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Jan. 9, 2025 - Sean Hannity Show
31:28
Bill O'Reilly - January 8th, Hour 2
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All right, Leonard Skinner, simple man.
That can only mean one thing on this radio program.
All things self-proclaimed, simple man, which means all things, Bill O'Reilly.
All things Bill O'Reilly at billorilly.com.
Mr. O'Reilly, sir, happy new year.
Great to talk to you.
I'm sure you agree with me that our prayers are with the people of California, although it is frustrating that the state has done nothing to lessen the likelihood of these wildfires because of their extreme environmental policies.
You know, and this isn't a time for politics, but however, you ought to be able to clear out the brush.
The L.A. mayor shouldn't have cut $17 million of the firefighters' budget.
Scores of broken hydrants in Los Angeles, we've discovered.
And it could be, a lot of this could be prevented if, in fact, if they would get rid of the overgrowth in California forests, which makes this all the more likely.
In much of California, a landowner that undertakes to start a controlled burn on their property has to jump through a series of hoops proving that they have the expertise to do so, but they should be doing it as a state, and lives and property would be saved, Bill.
Well, I don't know if there's any question the state of California is derelict in protecting its citizens from natural disasters.
Did you know that the state approved five water plants a number of years ago?
We're trying to track down exactly when that happened, and none of them have been built.
And why that's important is that California is always in, particularly Southern California, always in the state of drought.
And if you have water plants that hoard water, you can much easier irrigate the land and keep the dry brush from overwhelming the topography.
I was out there a week ago.
I was in almost exactly the place where these fires are, very near Pacific Palisades.
Very calm out there.
It was no problem.
Nobody was anticipating this.
And what the unbelievable thing about it is, this just happened about 24 hours ago.
It's not that this is an ongoing, it's just the fire started and the ferocious winds just whipped it into a catastrophe.
But that's the other part of this.
They know that they regularly have Santa Ana winds.
I lived in California for five years.
I'm very familiar with it.
And I saw these fires up close and personal.
I remember going back and visiting years later in an entire neighborhood very close to where I had lived was burned to the ground.
It was a pretty affluent neighborhood, not the part that I lived in, but I mean, everything was destroyed.
You see, you know, the Pacific Palisades being destroyed.
And they do nothing.
They don't take the necessary steps.
Back then, they were talking about desalinization plants, plants, because they didn't have enough water.
Because you rightly point out that they're constantly in a state of drought.
So that's a big problem.
Then they have all the brush, but you're not allowed to clear the brush because you're clearing the natural habitat of this snake or that lizard.
It's insane.
And as a result, these wildfires now are very predictable, but I would argue some of them, at least, would be very preventable if they take common sense measures.
Okay.
And I think that most people would agree with that.
The Getty Museum, which is a big attraction of Los Angeles, did clear the brush in a very dramatic way.
I don't know whether they got a waiver or not from the city, but they did it.
And that prevented the Getty Museum from being overwhelmed by the flames.
So what you're saying is absolutely, you can't prevent the fires.
What you can prevent is the catastrophe, the rapid spread.
And, you know, but the environmentalists control California.
And as you said, they'll come up with snail darters or this little fish, that, and then you get nothing done.
So while I'm on vacation, I see a headline: Bill O'Reilly summoned to Mar-a-Lago.
That was the exact headline.
I'm sure you saw the article yourself.
In your latest column, you discuss a trip that you made down to Mar-a-Lago.
How much would you like to reveal about that trip?
So I'm on vacation.
We left the day after Christmas for California.
I went to Yosemite, Monterey, Carmel, down to L.A.
And very soon after I left New York, I got a request from President Trump.
Hey, you got to come down to Mar-a-Lago.
Didn't say why.
All right.
Now, I'm not buying a membership.
That's like $125,000.
So I'm not doing that.
And I didn't know why, but when the President of the United States says he wants to see you, you go.
You go.
That's correct.
Yeah, you go.
And you don't say, why?
You just say, okay.
That's what being a patriot is all about.
So anyway, I diverted coming back from L.A. to New York.
