The shock and grief surrounding Charlie Kirk's assassination on a Utah college campus is setting new urgency for conversations about the nature of evil in America. Sean Hannity frames Kirk as a patriot and martyr for free speech, highlighting how his murder shook not only his loved ones but also influential figures like President Trump. Special guest Bill O'Reilly joins Sean to discuss his new book "Confronting Evil," offering insight from his private conversations with Trump and reflecting on how this tragedy intersects with global crises and personal responsibility. Their discussion delves into the societal impact of dehumanizing rhetoric, the importance of punishing evil, and why Kirk's legacy could mark a turning point for confronting hatred. This matters now more than ever, as America faces internal and external challenges demanding moral clarity and action.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
All right, Leonard Skinner's simple man that can only mean one thing on this radio program, and that is all things self-described, simple man that means all things Bill O'Reilly, all things Bill O'Reilly at BillO'Reilly.com.
Um I just want to make note of a fact.
Uh Bill and I we we have very different schedules, and sometimes it's hard for Bill and I, you know, to go live, and he has a phenomenal book out.
And I read it cover to cover.
And he's written a thousand number one New York Times best selling books, nineteen to be very specific.
And I know they hate it every time they have to put his name at the top of the list, but this one really got my attention, and I couldn't put the book down, and it's ripped out of the headlines of today, and we did an interview that I think maybe was the best interaction we had had together, uh, and it was supposed to air, and then Charlie Kirk got assassinated.
By the way, we're gonna put that whole interview.
Well, again, I don't want to take it out of context.
This is why I'm bringing Bill back today live, because it is worth listening to.
It's gonna it's gonna it's up on Hannity.com.
He wrote a book, Confronting Evil, assessing the worst of the worst.
I had written a book about evil back in 2004, very different book, but it starts out I had on page one I put in there the Lord's prayer lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
And I've often made the case that it is very hard for good people or or people that mostly want to be good but aren't perfect that are weak, and that we have our flaws and that we're all sinners and we've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, which is the the whole Christian message of salvation.
And it just it it hits home what happened this week as hard and as painful as it has been for all of you and for me and for Bill and for everybody was evil.
Now, he's talking more on a macro level, but it happens on a micro level as well.
I mean, if you hurt a child, you are an evil human being.
If you kill assassinate, you know, a cheerful, you know, i individual who says, tell me where I'm wrong, uh, and goes into a hostile environment of liberal indoctrination like Charlie Kirk did, that's evil.
Uh we're dealing with evil monsters on the world stage, President Chi, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, Ayatollah Homeini, you know, back in the day.
Now we have the Supreme Leader, and Bill captures this and makes you think in a way that that you really you need to make do a deep dive into.
Anyway, um the book is on Hannity.com, as I said, Amazon.com, bookstores around the country, and the other hour that we did, and this will be a very different hour, um, we are putting on Hannity.com.
Mr. O'Reilly, sir, thanks for coming back.
I appreciate it, but I really was moved by the book.
I did read it cover-to-cover, and it is in light of everything that happened since we spoke earlier this week.
Um, I think it takes on a whole new context.
Well, I did an interview earlier, uh, and a uh interview person said to me, uh, it's a haunting situation that your book, Infronting Evil, comes out on Tuesday, and the very next day, Putin lobs missiles into Poland, and a few hours later, Charlie Kirk is shot to death.
Uh I'm glad we're doing this hour.
It's an important hour.
If you're riding in the car anywhere in the United States, keep riding.
Don't park and get out.
You're gonna want to hear this whole hour.
First thing I'd like to do with your permission, because it's your show, Hannity, is to report on what happened last night with uh President Trump and me at Yankee Stadium.
Would that be all right?
Yeah, please.
I knew you were there.
So I got a call uh late on Wednesday night on my birthday uh from uh President Trump's top assistant, and he said, um, she said, can you go to Yankee Stadium and uh watch the game with the president?
Now, what are you gonna say?
