Confronting Evil by Bill O'Reilly Assessing the Worst of the Worst
What's it about?
Confronting Evil (2025) recounts the deeds of history’s worst men. Evil, it suggests, is multifaceted. From Roman emperors to American slave traders, Nazi officials to Mexican drug cartels, it shows us that while evil often is truly monstrous, it can also be disconcertingly ordinary. And because it can be found everywhere, we have to remain vigilant.
Caligula said he was God. American slave traders believed that the human commodities they traded were just that – things, not people. Stalin, like Hitler, said History was on his side. Drug pushers claim they’re simply giving people what they want.
When it comes to the harm humans do to one another, there always seems to be a good reason. Bill O’Reilly, a self-avowed straight-talker, doesn’t want to hear it. Cut the crap, he says – it’s nothing but malevolent sleight of hand.
When you get down to it, he thinks, evil has a simple definition: harming a human without remorse. It’s vivid and to the point. Nothing else is needed. And when it comes to motivation, you’re bound to find one of three things: money, power, or zealotry.
In this lesson, we’ll join O’Reilly as he confronts evil. From ancient Rome to medieval Mongolia and modern Mexico, we’ll look at the worst of the worst. As you’ll see, these case studies all fit the bill: human beings were harmed without remorse to secure power, wealth, or ideological aims.
For five centuries, Rome ruled the world. At its height, it fielded 250,000 soldiers and governed two million square miles on three continents. From Britain to Persia, Roman civilization was preeminent, embodied in its coins, forums, aqueducts, and amphorae brimming with Italian wine and olive oil.
It took centuries to construct the Roman colossus, but encroaching Germanic tribes toppled it within decades. The final blow came in 476 CE when a barbarian soldier overthrew Rome’s last emperor and proclaimed himself King of Italy.
Historians point to various factors to explain Rome’s fall: economic decline, strategic blunders, disease, and political instability all figure in their analyses. But there’s a shorthand answer, too: the misrule of evil men.
Caligula was one of them.
Romans knew little about the 24-year-old Caligula when he became emperor in 37 CE, but they did know his father: Germanicus, a general famed for his patriotism and bravery in battle. Germanicus’ reputation lent his son legitimacy, and the latter’s promises to lower taxes, grant exiles amnesty, and fund games made him popular. Rome, it seemed, had been blessed with a considerate ruler.
Caligula, though, soon fell seriously ill. He recovered, but his brush with death left a mark. He became erratic, fearful, suspicious. Unable to tell friend from foe, he had advisors tortured and exiled his sisters. Distrustful of Rome’s senate, he humiliated its members. When they protested, he appointed a horse to the senate: their words, he implied, carried as much weight as a nag’s whinnying.
Caligula’s reign of terror was as absurd as it was brutal. One day, he was proclaiming himself a living god; the next, he was presiding over glitzy public executions for his own amusement. There were unspeakable acts of sexual sadism as well as routine shakedowns. Those who crossed him were exiled or killed – so, too, were many who didn’t.
Caligula wasn’t the first mad emperor. His terrible innovation was to strip away the pretense. His predecessors – the psychopaths included – had cloaked their wishes in the language of norms, laws, and customs. That had constrained them: only so much carnage and corruption could be justified within those limits. Caligula dropped the mask. The law was what he said it was; if he said something else tomorrow, well, that was the law too.
Patriotism, honesty, and civic virtue were superfluous in Caligula’s Rome: getting ahead – or simply keeping your head – required blind obedience to the whims of the fickle god-emperor. The courageous suffered; the craven flourished.
Now, Rome’s political “immune system” was still functional during Caligula’s time: we know as much because its guardians assassinated the tyrant in early 41 CE. But there were more Caligulas to come – his great-nephew Nero, who became emperor thirteen years later, was one of them. Each did their bit to chip away at Rome’s values and hollow out the institutions that gave them shape. And that’s how the Roman colossus came to have feet of clay.
The city of Merv was one of the medieval world’s wonders. An emblem of Islam’s golden age, its inhabitants were entrepreneurial and educated. Situated halfway between China and the Mediterranean in today’s Turkmenistan, it was a Silk Road hub in which traders hawked everything from furs, teas, and spices to porcelain, pistachios, and pearls. Its famed libraries drew equally renowned scholars, including the period’s greatest thinker: the philosopher al-Ghazali.
