they accomplished it. I'm not a shrink, but based upon
50 years of reporting, I've seen pretty much every evil
you could possibly see. But now the government
soldiers have driven the rebels out of town
and into the mountains. And it always stayed with me. And I always wanted
to write about it someday. Why do we need this book, Bill? You know, we live in an age
that's complicated, and we have nuclear
weapons, and, the Earth could be obliterated. By evil. The destruction
capacity is there. So you need to know
if you are a human being that wants a good society
or a good life, that there are people
who take it away from you is absolutely there. Right on the top of that list. And right on the cover of
the book is the current Russian
president, Vladimir Putin. His reputation for corruption, assassination
and warmongering is well-earned. What's worse, O'Reilly says
he is only getting bolder. 20 pages in confronting evil
to Vladimir Putin. By far the biggest chapter,
write why he's a danger to us, enjoys
inflicting suffering on people. He's a mass murderer. Gets away with everything,
and we document. I mean, he's
blowing people out of the sky, and he's poisoning
people in London. And I mean, this is a guy
that's totally out of control. No constraints on him at all. You open the chapter on Vladimir
Putin with him as a KGB man, right?
The Soviet Union dissolved. He was furious. He was running the KGB office
in Dresden, and, he went out,
confronted a crowd by himself with a handgun. He stood him down and said,
yeah, the crowd dispersed. Yeah. Putin stared the crowd down
with only a hand gun. There's
something behind those eyes. They've always been
there, right? That's what evil does. People can sense evil. Then we go into his childhood. He perfectly explains
why he's so. Psychopapath.
Soopath. Narcissist. So Putin has two brothers,
both die, and his father works a night shift
and beats the hell out of, Vlad, and is often drunk on vodka. So Vlad basically splits
when he's about 12 years old and he goes into a gang,
and then Vlad graduates naturally into the totalitarian
Soviet system, where you beat up people that don't agree with you
or kill them. Adhere to social resist. So that's a terrible evil
that's to instruct you your unique emotional magnetism. Putin right now is
the richest man on the planet. The irony is
he can't spend the money. He's been designated a war
criminal. He cannot spend the money
that he has extorted from the Russian economy. There's a famous moment with you
confronting Donald Trump
about Vladimir Putin. Will I get along with them? I have no idea. That's a killer, dude. Putin's a killer. A lot of killers
get a lot of killers. Why? You think our country's
so innocent? I warned him. He dismissed it, though. He did. Why? Because he wanted to bully
people. Believe
what they want to believe. Yeah, and he wanted to believe
that he could deal with Putin. Is Trump changed
since that interview? Definitely. Because Putin has disrespected Trump. In Trump's months now, when
they talk on the phone, Putin is exceedingly polite,
even deferential. Old KGB training, manipulation,
whatever you want. Donald is great. I'm all in on negotiations. And then that night, he's launching attacks on Ukrainian
hospitals. Right? Dodging Putin is. It's been well-established
that confronting Vladimir Putin can be bad
for your health, right? You'll die. Russian activists and Kremlin
critic Alexei Navalny has died. So Putin's enemies
businessmen, journalists, dissidents, defectors
all end up dead publicly. Why does Vladimir Putin do these things
so publicly on the world stage? Sends a message
that he's above all law. He's above America. He's above everybody. You can do what he wants,
and he will tell you. Is potential. But, you know,
we recognize idealistic, but this is what you get. Aggressively distaste. I'm not saying that. I say,
look, here's how bad it is. Confronting evil. I can't go to Moscow now
after writing this book. You worried? No.
