Bill O'Reilly | Killing the Witches

[00:00:06] Bill OReilly has the latest book in his killing series. If you recall, he's done books like huge bestsellers called Killing Lincoln, Killing JFK. And these are books that are not only about the drama surrounding the events of the assassination of Lincoln, the assassination of JFK,

[00:00:25] but also explores the kind of historical backdrop, like particularly with Lincoln, the Civil War, and then the flash forward from the assassination, which is the whole reconstruction era,

[00:00:37] how the world changed after the Civil War, why the assassination of Lincoln and then JFK and so many others changed the course of events of what would have happened. He's again, he's written 18 of these books in the killing series.

[00:00:51] And the latest one, Killing the Witches is very fascinating. Like we all learn about the Salem witch trials here in America when we were kids.

[00:01:00] Like, oh, what a horrible time in, in what a shameful time in human history where on very little evidence and very little, you know, very little sense of doing what's right and wrong. These women were killed when these kids who knew what the agenda was of the kids,

[00:01:20] these kids accused these women of being witches and there was just no way out. You were just these women were either burned alive or hung.

[00:01:29] Just cruel ways to kill someone like being burned alive is a five minute event of just nonstop pain for hundreds of innocent women in history who have been accused of being witches, which obviously there's no such thing as witches. They were not witches. They were not evil women.

[00:01:47] The accusers were evil and the accusers never faced trouble even after the Salem witch trials ended. And you see in this book. So again, Bill O'Reilly does it again. The Salem witch trials happened in 1692, but it really begins with the pilgrims and the Puritans in 1620.

[00:02:05] He talks about all the events leading up. It's a fabulous history of early America or I should say European early America, all the events leading up to 1692. And then afterwards how it changed the course of human history.

[00:02:17] And I didn't know this, the relationship between Ben Franklin, the Constitution and the Salem witch trials, which Bill describes in this book. But then furthermore, I asked Bill, what does he think about the relationship between the Salem witch trials and events happening now,

[00:02:36] even all the way up to the national discussion on Israel and Hamas? And his answers were fascinating and eye-opening. It's a very short podcast. He didn't have that much time, but I hope you listen. He said he would come back on again.

[00:02:51] So if you have any questions, please tweet them out to me and I'll be sure to ask him. Meanwhile, you should enjoy the book and enjoy this podcast. This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altiger show.

[00:03:19] Bill, super enjoyed your latest book in the Killing Series, Killing the Witches. Of course, as a kid, you learn all about the Salem witch trials, but I never really connected all the dots from the entrance of the pilgrims to the Salem witch trials to the Revolutionary War.

[00:03:36] It's such a great way to learn history in the dramatic way that you present not only this book, but all the Killing Series. So tell me about how the series started. You started with Killing Lincoln.

[00:03:47] What made you think of the assassination of Lincoln as the starting point of the story, which describes both the past and the future? How the future changed because Lincoln was killed and this goes for all the killing books.

[00:03:59] Well, it's a fascinating story because the Killing Series is the most successful nonfiction book series of all time. And about 2000, the year 2000, I had written a few bestsellers, contemporary stuff. The No Spin Zone is looking out for you, things like that.

[00:04:16] But I pretty much said what I wanted to say so I went to the publisher and said, look, I'm a former history teacher. I know how to engage people in reading and caring about what happened in this country. So let's write a book on Lincoln.

[00:04:31] He's a big guy and I don't think this story has been told as well as it should have been. And the publisher said to me, you're crazy. There's been a million books on Lincoln. Nobody will buy the book. And I said, well, I'll take less money.

[00:04:43] And I think that's the only time in my life, James, that I've ever said I'll take less money. And I did. And then Lincoln sold three million copies. Boom, because people want to know about their country, but they don't want to be bored to shreds. Yeah.

[00:05:01] So we combine information with fun. And you know, it's hard to say the word fun when you go and talk about killing the witches or killing the SS or killing the killers, but the books move along. So that was a genesis of it.