I went to L.A. to Miami.
And by the way, don't do that.
There's no non-stop flights from L.A. to Palm Beach.
But it's like Mad Max on I-95 in South Florida.
I mean, really, it's insane.
My son and I are watching these cars go 120.
I thought it was in Germany on the Audubon.
It was crazy.
So we go up to Ma-a-Lago, and I've been there before, and I know the drill.
And we arrive at 7.30 last Thursday.
And he's got a good staff.
He's always had a good staff, Donald Trump.
And a young guy comes and says, President, I'd like to see you.
Okay.
So my son and I go over to the office, which is almost attached to the main residence.
And we go, and I'm ushered into a room, and there is a cabinet meeting underway.
And I went, whoa.
So next to me is Stephen Miller, and then there's Navarro, there's Lutnick, and three guys I didn't know.
And the president is behind his desk.
And I write all about this in a column that you referred to.
You can reference it on billorilly.com.
But the gist of the meeting was worldwide about tariffs and about Panama and about Greenland and about Gaza and China.
And it was just unbelievably fascinating for a journalist historian to hear the back and forth.
And then President Trump asked me my opinion, which, you know, I'm very shy about giving my opinion, Hannity.
You know that.
Very shy.
I mean, demure, shy.
Those are adjectives that immediately come to mind.
That's right.
And everyone knows.
But I gave him my opinion because I am a patriot and when asked by a president.
And it was very interesting to see how in command Donald Trump was.
Bill, here's a fact.
Most people we have known, both known him for about 30 years, the two of us, independently.
Most people do not understand Donald Trump.
They have no idea how smart he is, how funny he is, how generous he is, how witty he is.
They don't understand his psychology.
Everything is a negotiation, and they don't understand when, for example, he says he's going to put tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
That is the beginning of the negotiation.
I don't think he's negotiating when he says they'll be held to pay if the hostages aren't released.
I think he means that.
What really offended me, the corrupt media coverage of the press conference yesterday, was the headline, Trump doesn't rule out military action against Panama.
And you and I understand that he always opens a negotiation and has.
If you read the United States of Trump, the best book on Trump, and has since he was a young man in real estate, always opens with a hand grenade.
Boom.
The most outrageous thing he can say, to throw off the other side.
Now, Canada is not going to become the 51st state.
U.S. Marines are not going to go into Panama.
None of that will happen.
But if you step back and you understand.
But if Panama wants $3 billion in repair assistance from the U.S., there's going to be changes.
Otherwise, one change, and I actually said this in the cabinet meeting, is that a contract, a new contract has to be written whereby our shipping, U.S. shipping, gets a substantial discount going through that canal.
And a top priority considering we are largely responsible for all the engineering and the Panama Canal wouldn't exist but for the United States.
That's true.
Jimmy Carter giving it away was a debacle of monumental proportions.
And God rest his soul.
He was a much better post-president than he was a president, in my view.
He did a lot of great work after his presidency, Habitat for Humanity.
But this was the worst deal ever that I can think of in the modern era of a president giving away that canal that wouldn't exist but for us.
And it got us nowhere.
It got us Noriega.
Bush had to go in and get him.
He was a drug dealer.
I mean, it was insane, but Carter was not a good president.
But anyway, now we have two Chinese companies providing security for the canal.
That can't happen.
It has to stop.
It can't happen.
It has to.
And Trump said it very well.
He said, this was a gift, and it was a gift from the United States.
And you're abusing the gift.
And that has to change.
And if it doesn't change, then I would imagine that there'll be severe consequences for Panama.
And I'm not talking about an invasion.
No.
But the press wants to scare everybody.
That's what they do.
So irresponsible, so dishonest.
And then the Greenland thing, I mean, that's an easy negotiation with Copenhagen.
My message of the day on billoreilly.com is about King Frederick X. You know, it's a kingdom, Denmark.
And King Fred will make a deal in a minute because it'll be good for Denmark because they're never going to harvest the fossil fuels and the lithium underneath that permafrost, and we can.
But the big part of that deal is once we get in there, don't.