If it happens, it happens. But according to O'Reilly,
there would be no Putin without his predecessor
and role model, Joseph Stalin, who receives and richly deserves his own chapter
in confronting evil. Putin idolizes to this day
Joseph Stalin. Joseph Stalin completed
the Russian Revolution's descent from its utopian ideals into a totalitarian communist
dictatorship. Stalin's collectivist economic
plans yielded widespread famine. His purges and Gulag prisons
liquidated millions of his own countrymen. He initially allied with Hitler,
only to be blindsided when the blitzkrieg raged across his borders. Russia might well have been defeated
in World War Two, but Stalin threw limitless lives
into the Battle of Stalingrad. The orders were in writing. If any Russian retreats, let it be shot. And Stalin at that point
didn't care about the losses. He never cared about them. Ever lived to him
were meaningless. They were just numbers. He couldn't care less
how many people died. Even his own people. He was killing his own people. Millions of his own. Yeah. Starving them. Relocating that. Anything to protect the state? 75 years later,
Vladimir Putin would employ the same meat grinder strategy
in Ukraine. You go back to Stalin's
childhood. You read about him getting beaten up by a drunk
father trying to shield his mother
living in abject poverty. Well, Putin and Stalin had you almost
have you that same upbringing. Okay. So if you want to understand
why Putin does what he does, you got to know Stalin. You think about neo Marxists, neo socialists, whatever
you want to call them, they say. But for Stalin, communism,
socialism would work. It's not a failed system. It's just that Stalin
went a little too far. Oh, yeah. There is never been
on this planet, a socialist or communist government
that has succeeded in the long. We keep trying it term. Americans have seen what happens with socialism,
with communism. People know they haven't. You tell you American made him go
into any public high school and you ask these urchins
about communism. Socialism. You know what
you're talking about. The old. They had a problem. Oh, huge. Is that why Tommy, he's an. Then Bernie Sanders is a communist. He's not a socialist.
He's a communist. If you trace him back,
he honeymooned in Moscow. You know,
anybody else is doing that? No, no, no. Okay. A tourist destination thing. And so if you don't understand the viciousness
of the communist system, which is you have no rights,
will seize all your property. And if we want to kill you,
we'll kill you. That's what communism is. And you go
into a high school and, free busses. You don't know state run grocery
stores. Sounds pretty good. You note that Stalin,
among the group of evil doers, was not particularly brilliant. He wasn't
particularly charismatic. He wasn't some great
economic mind. How was he able to do brute? He was a brute. You brutalize a population, you kill tens of millions
of people, as Stalin did. And at the end,
millions come to Moscow. You end the chapter with 40 people crushed to death
trying to see the casket. Right? The casket. So explain how
someone does that to a society, and yet
they spend their last rubles to come to Moscow
and see the casket. Most people in these totalitaria
countries are ignorant. They just don't know. If you go to, a vibrant country, a democracy, people free press, right? You can get watch News Nation
and get some info. No news in Russia. Now there's no nation
or under Stalin. No free press,
no free flow of information. How did they get to know? What is it about Stalin
that Putin admires? Power? Absolute power. And that's what Putin wants. That's what he has in Russia for their future. If the idea of a taking a system with rain coming up, you knew this guy
was going to get some attention. He got fired at midnight. He was crazy
all the way through. But at the end, he's
a raving lunatic. Bill O'Reilly confronted
Adolf Hitler. The people who put him in power,
and the man he believes is keeping Hitler's legacy alive
today. It may not be who you think. And later. Which Americans made Bill's
hall of shame. Nathan Bedford
Forrest. Stay with us. In this morning. Possibly
even on that final midnight. It should surprise
no one that Adolf Hitler made the cover of the book. After all, he brought Germany
under Nazi rule, started World War Two and ordered millions
killed in the Holocaust. None of Hitler's other evil acts can match
the scale of those atrocities. But O'Riley chose to paint
a more personal portrait. I opened the Hitler chapter
with The Night of the Long Knives,
where Hitler turns on his best friends, kills him. He's my friend. The guy who got him the power
through intimidation, violence,
the so-called brownshirts. He's there on the scene. Hitman who walks into the lobby and make sure
everybody is neutralized, including his best friend,
earns from. Okay, Hitler enjoys this. That is the absolute truth. And that is the essence of evil. One of the most interesting
parts of Hitler's rise to power,
and you write about this, is that
he told the German people, this is what I want to do,
and then did it. And late at night he was elected. What does that say?