No, you know, yes, and uh and I was I was pleased to go.
Uh certainly.
And I had no idea about what the structure was gonna be or anything like that.
I knew it was gonna be in a steinbar in a box at Yankee Stadium.
That's the secured box.
But that's all I knew.
Uh and then uh subsequently uh we gathered information that was gonna be a big entourage uh there.
A lot of people in the Trump administration, all the Republican Congress people in New York, you know, big big and all the Yankee people and the Steinbrand people.
So I go into the box and uh my little nameplate is right next to President Trump.
So Randy Levina, President of the Yankees on one side, I'm on the other side of him.
Then I knew that this was serious.
Okay, and I I kind of knew that anyway because President Trump was shaken by the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
In shaken I mean he's not a man that shows emotion, as you know, you know him very well.
He said he doesn't show outward emotion, but he knew uh Charlie and they were friends.
And you know, when you lose a friend it suddenly like that, and I've I have uh you know you it takes you a while to um process it.
So anyway, uh throughout the game there were two topics of conversation.
One was Charlie Kirk and the other was evil Putin.
So I can't report uh, you know, because these these conversations were private.
Nobody in the box could really hear what the president and I were saying.
Uh and I can't really tell the country, you know, but I can give you an outline of it.
Um because he's aware, President Trump's aware of confronting evil.
In fact, I gave him a copy, and he says, I'm gonna start to read this tonight.
Uh and it was critical mass has been reached with Bad Vlad.
When you when you're shooting missiles into a NATO nation, um that's enough.
And it's as simple as that.
That's enough.
So we discussed what the United States and NATO have to do, and I believe President Trump is gonna do that fairly soon.
I've had the same conversations all week with the president off the record, and I'm not going to reveal them like you're not gonna reveal them.
And yeah, he was friends with Charlie.
Right?
Um and he's very aware of Putin.
He gave him every opportunity.
But he also gave Iran every opportunity too, Bill.
Uh now, but this is this is a nuclear armed nation.
It's a very different situation.
Right.
So you and I, and I was just gonna say that you and I are in getting the same information from the most powerful man in the world.
The wild card on Putin, it's not like Iran.
So you can go in and you can bomb Iran, they can't do anything about it.
But Putin would use nuclear weapons.
And after you read my book, you'll see why, because he's not the same man that he was in the first Trump administration.
Evil always deteriorates.
It never gets better.
And that is what is happening to Putin now.
All right.
So it has to be very deliberate, it has to be very surgical, but the message has to be sent to him and the world enough.
And then it was on to Charlie Kirk.
And this is more of a framing issue.
Because whether you like Donald Trump or not, and I would tell uh your audience, Hannity, that seventy-five percent of the sold-out stadium last night, which about I guess 50,000 people, were respectful to the president in the sense that they applauded USA to USA, USA it was 9-11, about 75%.
The other 25%, a few booed, most didn't do anything.
They just sat there because they don't like them.
New York City's a liberal city.
Nothing wrong with that, as long as you're not disrespectful.
But overwhelmingly, the crowd was pro-Trump.
That booied the president's spirits.
You could see it, you could feel it.
I was right next to him.
Because in the tennis over the weekend, it was different.
Different crews, working class people go to baseball games, swells go to see the tennis.
Swell don't like Donald Trump, generally speaking.
But in the Charlie Kirk discussion, I would I here's what struck me.
And remember it that the wounds are still raw.
Okay.
What that means is that if you knew Charlie Kirk, and you knew his family situation, in particular, two young children and the widow.
It's almost impossible to deal with that in a rational, unemotional way.
Emotion just overwhelms you.
But the way that Donald Trump has decided to deal with it is to honor the memory of Charlie Kirk in the sense that he was brave enough to exercise his freedom of speech in what he believed, firmly believed, was a positive way for the country.
That's the overarch.
And so President Trump will be attending his funeral, will be giving him the medal, okay, um, the highest civilian award that you can get in this country, and Charlie Kirk will go down in history as a martyr for free speech.