Empires had come and gone down the centuries and Merv had prospered under Greek, Arab, and Iranian rule. The Mongolians who arrived in early 1221 CE were different. They weren’t interested in adding a jewel to their empire’s crown: they wanted blood. The massacre started as soon as the man known as the “ruler of the world” – Genghis Khan – entered the city. Contemporary accounts state that 700,000 people were executed over the following days.
His empire was one of the largest in human history. By the early thirteenth century, it stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Carpathian mountains. Making an example of cities like Merv was how it had been built.
Khan’s soldiers possessed two potent weapons: speed and terror. Mounted on horseback, they swept across Eurasia’s plains and encircled settlements before reinforcements could be called. Anyone who resisted was put to the sword; only those who surrendered were spared. News of massacres spread quickly. It was an effective tactic: cities capitulated before Khan’s shock troops even appeared on the horizon.
Khan was born into poverty on the Mongolian steppes around 1162. The ruthlessness which expanded his empire was evident early on: aged eight, he killed his older half-brother to secure his familial position. He entered politics as a teenager, leveraging his charisma to forge alliances between warring Mongolian tribes. By the late twelfth century, the tribes were united under his leadership. Having pledged peace to one another, they poured out of Mongolia in search of new enemies to pillage.
Khan’s empire didn’t found cities, establish libraries, fund the arts, or build bridges. It didn’t employ bureaucrats. There was no administrative apparatus and no animating civilizational vision or ideology. Violence was all it knew. The historical record reflects the brutal simplicity of his rule. All in all, it’s estimated that his campaigns killed 50 million people – ten percent of the world’s population at the time.
Khan died in 1227 after falling from a horse. His empire was rolled back within a generation, leaving little behind but the bones of his many victims.
In the 1820s, Congress passed a law to ban the transatlantic slave trade, ending the centuries-old practice of importing African slaves into the United States. Slavery didn’t retreat inside the country, however – it expanded.
Cotton was king and the demand for labor on plantations in the deep South launched a lucrative trade in American-born slaves. Within a decade, the buying and selling of human chattel had become the most profitable business in the country.
The industry leader was a Virginia and Louisiana-based slave-trading firm founded by two men: Isaac Franklin and his nephew John Armfield. Over the course of their careers, it’s estimated that they bought and sold over 100,000 Black American slaves. Spanning a dozen states and dense networks of train and boat operators, agents, and auction houses, their operation was as logistically complex as it was morally abhorrent.
John Armfield was the brains behind it. He knew what his customers wanted and catered to their wishes, picking out lighter-skinned women who fetched higher prices and placing male slaves in “pens” to be fattened up before sale. His ledgers tell us how he saw the human commodities he traded. One entry reads: “121 men – $800 per head. 46 female – $400 per head. 37 children – $200 per head. Six dead.” Death, for him, was an overhead – a cost of doing business.
By the end of their careers, the two men had amassed personal fortunes of $30 million each – about $2 billion in today’s money. The prospect of meeting their makers didn’t soften their hearts: both left instructions in their wills for the slaves they owned to be divided as property with no concern for their families.
Slavery is sometimes depicted as a holdover from the vanishing world of Southern aristocrats. The lives of Franklin and Armfield paint a different picture. Far from belonging to a fading feudal order, they were pragmatic modern businessmen. They didn't fit the description of madmen or monsters: what stands out about them is their apparent ordinariness. Like many evil men, they looked a lot like us.
It’s a cold day in early January, 1942, the fourth year of Germany’s war. Snow coats the lawn of a lakeside villa in the wealthy Berlin suburb of Wannsee. Inside, sunlight streaks through velvet drapes. The silver cutlery and crystal glassware being arranged by white-gloved waiters sparkles. Bowls of caviar and plates of smoked fish are set down on starched linen. The fireplace crackles.
Fifteen Nazi officials take their seats. Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking SS officer, sits at the head of the long table. He’s flanked by bureaucrats, lawyers, and military planners. Among them is Adolf Eichmann, the official in charge of the deportation of German Jews. Eichmann, a meticulous worker and an ambitious careerist, prides himself on his ability to overcome logistical difficulties.