He wrote a book, Mein Kampf. They put him in jail
in the 1920s because he was such a threat
from a very beginning. He didn't try to disguise
his evil. He didn't try to disguise. What does it say? That he was then elected
to commit the German people? Or partially responsible
for that whole thing over there? That's what it says. Now, they never got the Nazis,
never got a majority vote. But they were high enough to win
power. So, Hitler. Look, you got a guy here
who was very brave and we write about that
in World War one. He won the Iron Cross
as a corporal. Yeah. I mean, the guy was not some
wallflower bureaucrat, okay? He was robust, and he is evil. And then he took advantage
of number one, the treaty where the Germans lost in World
War one. A devastated German society,
and then the Great Depression, where people
don't have anything to eat. Okay, so harsh conditions breed. I've always, always. That is the stair step that all of these maniacs
took to gain power. Was it hard for Hitler to amass
40% of the German people voting for him? All I said was, hey,
we're going host. We're the master race. We're
better than everybody else. You may not have anything now,
but if you vote for me, we're going to, right
all the wrongs and the people persecuting you along the banks
and the buildings. The Jews, we'll get them. We're going to get them. 40% of the Germans go. Okay.. That happened. It's not. It's not complicated
and convoluted, but it came on you, right? Adolf Hitler is thoroughly
addicted to narcotics, right? He is given daily doses of hormone stimulants,
methamphetamines and opioids. He needs barbiturates to sleep. Minutes
after the initial injection, the dictator slumbers
in his simple twin bed. At his feet is his favorite
companion, a four year old German shepherd named Blondie. He was crazy
the whole way through. But at the end, he's
a raving lunatic. And, Hitler
lived in a surreal world. Not a real world.
He's a drug addict. He was so megalomaniacal that you couldn't
even say to him, hey, Führer, we just lost on the beaches
of Normandy. You couldn't say that to him. But they all have one thing
in common. They live in a bubble, and nobody can penetrate the bubble
while they're in power, because they'll kill them. And if
they want to take narcotics is. Hitler did. There's a guy there
to inject him every hour. An hour,
if that's what the Führer wants. Nazis are seen as the most evil
by Americans that have ever existed. But people
compare Trump to Hitler. Ice agents are the Gestapo
or stormtroopers? Sure. What's the danger in that? It diminishes
terrible into, a triviality. So if you're going to say that,
the United States of America by, rounding up illegal migrants, is at the same level
of a guy who ordered people put into ovens,
including babies and women, then you're an idiot, and you are diminishing the poor souls
who had to go through that, during World War Two. Of course, anti-Semitism persists to this day
in many groups and forms. But O'Reilly says Iran's
Ayatollah Khomeini was Hitler's most effective heir
and dedicates a chapter to the ayatollahs
malevolent vision. The. Khomeini came to power, leading
the Iranian revolution of 1979. He brought and enforced
an era of religious zealotry, politically motivated murders
and international terror that continues to menace
all of us today. You've got bin laden,
and you've got Sinwar, who led Hamas in the October 7th
attacks. Baghdadi of ISIS. Why pick the Ayatollah? Because he was the guy
that put into motion all of these other guys. So once you have a head of state that says every Jew on
the planet should be killed, then you start to go, okay. The ayatollah often said
that he was the one confronting evil.
He was confronting the United States
that he viewed as evil. Correct. So the ayatollah, got into power
because the Shah was. So that was Shah just exploited
a hell of a country and Persian economy went down. And then Khomeini in powers,
exiled, said, oh, I got a I got, opportunity here. We'll do it in the, mosques. We'll
get all the imams on board. But, the departure of the Shah
is not the final victory, but it is the,
pre phase two or victory. And that's what happened. So it's the same thing
in almost every society. The strong men, evil doers replace the corrupt weak rulers. You talk about the October 7th
attacks. You detail them in the book carried out by Hamas. Does that all
all roads lead back to Iran? Or see, these these outfits
couldn't exist without Iran's, weapons and money. So ISIS, Hamas,
the Revolutionary Guard, the real fanatics, they want to kill every Jew, every Jew, kill more. That's from the Third Reich. So Hitler's
legacy lives in the Middle East. And that is
obviously a threat to the world. I think the ayatollah would be
quite pleased, wouldn't it? Yeah, he's probably
in a high place right now. Do you really believe that? Do you believe that? There.
I hope so. You know,
people ask me all the time. I just hope so. I hope there's a final judgment
on these evil people coming up. Who's the most evil of them all? For Bill O'Reilly, it's
the man behind America's biggest threat today, confronting
China's Chairman Mao. Mao Zedong was the worst
human being who ever lived. That's next. Today's communist
China is both America's most vital trading partner
and its biggest global rival. A single shipyard in China now
produces more ships every year than all of the American
shipyards combined. For that,
we can thank a charismatic and ruthless
revolutionary named Mao Zedong. In my opinion, Mao Zedong was the worst human
being ever to live. Rising
from the rubble of the brutal Japanese occupation
during World War Two. Mao's communist revolution toppled the corrupt nationalist
regime of Chiang Kai shek. Once in power, Chairman Mao pursued his vision
for a communist utopia. And what a vision it was. He began with a totalitarian
police state that abolished individual rights. Then came his great leap
forward. But instead, the collectivist
economic program brought widespread famine,
and the deaths of millions not only killed tens of millions
of its own people, he starved
them to death on purpose because they wouldn't conform to his insane view of how to run the economy, starve them to death. Didn't care
one word about his own people. Never cared.