We may not even need them, Bill, because they do have autonomy.
They do have their own parliament, and they might vote for their own independence.
And if they do, they can then align with the United States any way they want.
But that's not what is at issue.
The government today and the king is a part of it.
And the king is a descendant from Gorm the Old.
Did you know that?
I did know that, yes.
Guorm the old, 10th century.
Now, I know Goram would have made that deal with Trump.
I know that.
By the way, and the people of Greenland are not happy with Denmark.
They feel like they're treated like second and third class citizens and that there's a level of racism when they make a visit to Denmark.
There's only about 58,000 people on this island of about 1.38 million acres.
If it were a country, it'd be the fifth largest country on the planet.
But I heard a rumor that because Don Jr.
went there, they already made a deal.
If he leaves immediately, Denmark will give Trump anything he wants.
Do you think that's true?
I think it's a possibility.
I do.
I think things are going to change.
I think the world order is going to change.
I think everything already has changed.
I think things will change in the Middle East.
I think we'll see an end to war in Europe.
I do believe that in spite of the sabotage of Joe Biden with, you know, by trying to sell off the wall of pennies on the dollar, which really hurts the American people, him trying to ban fracking and drilling and putting a moratorium on such.
I don't believe any of this will stand.
And I believe Donald Trump's agenda will move forward.
And if he is able to achieve what he's setting out to achieve, I think he has the chance to be the most transformational president in 100, 100 plus years.
Okay, well, I don't want to say we'll see because that's ridiculous, but certainly the potential is there.
Now, here's my beef today.
If we cut $2 trillion in spending, if we deported illegal immigrants, if we secured our borders, if we became the most energy-dominant country on earth, if we rebuild our military for the next generation of weaponry and become the baddest military on the face of the earth, you don't think that's transformative?
Of course it is.
And if it happens, then President Trump will go down in history as one of the great presidents.
But here's my beef today, Hannity.
You ready for my beef?
We got 20 seconds.
Go.
So Biden is going to Italy.
You know how much it costs the taxpayer?
About $15 million.
Kamala's going to Asia and around the world.
Why?
They're grifters.
They're using the taxpayer money to take long vacations.
It's outrageous.
It's outrageous.
All things simple, man, Bill O'Reilly.
Happy New Year, my friend.
And if you get summoned to Palm Beach, you may want to stop by, you know, and catch up with your buddy Hannity next time.
Didn't even give me a call.
Unbelievable.
800-941 Sean, our number.
If you want to be a part of the program, quick break, right back.
Hey there.
I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
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We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass, you're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen.
25 now till the top of the hour, 800-941, Sean, our number.
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I still can't get over the environmental regulations that have prevented California.
And I don't like to talk about politics in the middle of a tragedy because my prayers really are with the people of the Pacific Palisades and anybody impacted in California.
I talked to two friends of mine out there yesterday, and they both had to evacuate their homes.
I got to get an update on how things went for them.
They just wanted to get out with their life.
We have residents furious at the LA mayor, Karen Bass.
She happens to be in Ghana.
Why she's 7,400 miles away, I don't know.
But a lot of people in LA are furious.
We also discovered firehouse.com that LA firefighters are at their wits' end after finding scores of broken fire hydrants as they struggle to gain control over one of the worst worst wildfires in their city's history.
You have the mayor slashing LA firefighter budgeting by $17 million.
That was only months before the city now is up in flames.
The LA fire department had its budget cut by a staggering $17.6 million this financial year.
And this California wildfire problem, which we have gone into great specificity and detail about, a lot of this would be preventable if they would do controlled burns, if they would clear out a lot of the material that is burned, that they'd create areas where they'd cut down trees and barriers.
There's all sorts of fire safety, fire management, forestry.
It's a science if they actually would follow it, but they don't because they give into the environmental extremists.
It was only four months ago, Donald Trump was in California speaking about the need for California to send more water downstate to prevent fires.
Now, it's interesting that years ago, they did fund five water plants for this very purpose, and none of them were built.
And somebody needs to be held responsible for that.
