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Bill O’Reilly has over 18 million books in print as part of his historical “Killing” series. The latest installment to hit the New York Times best-selling list, “Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts” (Macmillan, released September 26th), examines the events behind the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. The host of The O’Reilly Factor appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to discuss the relevancy of the event that coined the phrase “witch hunt”.
“’Killing the Witches’ is basically a book that explains how the New World was developed,” O’Reilly told Berman and Riedel. “We put you on the Mayflower… then they get here, and it’s a theocracy… so we trace all this history down, and then it gets out of control, and the reason it got out of control was fear. There were good people in Salem, but they didn’t stand up to this because the next day they would be accused of being a witch. Twenty human beings executed, hundreds imprisoned, and it only stopped because the loons accused the governor’s wife of being a witch.”
O’Reilly then brought up a modern-day story to illustrate the parallel of Salem in 1692 and the United States in 2023. “The witch hunt is back today- cancel culture… There was an ESPN tennis analyst [Doug Adler] who was doing a match with Venus William who said, ‘Venus Williams is using guerilla tactics.’ Hit-and-run, you know, guerilla warfare. A New York Times stringer said that [Adler] accused Miss Williams of being a gorilla. ESPN fired the guy; he has a heart attack. He’s never recovered! If this isn’t a Salem witch trial, nothing is.”
O’Reilly also offered his take on current-day headlines, like the worsening situation in Israel in the wake of Tuesday’s hospital bombing in Gaza. “You know what the tragedy is, that very few people are talking about? It doesn’t matter what the truth is here, because people are going to believe what they want to believe, like the hospital bombing… it’s going to come out that the hospital was blown up by Islamic Jihad, if that’s what’s going to come out. But the people who hate Israel aren’t going to believe it, no matter what evidence is presented. They will not believe it. So, you know, this is survival that we’re talking about in the Middle East right now.”
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