And then I said to him, and then he goes, What do you, you know, and we were back and forth on that.
And I said, the worthiness of this for history is this could be a turning point.
Pardon the pun, Charlie Kirk's organization's turning point, USA.
This could be a turning point because everyone is locked in.
The apathetic, the stupid, the bitter, everybody's locked in on this.
And I believe most Americans are good people, and they're gonna say, just as we're saying to Putin, enough of this hatred.
And that is going to be the worthiness going forward.
And that was the basis of our discussion in the box last night.
Bill, I would like to believe what you just said that a closing statement was true.
I'd like to believe that the people that for ten years that have said, you know, look at the closing arguments of 2024.
Racist Nazi, Hitler Stalin Mussolini.
And I've been arguing there is a dehumanizing impact on people's minds, especially the weak-minded or the vulnerable or the mentally ill, or people that are kind of hanging in the balance, and they're impacted by those words.
And while we might over time, you know, become numb to it because we were report on it and have reported on these things now for decades, uh, those that have uh only recently, like in this case of this this kid, you know, buying into the sick, ugly, twisted ideology, you know, you get impacted by words.
There's nothing you can't you you can't describe evil uh or call somebody evil in a way that is more damaging than saying they're Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin.
You can't.
And so when you dehumanize it, it's almost has a hypnotic effect to the point where people you know begin to believe that they're doing God's will.
I talked to Dr. Drew about this last night, he said it is a very real, real syndrome.
Let's break let's break it down because I'm a simple man, okay.
If you are living in a home with somebody who is happy that Charlie Kirk was assassinated, that person you are living with is mentally ill.
There's no two sides to that.
And likely the mental illness that is gripping the person that you know is going to get worse.
So therefore, there has to be some kind of an intervention on a family basis.
Can't look away anymore.
You can't say, oh, it's a fad.
Ah, he'll get over it.
Oh, he'll grow out of it.
No, you can't.
Because that's so heinous.
What happened is so hands, and and just consider this.
Charlie Kirk's family is destroyed, but the family of the alleged assassin is destroyed too.
How much evil is involved here?
Okay.
So the guy, obviously mentally ill, and that does not give Him a pass.
The guy at Charlotte Buss is mentally ill, got on the bus with a knife, sat behind a woman, and then made a decision to kill her.
Yeah, mentally ill, okay, but evil.
And you have to punish evil.
That's the key.
Now, here's going back to President Trump.
And this is what many, many people don't understand.
Trump firmly believes, and always has, that evil has to be punished.
He'll make a deal with it if it's better for the United States.
But in his DNA, is we cannot let people hurt other people, and we cannot allow it to go unpunished.
Alright, we'll take a break.
We'll come back on the other side.
Bill O'Reilly is with us.
He just released his new book.
It's on Hannity.com, Amazon.com, bookstores around the country.
It's called uh Confronting Evil, Assessing the Worst of the Worst.
We'll go through a little bit of that list when we get back.
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All right, again, continuing with Bill O'Reilly, his new book out this week.
It's on Hannity.com, Amazon.com, bookstores around the country confronting evil, assessing the worst of the worst, and we saw evil on display this week in Utah.
Um I want to talk a little bit more broadly about the evil in the world.
And I don't know why there's a reluctance and a resistance among the left.
And I am getting a little political here, but hear me out, Bill, and then I'll give you all the time you need to respond.
You look at the issue of crime.
President Trump decides, okay, the homicide rate.
The U.S. has the highest homicide rate of any capital city in the world.
He's not going to put up with that.
And lo and behold, he cracks down on crime, lives are being saved, and DC is the safe it has safest it has been in decades.
And then he offers it to Chicago, and the mayor, Brandon Johnson has a meltdown.
The governor has a meltdown.
Gavin Newsom has a meltdown.
New York has a meltdown.
As if he's doing something horrible.
And to me, the the people on the left are putting the so-called rights of criminals over the safety of their own citizens.