It was the same thing. Everything's the state. If we tell you that you have to live on 800 calories a day, you have to live
on 800 calories a day because we're taking the food. His army got the food, okay? And the little children
starve to death. I think that's pretty evil. Later, Mao would build
a cult of personality around himself
and turned on his comrades. His Cultural Revolution
mobilized youth into Red guards that purge society
of alleged capitalist elements. And then there's
the Cultural Revolution. Well, the Cultural Revolution. It was the soso stupid Mao
Red book. I mean, communism,
very simple doctrine. It's like fascism. It's you can't do anything That's it. Communism. You have no rights. You can't own property. You have to live
where we tell you to live. How did Mao make this appealing
to people? How is it
that Mao gets so many people to fight, to die,
to kill their fellow countrymen for this communism idea
that you laid out that is antithetical
to the human equation? Because he would lie to them,
he'd say, oh, we're all going to have the same bowl of nice house
we love, nice garden. We'll have everything you want. And that's
what all communists do. And of course,
it never works out. Everything's
going to be better here. And the Chinese people
are suffering. They don't have anything.
Chiang Kai shek is corrupt. They hate him. They hate the Japanese. The Japanese had come in
and slaughtered them. And Mao goes, I hate Japanese. I'm going to take care
of Japanese. And everyone
goes, yay! We like you! It's very
simple, not complicated. Most of the few of us. Long live Chairman Mao! Long live Chairman Mao! Do we pay enough attention to
what Mao did, what Mao created? What? GE is continuing? Well, look, China is a country that could go either way. It could become, a existential enemy. That means that
we'd have to deal with them,m, you know, maybe militarily,
that would be the most catastrophic
event in human history. Or we can come to
some kind of an arrangement. So when I was in China
and I spoke to the Chinese Politburo in May of this year, the guys that brought me in,
and I paid my own way. I don't do that. I asked them, because
they're very wealthy people. There are wealthy people
in China. So how does being a billionaire
square with communism? And he looked at me and he said,
there is no other way to govern. 1 billion and a half people. No other way. It has to be this way. Next door,
India has got democracy. That's what this man was saying. They believe or talked
themselves into it or whatever. At the system,
they have imposed the most hellacious police state on
this earth has to be because you couldn't
control all these people. So you don't think the world
is going to look back on us 80 years
from now and say, America for 40 years
did not confront China. Going back to H.W. Bush would not confront China because we didn't
want to pay the economic cost. No, you didn't
want to start world War three because you can't use military
because of the nuclear weapons coming up. The British royal's evil. We're winding back the centuries to confront one king of England,
often celebrated in popular culture,
but not by Bill O'Reilly. He was so cruel, personally. It was staggering. We're on Bill O'Reilly's list
isn't a 20th century tyrant, but the consequences of his
actions are still felt today. King Henry the Eighth broke
with the Catholic Church so he could divorce the first
of his six wives. He beheaded two of them
while betraying his closest friends and advisors in a ring
that would change both England and the world forever,
and wanted to get a chapter in the book
that shows you how evil people
can be to their wives, to their best friends,
to their children, personal evil. And that's why
I put him in there, because personal evil is rampant
in this world. Sort of feels like
small potatoes, right? But he isn't because how he treated his wives and his best friend, Thomas More. What was so important
about the story of Thomas More? Well, more is his best friend. You know,
he wanted to help the peasants, and he's a confidant of Henry
the Eighth. Henry,
in the beginning respects him. And then he told Henry, look, you can't be disrespecting
the Pope. We're all Catholic here. And Henry goes blank. You. I'm going to do whatever I want, and you're going
to tell everybody and tell us. And I can't do that. Yeah. Okay. Say hello
to the Tower of London. And then, he winds up
with his head cut off. It's personal,
you know, that'd be like, you know, three weeks later and, you and I, we meet, and then I
have my guys cut your head off. You. You've considered it? No. Como? Yeah, but not you. And he extended that to everybody
in England, Scotland and Ireland and he created the Protestant Catholic wars
that ravaged Europe and killed millions of people
over the centuries. It was all Henry V, all
because he wanted a divorce. He wanted what he wanted
when he wanted it. How was it? And if you didn't show up
with it? Hello? Tower of London. It brings up
an interesting point, though. Has there ever been anybody who had absolute power
as Genghis Khan, as Stalin, as Hitler, as Henry
the Eighth did, and then not been corrupted, not become gluttonous
and pathological? Constantine, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. There's a fairly good guy. George
Washington could have been King. They wanted to crown him. So there have been people
throughout history that, have not succumbed to the evil
that often accompanies power. But it's the exception
rather than the rule. I mean, this guy, you know, he
he was a great illustration of that evil destroys
human beings. If you are an evil person, you are going
to destroy yourself. Yeah, but Henry
the Eighth gets this pass in popular culture, right? He's the only one of these guys
I know. Why, I don't know,
I got Episcopalian friends, and I go,
does it ever strike you that the guy that's in charge
and Henry the eighth? Yeah, but Henry
the Eighth is celebrated beyond the Anglican church,
right? There's movies.