The meeting begins. Its subject is printed on the notes handed out to attendees: the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The Nazi regime has already explored several so-called “solutions,” including mass deportations to Madagascar. Over the following 90 minutes, it formally abandons these proposals. The language shifts from “emigration” to “evacuation” – code for the physical elimination of the European Jews.
The meeting draws to a close and cognac is served. As the conversation becomes less inhibited, euphemism gives way to blunt discussions about methods of killing. The words “liquidation” and “extermination” hang in the air. At his trial 19 years later, Eichmann will note that Heydrich was pleased as he left Wannsee that day. He’d expected opposition. Instead, he’d found “an atmosphere of agreement on the part of the participants.”
The Wannsee Conference, as the meeting will come to be known, sets everything that happens next in motion. Men and women with partial Jewish ancestry are sterilised and marriages between Christians and Jews are annulled. Jews across Europe are rounded up and transported in freight trains to camps in which they are either slowly worked to death or killed immediately. Bureaucrats work tirelessly to expedite the killing, repurposing industrial pesticides like Zyklon B for specially built gas chambers. On average, the Nazi extermination machine will murder 5,000 Jews every day for the next 1,200 days.
Most records of the 90-minute meeting were destroyed – Eichmann burned the papers in the fireplace that had warmed the participants. Only a protocol of the topics discussed could be found at the end of the war. It was a key piece of evidence in the Nuremberg trials. The Wannsee House, the site of the meeting, is now a Holocaust memorial.
February 2012. It’s bitterly cold. Francine – her friends call her Franny – sits in a beaten-up, snow-covered Toyota Camry outside her parents’ Detroit home. They bring her flasks of hot tea and extra blankets, but she’s not allowed inside the house – they don’t trust her not to steal something. She idles the engine to keep the radiators running and pulls out a leather satchel. Everything’s there: a syringe, a spoon, a lighter, and a small bag with a skull-and-bones logo.
Frannie’s parents will find her in the morning, the needle still stuck in her arm.
In the late 2000s, that skull-and-bones logo was everywhere in working-class neighborhoods in the United States. Like three-letter acronyms on wine bottles, it told buyers where the product was from. The fentanyl-laced heroin that killed Frannie and thousands of addicts like her came from Sinaloa, Mexico – the home of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, one of history’s most powerful and dangerous drug traffickers.
El Chapo’s operation was simple: move cocaine from Colombia and heroin and marijuana from Mexico’s north. He smuggled his branded product inside trucks, trunks, and even tubs of jalapeños. By the early 2010s, his organization – the Sinaloa Cartel – had become the largest criminal syndicate in the world.
Fentanyl, a powerful painkiller first synthesised in the 1960s, turbocharged his operation. Heroin, cocaine, and marijuana are time and labor-intensive: you have to seed, grow, harvest, and process lots of plants to produce them. That’s risky, since the operation leaves a large physical footprint and requires the involvement of thousands of workers, any one of whom might blab to the authorities. Fentanyl, by contrast, can be made in a lab in days. The overheads are low and it’s strong – two milligrams is usually fatal – so you don’t need much of it to make a killing.
Literally. Cartels like El Chapo’s have left a trail of carnage in their wake, both in the United States and in Mexico. In the US, it’s usually unsuspecting heroin users like Frannie who fall victim to them. In Mexico, the profitability of the trade leads to constant fighting over its control. Ordinary citizens bear the brunt: drug money corrupts their politicians, perverts their legal system, and turns towns and cities into war-zones.
Drug traffickers don’t have an ideology, unless you count personal enrichment as a political philosophy. They don’t fly planes into buildings or massacre religious opponents, but they’re every bit as deadly – and evil – as the groups that do.
In this lesson to Confronting Evil by Bill O’Reailly and Josh Hammer, you’ve learned that evil takes many forms – political, personal, and bureaucratic – and it flourishes when institutions fail and opportunists step in to further their own aims. Sometimes it’s absurd and theatrical; other times, it’s cold and calculated. Often it’s just a way to make money. History has a clear lesson for us, though: confronting evil begins with recognizing it, even when it cloaks itself in ordinariness.