And then you add to that defund, dismantle no Bell Law Madness, and reimagine the police madness, and you have nothing but, you know, okay, what did we have the last two weekends in Chicago?
About 80 people shot and about 20 people dead.
That is that is like a typical, you know, two weekends in Chicago.
And they they don't seem to care.
They don't they won't take the help that's being offered.
Now, I ask you this through the prism of evil existing, because they're facilitating this.
And you mentioned that if people vote for Mom Dani, that they're actually, because he supports these policies, that they themselves are aiding and a betting in in this activity.
Explain.
Okay.
So I think President Trump has adopted me as his favorite historian.
And the macro picture on this is in this is the second time in modern times.
All right, so we'll go back to um the turn of the 20th century as far as modern times concerned.
The second time that evil has risen in the world to the heights where danger level has been reached.
The first time was in the 1930s.
And uh that was on the right.
That was the fascist movements in Europe and Japan.
And well, it was also a socialist movement in some capacity.
I don't want to get into a historical argument with you, but keep going.
Present time, but you need to know what happened just briefly.
So 100 million dead.
After World War II.
United States defeated evil with the help of our allies, but it was really us that did it.
So that was def a defeat of evil in the nineteen thirties, but the the way it rose was frightening.
Now we see that again.
But it's on the left.
And what has happened around the world, and particularly in the United States, is moral relativism.
There is no right and wrong.
There is no good and evil.
So Joe Biden didn't get up every morning and said, I'm committing an evil act by failing to enforce immigration law.
That's not what he did.
And there was nobody in the White House telling him that no dissent.
He lived in a bubble.
And the people that drove that open border policy, which has led to the deaths, I would say of hundreds of thousands of Americans because of the narcotics proponent of it, that along with the flood of migrants, you had a record amount of deadly narcotics flowing into this country because the Biden administration told the border patrol to stand down.
So you're talking of hundreds of thousands of dead people, partially responsible for their own demise, but still aided and abetted.
So the left does not see that.
They will not even recognize it.
And that is the danger that we face now.
And then you go into the law enforcement, that you have major cities in this country where the DAs don't want to prosecute criminals.
And the statement you referenced about Mandani, and I got blowback from this, but that's my life, is I said anybody voting for that man for mayor is committing an evil act.
You may not be totally evil, but by giving him power, and he has told you directly he does not want to incarcerate criminals, he's gonna cut a billion dollars out of the NYPD budget.
He believes police officers are racist across the board.
The body count is going to triple or quadruple if that man wins.
And you are helping him win?
Mm-hmm.
What would you call a vote like that?
And when I said it, you can't refute it, because Van Dani himself says it.
And then you go over to Pritzker and you go over to Johnson in Chicago and Illinois, where the federal government is offering a blanket of protection for African Americans on the South Side who are being gunned down on a daily basis by drug gangs.
And it's been going on for twenty years, and the state and locals have not been able to stop it.
And finally a president says, I'll help you.
And that guy's the devil, that guy's Hitler.
That's evil at an unprecedented rhetorical level.
What you're what you're describing, Bill, is a predictable outcome, and yet they're they're uh that they are leaning into these policies, you know, sh uh more heavily every single day.
Let me go back to your previous point, because it's something that that I assessed in in my book in two thousand and four, and that is, you know, the last century alone, if you look at Mao and China and Stalin and Russia and Hitler and Germany and and Mussolini and Tojo, we lost over a hundred million people.
A hundred million souls.
And I argued at the time, and I argue today that it is very hard for good people or reasonably good people, or people that desire to be good, people that have a heart, conscience, and soul, to wrap their minds around The fact that evil does exist.
And if you're allowing unvetted illegals into this country, you're putting Americans in danger.
If you buy into defund, dismantle, no bail laws, reimagine the police, you are opening the door to evil and danger.
And in that sense, there is either a fundamental level of ignorance that is spectacular to me because it's common sense, uh, or there are other motives that that I don't know what they could be about, but there's there's got to be something.