There's pop culture. Look, you're right. The British people and I know
I'm going to get in trouble for saying this,
but the British subjects, they don't want
to admit a lot of wrongdoing. Is this an Irishman
talking, bill? Yeah, a little bit. They confiscated my family's land for no reason,
causing very, very, severe pain. But, I wanted to show
the complete disregard that these people
had on a personal level. I mean, you know, they're
eating, they're drinking. They got 18 mistresses.
They're some. And taking narcotics on and on
and on. And I y'all know
I'm going to do what I want. Coming up, who were the most
evil Americans? You may never have
heard their names, but you need to know
what they did. The slave industry
was the worst thing that ever happened
in the United States. Bill O'Reilly confronting
our homegrown evil. Next. You write that we Americans
have vanquished evil governments in Germany, Japan, Russia, Iraq
and other far off places. But you feature examples of evil
in the United States. You profile the African slave traders,
Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, at one point, the richest guys in America in t world,
and we allowed it in the world. But the American government, the American people,
they allowed it. And it was
it was a slave trade, okay? It went from Virginia down
in New Orleans and then back up the Mississippi. So yes, the slave industry
was the worst thing that ever happened
in the United States. The statue you write in
the book are stunning. The New Orleans slave market
was the largest in the world. I think this is a pretty
stunning passage in the was. And when I read it, 1000 slaves
wait to be sold. The slaves are separated
by gender and age. One by one, they climb atop a wooden box
as buyers inspect them. Males are prodded, slapped and then forced to jog across
a gravel pit without shoes. Females are subjected to demeaning examinations
to prove their fertility. Children watch in horror
as their parents are sold to the highest bidder. More cargo arrives tomorrow. Slavery was at the very
heart of the American economy. That's why
it was showing up to the South. That's the thesis of the 1619
project, right? Are you on the same side
as them? No. Okay. Because slavery was exclusively
for the benefit of the aristocracy in the South. And the reason
it wasn't outlawed was because
the South would succeed. And everybody knew
that these kooks don't want to denigrate America. They're basically say,
okay, slavery built the country. That's not true. All right. That's
not even close to being true. What is true
is the legacy of slavery harms African Americans to this day?