[00:05:17] And obviously what's great about these, like let's say killing Lincoln as an example. The assassination of Lincoln is in itself dramatic and drama. There's John Wilkes Booth. There's the hunt for John Wilkes Booth. There's the events leading up to it.

[00:05:32] There's the what ifs he had knock onto the theater. There's also this. It's a pivotal point in US history because the civil war is ending and a new country is ready to berth.

[00:05:41] And so you're using the drama of the assassination of Lincoln to basically provide history about the civil war and what historic events let up this killing. Plus how the future, how reconstruction, the integration of South and North completely changed because of this assassination.

[00:05:59] And I feel like you use that formula in every one of these books, like with JFK. It's a way to talk about how the Vietnam war then, you know, divided the country with starting with the assassination of JFK.

[00:06:10] Like many people think killing JFK, they just think what's the story of the assassination? What made, how did you put it all together? The historical view, the 10,000 foot view that you do. Well, it's basically my journalistic skill level.

[00:06:25] So I combined James journalism with history and I don't know of anybody doing that right now in America. And that's one of the reasons. So I'm always okay. So it happened. All right. So Kennedy got assassinated. Lincoln got assassinated. What are the unintended consequences of that?

[00:06:43] As a, as a journalist, that's a question you would ask. All right. So this happens then what? And then the then what becomes unbelievably fascinating. And that's a big part of killing the witches because okay, we take you to Salem. You see the insane little kids accusing people.

[00:07:04] 20 of them get executed, hundreds more in jail just on the testimony of 10 year old girls. No defense or anything like that. Insane. But then what happens?

[00:07:18] And what happens is a guy named Benjamin Franklin who's a genius teenager and boss and gets onto this and visits the top witch hunter caught in Mather.

[00:07:29] And Franklin takes away this stunning conclusion that religion out of control is the reason that these people were killed, which is true. And then he takes that into the constitutional convention in Philadelphia when he gets older and more powerful.

[00:07:47] And that's why we don't have any religion in our constitution. Whereby Patrick Henry and Roger Sherman and other founders wanted the United States to be designated a Christian nation in writing. They lost and we give you that whole brawl.

[00:08:01] So my job is to basically tell the reader the nuts and bolts of what we're talking about, whether it be Kennedy or Lincoln or Reagan or the SS, but then take it further. And that's why I think the series has been so successful. Yeah.

[00:08:17] I'll admit like as an avid history reader, I did not know. I didn't. I was not able to initial until I read the book.

[00:08:24] I was not able to make the connection between the Salem witch trials and the separation of church and state in the constitution until you wrote it. How did you learn that? Like what did you learn that in the process of writing this book or?

[00:08:37] Yes, I learned it in the process of writing the book. I didn't know it beforehand, but we researched for six months before we start to write the killing books. Killing books take a year. Okay.

[00:08:49] And in the research process, Benjamin Franklin pops up and we went, oh, what has been doing? And then we got the documentation of his meeting with Mather and that he was so unsettled by it, it stayed with him his whole life.

[00:09:07] And then we traced it all the way to Philadelphia. That's kind of detective work. That's what we do in research. We find out things that nobody knows like the Mayflower. We open the killing witches with it.

[00:09:20] James, you and I, we would not have wanted to been on that boat. Sal was horrendous. Everybody said, oh, Mayflower pilgrims pass this stuff and no, it was horrible. That 66 day voyage. And then they get here and it gets worse.

[00:09:37] Why do you think anybody wanted to go to America given the high odds of death? They were booted out. The King James, they didn't want the Puritans there. First, I went to Holland, Holland booted them out. I mean, these were crazy people. Yeah. The devil was everywhere.

[00:09:54] You're going to hell. He can't have any fun and the kids can't sing. They can't dance. They can't play. That's why these kids did it. They were so crazed because their lives are so miserable that they said, all right, I'm going to liven things up here in Salem.

[00:10:09] And they did. You know, what disturbed me in the book and what was always disturbing about this story is how willing people are to listen to things that are completely irrational. Like, why do you think? Yes, they were a very religious group.