Confronting Evil (2025) recounts the deeds of history’s worst men. Evil, it suggests, is multifaceted. From Roman emperors to American slave traders, Nazi officials to Mexican drug cartels, it shows us that while evil often is truly monstrous, it can also be disconcertingly ordinary. And because it can be found everywhere, we have to remain vigilant.
Caligula said he was God. American slave traders believed that the human commodities they traded were just that – things, not people. Stalin, like Hitler, said History was on his side. Drug pushers claim they’re simply giving people what they want.
When it comes to the harm humans do to one another, there always seems to be a good reason. Bill O’Reilly, a self-avowed straight-talker, doesn’t want to hear it. Cut the crap, he says – it’s nothing but malevolent sleight of hand.
When you get down to it, he thinks, evil has a simple definition: harming a human without remorse. It’s vivid and to the point. Nothing else is needed. And when it comes to motivation, you’re bound to find one of three things: money, power, or zealotry.
In this lesson, we’ll join O’Reilly as he confronts evil. From ancient Rome to medieval Mongolia and modern Mexico, we’ll look at the worst of the worst. As you’ll see, these case studies all fit the bill: human beings were harmed without remorse to secure power, wealth, or ideological aims.
For five centuries, Rome ruled the world. At its height, it fielded 250,000 soldiers and governed two million square miles on three continents. From Britain to Persia, Roman civilization was preeminent, embodied in its coins, forums, aqueducts, and amphorae brimming with Italian wine and olive oil.
It took centuries to construct the Roman colossus, but encroaching Germanic tribes toppled it within decades. The final blow came in 476 CE when a barbarian soldier overthrew Rome’s last emperor and proclaimed himself King of Italy.
Historians point to various factors to explain Rome’s fall: economic decline, strategic blunders, disease, and political instability all figure in their analyses. But there’s a shorthand answer, too: the misrule of evil men.
Caligula was one of them.
Romans knew little about the 24-year-old Caligula when he became emperor in 37 CE, but they did know his father: Germanicus, a general famed for his patriotism and bravery in battle. Germanicus’ reputation lent his son legitimacy, and the latter’s promises to lower taxes, grant exiles amnesty, and fund games made him popular. Rome, it seemed, had been blessed with a considerate ruler.
Caligula, though, soon fell seriously ill. He recovered, but his brush with death left a mark. He became erratic, fearful, suspicious. Unable to tell friend from foe, he had advisors tortured and exiled his sisters. Distrustful of Rome’s senate, he humiliated its members. When they protested, he appointed a horse to the senate: their words, he implied, carried as much weight as a nag’s whinnying.
Caligula’s reign of terror was as absurd as it was brutal. One day, he was proclaiming himself a living god; the next, he was presiding over glitzy public executions for his own amusement. There were unspeakable acts of sexual sadism as well as routine shakedowns. Those who crossed him were exiled or killed – so, too, were many who didn’t.
Caligula wasn’t the first mad emperor. His terrible innovation was to strip away the pretense. His predecessors – the psychopaths included – had cloaked their wishes in the language of norms, laws, and customs. That had constrained them: only so much carnage and corruption could be justified within those limits. Caligula dropped the mask. The law was what he said it was; if he said something else tomorrow, well, that was the law too.
Patriotism, honesty, and civic virtue were superfluous in Caligula’s Rome: getting ahead – or simply keeping your head – required blind obedience to the whims of the fickle god-emperor. The courageous suffered; the craven flourished.
Now, Rome’s political “immune system” was still functional during Caligula’s time: we know as much because its guardians assassinated the tyrant in early 41 CE. But there were more Caligulas to come – his great-nephew Nero, who became emperor thirteen years later, was one of them. Each did their bit to chip away at Rome’s values and hollow out the institutions that gave them shape. And that’s how the Roman colossus came to have feet of clay.
The city of Merv was one of the medieval world’s wonders. An emblem of Islam’s golden age, its inhabitants were entrepreneurial and educated. Situated halfway between China and the Mediterranean in today’s Turkmenistan, it was a Silk Road hub in which traders hawked everything from furs, teas, and spices to porcelain, pistachios, and pearls. Its famed libraries drew equally renowned scholars, including the period’s greatest thinker: the philosopher al-Ghazali.