The evidence, you know, is that great.
And understanding this is critical.
You know, the the subtitle of my book, Deliver Us from Evil was Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism.
Now, I got I got criticized for putting in liberalism.
And what did I mean by that?
I meant that we have to win the political narrative if we're going to stop the evil that we know exists that maybe a lot of people don't want to focus on.
You're not going to stop it, but you can mitigate it.
And that's what I'm going to make a prediction about right now.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk is going to lead to the weakening of evil in the left wing precincts.
It's going to be much harder for those people to peddle this dangerous philosophy now after Charlie Kirk was assassinated than it was last week.
Because the people who aren't ideological are paying attention finely.
They're putting their cell phones down finely.
They're watching uh Fox News or News Nation, whatever it may be, finally.
And they're making judgments.
You have to be able to make a judgment on this.
You can't walk away and not make a judgment about Charlie Kirk.
And the nuts and loons who are public and have said, oh, he deserved it, like the Dowd guy on MSNBC.
Anybody shocked about MSNBC?
No.
Stephen King.
He's been a loon uh from day one.
Okay.
These people are now on the run.
They have to apologize.
Dowd was fired.
Even the women on the view, as hypocritical as you could possibly get.
Oh, they're lamenting the death of Charlie Kirk.
Did you ever invite him on your program?
No.
Did you ever say a kind word about the people that Charlie Kirk represented?
No.
And now you're all because Disney ordered him to do that.
Disney actually told the producer of the view, do not allow these five women to say anything bad about Charlie Kirk.
And I know that to be true.
So out of tragedy, out of evil, if you can mitigate it or defeat it, sometimes emerges good.
And I think that Charlie Kirk gave his life for his cause, never knowing that obviously this was going to happen.
Okay.
But what is the tide, I see it beginning to turn against the Pritzkers and the Newsoms, the Mandanis, the Schumers.
It's turning against them.
And I told that to President Trump last night.
I said, you be the voice of reason.
You say no violence.
You tamp it down.
You lead that movement.
Because that is what the country needs right now.
All right, quick break.
We'll come back more with all things simple man Bill O'Reilly.
All things with O'Reilly at BillO'Reilly.com.
Don't forget his new book is just out today.
You're going to want to get a copy of it.
And it's confronting evil and assessing the worst of the worst.
Amazon.com, Hannity.com, bookstores around the country, more with O'Reilly on the other side as we continue.
The final hour of the Sean Hannity Show is up next.
Hang on for Sean's conservative solutions.com, Amazon.com, and as of today, bookstores around the country.
Also more of my interview with Bill O'Reilly at Hannity.com if you'd like to listen uh later or over the weekend.
Uh Mr. O'Reilly, I gotta say it's it's right up there with uh the I think probably the best book you've written, the most serious book you've written, and you've written a lot of them.
And uh I think that there's a message here at a very critical time.
This is a this is a crossroads now for the country.
It's a tipping point.
Uh but we appreciate your time.
Thank you for being with us and uh congratulations on the book.
And I know the New York Times is gonna vomit when they have to put you up at number one again.
Well, look, number one, I appreciate you reading the book.
Number two, you've really covered this well, Hannity.
And you know me.
I'm no cupcake when I come out to uh give compliments.
Oh my gosh.
But you have.
Because it's a hard story.
You cannot help yourself.
I love you to death, but my goodness, you can't help yourself.
No, I can't.
But uh the people don't know how hard it is to cover a story like this when you're emotionally involved.
And I know you knew Charlie Kirk.
I did not know him very well.
But I know you did.
He was such a Bill, he was a champion.
He was a warrior, he was a he was a cheerful warrior.
Walk into these college campuses.
Tell me where I'm wrong.
Have these discussions, knowing it's a hostile environment, never expecting this.
Uh got a role.
Bill O'Reilly Confronting Evil.
Again, Hannity.com, Amazon.com, bookstores around the country.