That is true. And I think we have tried. Now to rectify that mistake. My belief is we have tried to
right the historical wrongs. The Civil War was
fought to protect slavery, yet the statues to Confederate generals still stand a big part
of traditional values. Americans, whatever
you want to call them, MAGA. We're going to bring the statues
back. Bases named
after Confederate generals. How do you square that? I swear, like,
I want those names out there. I want people
to see who these men were because they're all different. There's a difference
in having a name out there than celebrating it, right? We wouldn't
have about celebrating. Would we ever
have fought Forrest after Nathan Bedford Forrest? So one of the worst people, who ever lived in America's
Nathan Bedford Forrest, we got a chapter on him,
a Confederate general, and he was a founder of the Ku
Klux Klan. As evil as they come
now, there's no justification for having a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest,
Robert E Lee, a different story. Okay, I'm
not justifying what Lee did, but we believe that states
rights and his Virginia workk
shouldn't be told what to do from the people
across the river. And it wasn't that Lee, was a slave or, you know, a Suzy Astic. But he decided
to do what he did. He was wrong. But that's different. Was he evil? Not, in my opinion. Slavery. Unquestionably
a force for bad in America. Lots of awful things came from
an American capitalism has been the single
greatest thing to happen to the world
and the advances because of it. And yet you put the robber
barons next to the African slavers
as American evil. Sure. And this is fascinating. So we're taping this interview right down the street from where
JP Morgan lived. Yeah. JP Morgan, the shrewdest, smartest robber
baron, bought up all these companies,
paid his people nothing. Got them in mines
where they were beaten, crushed. Got them in, plants
where they were lit on fire. No working conditions,
no safety. Children eight, nine. This didn't wait. JP Morgan. Okay, he's doing all this,
and he knows he's doing it. Yeah, but he's not putting
people in ovens and gas, okay? He's not putting people
in ovens. So what? He's evil. And then Rockefeller shows
up, Rockefeller goes, you know, we're going to need
all this oil. Gotta light these lamps. And here's what I'm going to do
to make more money. Rockefeller. Rockefeller Center,
right down the street. I'm going to not ship oil to certain parts
of the country in the winter. So the people can't heat their homes. And I'll do that
for a month or two. Let them be chilly,
and I'll jack the price up five times
more than it used to be. Hey, these guys were the worst. Okay, so we shouldn't
have statues, right? Nathan Bedford Forrest,
founder of the Klu Klux Klan. Should we have
Rockefeller Center? Remember,
all of these robber barons gave an enormous amount of money
to charity. Carnegie Mellon,
where they tried Vanderbilt, where they tried to buy
redemption. Exactly. He tried to buy their way into
heaven. there not a similarity
to Jeff Bezos on his yacht, in his $50 million wedding wall? There are slaves literally,
in China making all the stuff that Amazon sells. You have to stretch it there, but it's the same as, the Robber Barons,
because it's a handful of guys new. The, country was changing again
in the 1990s. A new high tech was coming, and they made billions
and billions of dollars. But I haven't seen the evil
level. They're not nearly
in the category. The robber barons. Up next,
we've seen the faces of evil. But what can be done to stop it? The worst evil
doers of the past. Maybe day. But as we've seen their legacies
live on today, overseas and right here at home,
and the threat is very real, there is the saying,
the only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph
is good men to do nothing. Right. But how is it
we haven't figured that out? That you have to confront evil
at the beginning, because it's easy to look away. Most human beings take the easy
path. You know, there's very few. George
Washington's just very few. George Patton's. They're extraordinary human
beings. Most of us are weak. Do you have any faith,
any hope left? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think that the, good always outweighs
the bad in the sense that the United States most powerful
nation in the world. Why? Because essentially,
a noble nation. That's why. And all the evil
nations have gone down and most of them are destroyed. Now we're dealing with China
we do want to put in, but I don't expect that they
will ever rise to where we are. So I think they're the good
people outnumber the bad people. No way of attack. This idea of moral relativism that somehow not only do the evil men justify evil, but a lot of people justify
looking away from evil. Sure are they? And they have valid excuses. And then if you're some if you're living
on the south side of Chicago. Right. And you're an honest,
hardworking person. And every day you walk out to the street
and you see guys with guns selling fentanyl and heroin doing horrible things. And you say if I report, I can be killed. That's a pretty good excuse. But then you go into a system
now in America where the left doesn't
want to punish criminals, how do we get there? How insane is that? That alone is evil. We live in a system now. In America, when the progressive left does
not want to punish criminals because they feel it's society's
fault that these people doing heinous things that is evil, because the criminal will
then go out and hurt more people. And the right in America, MAGA
in America, the American first movement in America says,
Let Putin have Ukraine. We don't care. It's
not our problem. Very small minority. The polling indicates
that most Americans understand Putin is evil
and they want Ukraine to stop. And they are objecting to us
sending vast amounts of money to help Ukraine. Standing for good
isn't enough, right? You have to stand up to evil,
to America doesn't do it. Nobody else's. Nobody else. Well, that's
why people, when they badmouthed America
could never understand it. I guess we alone have freed
billions of people. The Cold War was won by us. But look, we could become
a totalitarian society if the education system
continues to decline and the selfishness of our
society continues to rise. Those are the two elements
you would need. So we end tonight with a message
of hope and a warning. It's up to us in ways
both big and small, to make sure evil never
takes over America, to embrace what Abraham Lincoln called
the better angels of our nature, we each decide for ourselves
how to do the right thing. But make no mistake, doing
nothing is never an option. Thanks so much for watching. For all of us here at News
Nation, I'm Leland Vittert. Good night.
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