Empires had come and gone down the centuries and Merv had prospered under Greek, Arab, and Iranian rule. The Mongolians who arrived in early 1221 CE were different. They weren’t interested in adding a jewel to their empire’s crown: they wanted blood. The massacre started as soon as the man known as the “ruler of the world” – Genghis Khan – entered the city. Contemporary accounts state that 700,000 people were executed over the following days.
His empire was one of the largest in human history. By the early thirteenth century, it stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Carpathian mountains. Making an example of cities like Merv was how it had been built.
Khan’s soldiers possessed two potent weapons: speed and terror. Mounted on horseback, they swept across Eurasia’s plains and encircled settlements before reinforcements could be called. Anyone who resisted was put to the sword; only those who surrendered were spared. News of massacres spread quickly. It was an effective tactic: cities capitulated before Khan’s shock troops even appeared on the horizon.
Khan was born into poverty on the Mongolian steppes around 1162. The ruthlessness which expanded his empire was evident early on: aged eight, he killed his older half-brother to secure his familial position. He entered politics as a teenager, leveraging his charisma to forge alliances between warring Mongolian tribes. By the late twelfth century, the tribes were united under his leadership. Having pledged peace to one another, they poured out of Mongolia in search of new enemies to pillage.
Khan’s empire didn’t found cities, establish libraries, fund the arts, or build bridges. It didn’t employ bureaucrats. There was no administrative apparatus and no animating civilizational vision or ideology. Violence was all it knew. The historical record reflects the brutal simplicity of his rule. All in all, it’s estimated that his campaigns killed 50 million people – ten percent of the world’s population at the time.
Khan died in 1227 after falling from a horse. His empire was rolled back within a generation, leaving little behind but the bones of his many victims.
In the 1820s, Congress passed a law to ban the transatlantic slave trade, ending the centuries-old practice of importing African slaves into the United States. Slavery didn’t retreat inside the country, however – it expanded.
Cotton was king and the demand for labor on plantations in the deep South launched a lucrative trade in American-born slaves. Within a decade, the buying and selling of human chattel had become the most profitable business in the country.
The industry leader was a Virginia and Louisiana-based slave-trading firm founded by two men: Isaac Franklin and his nephew John Armfield. Over the course of their careers, it’s estimated that they bought and sold over 100,000 Black American slaves. Spanning a dozen states and dense networks of train and boat operators, agents, and auction houses, their operation was as logistically complex as it was morally abhorrent.
John Armfield was the brains behind it. He knew what his customers wanted and catered to their wishes, picking out lighter-skinned women who fetched higher prices and placing male slaves in “pens” to be fattened up before sale. His ledgers tell us how he saw the human commodities he traded. One entry reads: “121 men – $800 per head. 46 female – $400 per head. 37 children – $200 per head. Six dead.” Death, for him, was an overhead – a cost of doing business.
By the end of their careers, the two men had amassed personal fortunes of $30 million each – about $2 billion in today’s money. The prospect of meeting their makers didn’t soften their hearts: both left instructions in their wills for the slaves they owned to be divided as property with no concern for their families.
Slavery is sometimes depicted as a holdover from the vanishing world of Southern aristocrats. The lives of Franklin and Armfield paint a different picture. Far from belonging to a fading feudal order, they were pragmatic modern businessmen. They didn't fit the description of madmen or monsters: what stands out about them is their apparent ordinariness. Like many evil men, they looked a lot like us.
It’s a cold day in early January, 1942, the fourth year of Germany’s war. Snow coats the lawn of a lakeside villa in the wealthy Berlin suburb of Wannsee. Inside, sunlight streaks through velvet drapes. The silver cutlery and crystal glassware being arranged by white-gloved waiters sparkles. Bowls of caviar and plates of smoked fish are set down on starched linen. The fireplace crackles.
Fifteen Nazi officials take their seats. Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking SS officer, sits at the head of the long table. He’s flanked by bureaucrats, lawyers, and military planners. Among them is Adolf Eichmann, the official in charge of the deportation of German Jews. Eichmann, a meticulous worker and an ambitious careerist, prides himself on his ability to overcome logistical difficulties.