[00:10:40] But why do you think they were willing to kill 70 year old women who had always been, you know, positive in their society, but just on the accusation of some girls who were probably crazy or vindictive. They're willing to hang or burn alive at the stake.

[00:10:58] Grammas that they knew. Fear. If you objected to the witch hunt, then the next day you were designated a witch. You were accused.

[00:11:09] So there were good people in Salem, but they, we give a couple of examples of people who stood up to these clerics and these corrupt judges. And then the next day they're accused of being a witch. So everybody's shut up.

[00:11:22] I mean, the governor was against these witch trials. It seemed throughout and he seemed to be somewhat of a voice of reason during this time, 1692. And yet they still continued like there was no way to stop these trials. William Phipps was weak.

[00:11:37] So he didn't want to rile up all the religious zealots, including the powerful Mathers, increased Mather, first president of Harvard by the way, and his son, Cotton Mather. They led this witch hunt. And Phipps didn't want to go up against them.

[00:11:54] So he's weak and then Phipps goes off to fight the Indians in Maine and they accused his wife, Mary Phipps of being a witch. And that's the only reason it stopped because Phipps comes back, the governor of Massachusetts Bay.

[00:12:09] They tell him, hey, your wife's under arrest for being a witch. And then Phipps had the militia, had the guns and he stopped it. But it might still be going on today if he didn't stop and if his wife had been accused.

[00:12:22] That's how out of control it was. I mean, and you're right, it took a militia to stop it. Like I was surprised how many husbands in the book you describe how many husbands basically fled as soon as their wives were accused.

[00:12:36] They didn't really stand up for the mother of their children. Well, how could they? They couldn't. And but there was cowardice. There's no doubt about it, but there was no way out. And that's the harrowing thing. You know, it's two weeks till Halloween, James.

[00:12:56] And this is the scariest book you're ever going to read because these people were trapped and these clerics and judges, they were making money off this too.

[00:13:06] There was that component because if you were a convicted witch, the state Salem seized all your property and all your assets and then judges and clerics got the money. Right. Just like the king got the money in England when they did it there.

[00:13:21] And the priests and bishops got the money in Europe. In Europe, they burned, you know, thousands of witches. So anyway, it's really a book that every page you're going to learn something and it's scary. So if you're in the market for Halloween book, this is it.

[00:13:39] I mean, I find this with all the killing books that they're really good. Like I wish I had learned history from these books and I'll get to that in a second. But what this killing the witches?

[00:13:50] We look back on it and we say, oh, obviously they weren't as sophisticated as we are. They weren't as intelligent as we are. We definitely never would have allowed that. And yet in modern society, we're now killing the witches all the time.

[00:14:04] Like there are people just screaming insanity all the time. And there's no way, even we see this with this current horrible search situation between Israel and Hamas, like why is everybody so crazy, international? Well, the media is a big problem now, but I wrote killing the witches, James,

[00:14:24] because the witch on his back in the form of cancel culture. So the far left invented this cancel culture about 10 years ago. Designed to destroy its opposition. Anybody speaks out against the progressive left, boom, you're going to have an accusation against you.

[00:14:41] You can look at it down the line. All right. And then the press, which once stood for a due process, your innocent until proven guilty in America. No, not anymore. You're guilty. Any accusation guilty and a press slaps it.

[00:14:57] And that's why I wrote the book because the witch hunt is back. No. And I, and I figured that out while reading this book like what? So basically this happens in academia too. What changed academia and journalism to go from information gathering to activism? Zelletry.

[00:15:17] So in, I've been in journalism almost 50 years when I first started getting out of Boston University with a masters in broadcast journalism, it was straight. Yes. In New York and in Washington, the people who ran the news agencies on a national level were a little bit liberal.

[00:15:37] Walter Cronkite, you know, that kind of thing, but they didn't let it permeate the presentation after the Vietnam War. That changed. And the left started to dominate the news coverage and the industry attracted liberal people because it's almost like a moth to a flame.