Listen, cleaned out and protected.
We've got to take care of the floors.
You know, the floors of the forests, very important.
You look at other countries where they do it differently, and it's a whole different story.
It was with the president of Finland, and he said, We have much different.
We're a forest nation.
He called it a forest nation.
And they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don't have any problem.
And when it is, it's a very small problem.
So I know everybody's looking at that to that end, and it's going to work out.
You have so much water, and all those fields that are right now barren, the farmers would have all the water they needed.
And you could revert water up into the hills where you have all the dead forests, where the forests are so brittle.
Because no place is like California.
I go to Austria.
The head of Austria tells me, you know, we have trees that are much more flammable than what you have in California.
We never have forest floors because they maintain their forests.
And you have all that water that could be used to, as water, what they call water flow, where the war, you know, where the land would be damp.
And you'd stop many of these horrible fires that are costing billions and billions of dollars by the federal government, et cetera.
So one thing I'm going to do for California, vote for me, California.
I'm going to give you safety.
I'm going to give you a great border.
And I'm going to give you more water than almost anybody has.
And by the way, he's not wrong on the water part.
I mean, many of you may remember that years ago, I went out to the San Joaquin Valley, and they would not allow water to be given to farmers.
And I'd walk through, you know, literally thousands and thousands of acres of farms were pretty much shut down because of a government policy to protect this little, what looked like a minnow fish called the Delta Smelt.
And they cared more about the Delta smelt and their environmental agenda than they did about farmers and their ability to make a living and provide food for people.
It's insanity.
But that's, you know, that's what they're doing.
All right, let's get to our busy, busy phones.
Let us say hi to Chris.
He's in the great state of Texas.
God bless Texas.
Happy New Year, Chris.
How are you?
Happy New Year, sir.
Yeah, I bet a Texas related question when it comes to Biden sabotaging this wall and selling this for five cents on the dollar.
I don't understand why no one in the state of Texas in the county at the county level made an attempt to purchase these things to secure them.
And I know that you can do that if you join the, there's a federal website to register to put things out to bid.
And I know I was in law enforcement and I know my contacts back in New Jersey are still involved in that.
And it's a pretty simple thing.
Listen, it's a very simple thing.
This is only vindictiveness.
This is pettiness.
This is not going to really personally hurt Donald Trump.
This will hurt the American people by trying to put limitations, moratoriums on drilling and fracking.
That's not going to hurt Donald Trump.
Donald Trump will be able to overcome that, most likely first with an executive order.
It may take court litigation action later.
It may take legislation in the end, but he's going to drill and he's going to make this country energy dominant.
He's not going to give up.
But this is vindictive pettiness.
It really, really shows you, you know, want to talk about undermining democracy.
They know what the Trump agenda is.
They know what the American people voted for, and they just want to undermine it every step of the way.
And selling off portions of the wall, knowing that Donald Trump would buy new wall to build.
Yeah, it'll cost six times what it cost, you know, however many years ago, six years ago, whenever he bought it.
But, you know, that Joe's hurting the American people by trying to put a moratorium on energy.
He's hurting all of you because you'll pay more for energy.
The more energy produced, supply, demand, crisscrossed, dictate the price, and you reduce the supply, it increases the cost.
It's that simple because the demand will remain constant.
So I just think that that's on Joe.
It really shows what an angry, bitter, resentful, petty person that he is, and frankly has been the whole time, and why he's one of the worst presidents in history.
Back to our phones.
Thank you for the call, Chris.
Wayne in Pennsylvania.
What's up, Wayne?
How are you?
We love our friends in the Commonwealth.
What's going on?
Hey, Happy New Year, Sean, and congratulations.
Thank you.
Happy New Year to you, too, my friend.
God bless you.
Thank you.
Hey, I'd like to make a few points what I've learned during the past presidential cycle with both the Democrats and the Republicans.
And before I do that, I'd like to make a confession, Sean.
Back in 1975, I saw Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden.
Sean, I didn't know I was attending a neo-Nazi rally at the time.
Well, you are not.
But a statement like that, that's what the Democrats were doing with Trump.