The meeting begins. Its subject is printed on the notes handed out to attendees: the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The Nazi regime has already explored several so-called “solutions,” including mass deportations to Madagascar. Over the following 90 minutes, it formally abandons these proposals. The language shifts from “emigration” to “evacuation” – code for the physical elimination of the European Jews.
The meeting draws to a close and cognac is served. As the conversation becomes less inhibited, euphemism gives way to blunt discussions about methods of killing. The words “liquidation” and “extermination” hang in the air. At his trial 19 years later, Eichmann will note that Heydrich was pleased as he left Wannsee that day. He’d expected opposition. Instead, he’d found “an atmosphere of agreement on the part of the participants.”
The Wannsee Conference, as the meeting will come to be known, sets everything that happens next in motion. Men and women with partial Jewish ancestry are sterilised and marriages between Christians and Jews are annulled. Jews across Europe are rounded up and transported in freight trains to camps in which they are either slowly worked to death or killed immediately. Bureaucrats work tirelessly to expedite the killing, repurposing industrial pesticides like Zyklon B for specially built gas chambers. On average, the Nazi extermination machine will murder 5,000 Jews every day for the next 1,200 days.
Most records of the 90-minute meeting were destroyed – Eichmann burned the papers in the fireplace that had warmed the participants. Only a protocol of the topics discussed could be found at the end of the war. It was a key piece of evidence in the Nuremberg trials. The Wannsee House, the site of the meeting, is now a Holocaust memorial.
February 2012. It’s bitterly cold. Francine – her friends call her Franny – sits in a beaten-up, snow-covered Toyota Camry outside her parents’ Detroit home. They bring her flasks of hot tea and extra blankets, but she’s not allowed inside the house – they don’t trust her not to steal something. She idles the engine to keep the radiators running and pulls out a leather satchel. Everything’s there: a syringe, a spoon, a lighter, and a small bag with a skull-and-bones logo.
Frannie’s parents will find her in the morning, the needle still stuck in her arm.
In the late 2000s, that skull-and-bones logo was everywhere in working-class neighborhoods in the United States. Like three-letter acronyms on wine bottles, it told buyers where the product was from. The fentanyl-laced heroin that killed Frannie and thousands of addicts like her came from Sinaloa, Mexico – the home of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, one of history’s most powerful and dangerous drug traffickers.
El Chapo’s operation was simple: move cocaine from Colombia and heroin and marijuana from Mexico’s north. He smuggled his branded product inside trucks, trunks, and even tubs of jalapeños. By the early 2010s, his organization – the Sinaloa Cartel – had become the largest criminal syndicate in the world.
Fentanyl, a powerful painkiller first synthesised in the 1960s, turbocharged his operation. Heroin, cocaine, and marijuana are time and labor-intensive: you have to seed, grow, harvest, and process lots of plants to produce them. That’s risky, since the operation leaves a large physical footprint and requires the involvement of thousands of workers, any one of whom might blab to the authorities. Fentanyl, by contrast, can be made in a lab in days. The overheads are low and it’s strong – two milligrams is usually fatal – so you don’t need much of it to make a killing.
Literally. Cartels like El Chapo’s have left a trail of carnage in their wake, both in the United States and in Mexico. In the US, it’s usually unsuspecting heroin users like Frannie who fall victim to them. In Mexico, the profitability of the trade leads to constant fighting over its control. Ordinary citizens bear the brunt: drug money corrupts their politicians, perverts their legal system, and turns towns and cities into war-zones.
Drug traffickers don’t have an ideology, unless you count personal enrichment as a political philosophy. They don’t fly planes into buildings or massacre religious opponents, but they’re every bit as deadly – and evil – as the groups that do.
In this lesson to Confronting Evil by Bill O’Reailly and Josh Hammer, you’ve learned that evil takes many forms – political, personal, and bureaucratic – and it flourishes when institutions fail and opportunists step in to further their own aims. Sometimes it’s absurd and theatrical; other times, it’s cold and calculated. Often it’s just a way to make money. History has a clear lesson for us, though: confronting evil begins with recognizing it, even when it cloaks itself in ordinariness.
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