[00:16:00] So liberals went in and they, and they started to run the New York Times, the Washington Post, the network news and other liberals following and then they would hire only liberals. Now I was a reporter. Nobody knew what my ideology was.

[00:16:14] And I don't, to this day, I'm independent. I don't have an ideology, but I was able to report the news with all the commentators. I mean, I work for Peter Jennings, liberal man, but he was disciplined. He didn't let it. I work for Dan Rather, very liberal man.

[00:16:28] He did rather let it seep in. Okay. And I got worse and worse and worse and worse. And why? Why did the discipline change? So now again from professors to journalists, they have become activists rather than educators. Because a progressive left believes that anyone who is traditional or

[00:16:49] conservative is evil. They must be destroyed. And then that's what we're seeing with Hamas Israel now. Here's what really disturbs me when you see like a Rashida to lab have her, the Palestinian flag in her office, which fine,

[00:17:03] whatever she wants to do, but she has the Palestinian flag and the LBTQ plus flag. Doesn't she know rationally that it's illegal in the Gaza Strip to be gay? They're not, you can't have both flags and not be a hypocrite. Why does it?

[00:17:19] Oh, look, I don't know the woman. I know that the people in her Massachusetts district vote for her. She's Massachusetts, right? To leave it Michigan. Michigan. They vote for her. I know she's a fanatic. There's no reasoning with fanatics. There's no logic. There's nothing you can do.

[00:17:37] They believe what they want to believe some of the beliefs are emotional. Some of them are calculated, whatever it may be. But the intolerance of the national media toward anything other than liberal thought is wrecked the media. The media has destroyed itself.

[00:17:56] If you look at the surveys, Americans know the fix is in and they don't like it. You know, when I was doing the factor on Fox News or we would get 6 million a day on the two runs to watch. They get a third of that now.

[00:18:11] Two thirds of the audience that watch me are gone. And it's because they know that they're not going to get facts. They're going to get ideology even on Fox Fox is right. So this is not a good situation because we the people depend

[00:18:28] on information to make our decisions and the information is not flowing in an honest way. So the polarization and killing the witches ends like you say with William Phipps bringing the militia essentially to save his wife. And then of course that passes through Benjamin Franklin who

[00:18:46] helps devise the Constitution separates church and state. So it was a big historical things to change this polarization. What happens now to change the increased polarization in the U.S. and maybe the world? It's not going to it's not going to change.

[00:19:03] So we are a tribal country now we're in tribes. All right. And one tribe hates the other tribe and they're not going to listen and listen at. So I was talking to John Stuart the other night I went to see

[00:19:16] his show and you I think you'll remember the rumble in the air condition auditorium do you remember that on the internet James? No. Okay. You need to look that up. So it was Stuart and I and we broke all records for

[00:19:29] viewing on the Internet and it was 2013 when Obama's training is from me I believe. So anyway we did it in a funny civil way Stuart and I just Google O'Reilly John Stuart and you'll see all the time back

[00:19:45] and forth and we had laughs and we you know but we got our points across so that the audience can make up their mind about who had the stronger argument that's gone. That's gone. Yeah and and it's because of the people who run the

[00:20:00] networks the cables they want to speak to the choir because it's much easier you make money speaking to the choir it's not as hard and that's what they do. Well Bill O'Reilly thank you so much for this new take on

[00:20:15] history through all of these killing books killing JFK killing Lincoln all of them they're killing Jesus fascinating takes and a great way to learn history killing the witches is a great book which again ties together not only the founding of America but all the way to the Constitution

[00:20:31] and puts into real terms this irrational behavior that still exists. I just want to say what I really appreciate about you as an interviewer when you interviewed Obama before the 2008 election I thought that was just a class A job

[00:20:46] there was no ideology it was a great interview I started watching you very much after that and I and I really appreciate your presentation on things so thank you again and everybody should buy this killing the witches it's a great take on history so thank you.

[00:21:00] Appreciate it James good interview and thanks for having me on.