They had the legacy media had the Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, and then they flashed the neo-Nazi rally back in the 30s at the garden, calling them Hitler, fascist.
But you know what?
That was ridiculous.
So one of the other points is the mental health of Biden.
Now, I cannot believe Schumer just recently came out and said he saw nothing wrong with him.
And I honestly believe the reason why they had the debate that early in June is because they knew there were issues with Biden, and that was their out to just show him to the public what he really was.
Another point with.
But you know what?
There was a great column by, well, those were two great columns, one by Joe Concha, who was on yesterday, and Greg Jarrett also on yesterday.
And Greg's column, 2024, the year of gaslighting.
And it really was, and this is why I proclaimed the death of legacy media.
I'm not going to be proven wrong on this.
Like, I wasn't proven wrong on the death, you know, when I said journalism is dead.
You know, you can go back to they lied.
They covered up what was happening at the border.
They covered up inflation.
They covered up the economy.
They covered up the high costs of gasoline.
They covered up Joe's cognitive state.
They lied about the state of the world.
They defied Supreme Court decisions.
They did all of these things.
Then they lied about the cheap fake videos after the G7 summit.
They lied about their policy flip-flopping.
Nobody wanted to cover the Kamala files the way we did on this program, but it did go rather viral.
You're right about the Madison Square Garden rally.
It was not an ode to Nazis, as they claimed.
And their rationale now that Kamala lost because of sexism and racism is completely out of touch.
And Sean, like you always say, you have to unpeel the onion.
Like with COVID, they pretty much ostracized us, canceled us because we didn't take the shot.
And so many people lost their livelihood, lost their lives.
And there were cases where people were set up for major surgery and they were turned down because they did not take the shot.
Another point that I want to make is climate change.
There's climate change every year.
It's called the four seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter.
And being a resident of New Jersey for a period of time, we had temperature swings from anywhere from 98 degrees down to 15 degrees.
So, you know what?
That's a bunch of baloney about climate change.
As for the Republicans, you only won by 2 million votes.
That comes down to 40,000 votes per state.
Start listening to the people.
I've been trying to get in touch with my senator, my council people, and even ex-governors.
And they do not want to hear from the people.
It's always an intern or a surrogate, and you never really speak to that particular person.
So they need to listen to us or else they'll lose in 2028.
Thank you very much, John.
Well said, Wayne.
Listen, you have a very, very great new year.
Have a happy new year.
God bless you and your family, my friend.
800-941-Sean, our number, if you want to be a part of the program, John in Texas.
John, God bless Texas.
What's going on?
Well, thanks for having me on.
I just kind of wanted to say a little bit about Judge Meathead there.
I think if he doesn't go through with the sentencing at all, he's just going to say that, yeah, we had him, but he's immune and he escaped this way.
And I think under an appeal, the entire case is going to be laid out for the whole world to see.
They're going to see all the facts, the twisting of the facts in the law to achieve the end result.
And it's going to be out for everybody to see.
And also, maybe you can show some of the collusion.
It's not that the left fears Trump's views.
They really fear his effectiveness.
And that's why we're going after him like this.
Well, they did it to win the election.
They did it to make him a convict.
He's not officially a convict till he's sentenced.
On the other hand, he does have the opportunity then to appeal the case.
I believe in the end it will be overthrown.
Some breaking news today.
The president did file an emergency petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent this sentencing.
I don't know if it's going to be too late.
I know people like Mark Levin and others have been saying that they need to do this sooner, but you know what?
There's still time.
Let's see what happens.
And if the president does get sentenced, it'll be irrelevant anyway.
There's not going to be any fine.
There's not going to be any imprisonment.
There's not going to be anything, except Democrats will say he's a convicted felon.
Well, for now, because there were so many abuses of the system and corruption involved in this case, I can't imagine that this is not going to get overturned and probably overturned rather expeditiously.
So they'll get their sentencing.
They'll get their last pound of flesh.
And after that, guess what?
Donald Trump will be the president.
It won't matter, and it won't be an issue when he leaves office.
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