This is Later with Lee Matthews, The Lee Matthews Podcast more what You Hear Weekday Afternoon's on the Drive. He's done it again. Bill O'Reilly, with his co writer Michael Martin Dugard, has come up with another killing series that is worth every word you read in it. This time it's Killing the Witches. The horrors of the Salem witch trials that have are very timely this time
of year. And before we start talking about the book, Bill, I just got to ask about the historic events of the past couple of days. Good thing or bad thing for Republicans bad big victory for the Democratic Party shows the American public that it fits together, it's cohesive. Not one voted to retain Speaker McCarthy, even though he's not a radical guy. He ran the house fairly efficiently, I thought. But Democrats will not go against party orthodoxy.
Ever, whereas Republicans are divided, they don't have a leader, and eight of them led to McCarthy losing his job. So it's a big victory for the Democrats my thoughts as well. And I guess the quicker they turn this thing around, the better. But you've turned around another great book in your Killing series. This is Killing the Witches, the Horror of Salem,
Massachusetts. And in reading it, Bill, the first thing that occurred to me was, Yeah, the pilgrims came over and they wanted religious freedom. Most of the people who were coming wanted religious freedom, but they had to have the money to immigrate from someone. And in that way, capitalism seems to have founded the United States as much as religious freedom. Well, it's always been a capitalistic country. There was never any drive towards socialism or a
monarchy handing out money or anything like that. But the key to this, Lee, and I'm glad you read the book is I selected the topic because cancel culture is back, the witch hunt is back. In fact, Trump uses the words witch hunt pretty much every hour on the hour, and I told one of his guys, as we can he just hold up my book when he's saying, which hunt. All right, So that would be good
for sales. But the Salem disaster, and that's what it was, led to the deaths of twenty human beings and even more because hundreds were incarcerated awaiting trial on this bogus witch stuff and they died in prison. So here I leaped forward to the cancel culture today and it's the same lack of due process. All accusations are convictions. But it's not religious driven as it was in sixteen ninety two. It's politically driven by the progressive lefe. They don't like
you, They're going to try to destroy you by accusation. That's why you hear racist, homopholl bigot all over the place in the discord, the discourse, I should say today. So the first out of the book is history. We got here the Mayflower. You don't want to be on that boat. Lead No, that was a harrowing journey. And then I segue into present day and you do so in Killing the Witches, the horror of Salem,
Massachusetts. Another thing that the book deals with in depth, and I'm glad you do, is the idea and how we came about the idea of religious freedom. Right. Benjamin Franklin was a young teenager in Boston and got onto this Salem horror and he actually went to the house so the chief witch hunter, a man named Cotton Mather, and they had a discussion, and I chronicle that in Killing the Witches. Well, Franklin was so appalled, even as a teenager. He's a genius that it kept that this whole life.
And when the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia debated the role of how religion would be handled, Patrick Henry and Roger Sherman and a bunch of them wanted America, the new Country, to be defined as a Christian nation, but Franklin said absolutely not because of the excesses that happened in Salem. And Franklin, Madison and Jefferson won that battle, but it was a brawl. And I
we write all about that in Killing the Witches as well. Well you also get into how the religious freedom is then expressed by the founding fathers and uh and the and the nation, and the notion of a church, a sponsored church, a government sponsored church, and how that came It almost came about, but didn't right, and the Salem witch trials derailed that. So in Massachusetts, no matter what religion you were, including being a pagan, you
had to pay a tax to the Christian Church. Virginia the same thing. And Patrick Henry, as I mentioned, give me liberty or give me death, he wanted that to continue with the new country after we won the American Revolution. And so that's what spurred this unbelievable debate they had in Philadelphia, And if not for the Salem witch trials, that constitution could have been written so that people would have had to pay money in taxes to a certain church.
Bill O'Reilly, the book is Killing the Witches, the Horror of Salem, Massachusetts. I want to pick on the governor of Massachusetts for just a minute, Thomas Hutchinson. I don't know, Bill, and reading your account of it or Stacy Shiff's recent account of it in her book, Sam Adams Revolutionary. Is he a Mikeavellian villain or a passive, aggressive, incompetent imbecile. Oh, he was a stooge of the crown. I mean, you know, he pretty much did what they told him to do and he didn't
wind up well for him. We write about him and killing England extensively. Don't mention him so much in Killing the Witches, because he wasn't in He wasn't around then. It was a guy named William Phipps who was the governor Massachusetts Bay. And the only reason that the witch chrial stopped, the execution stopped was because the loans in Salem accused Mary Phipps. The governor's wife of
being a witch. I mean, how stupid as that. And then finally the governor said no more, and we're not going to do this anymore, which he should have said in the very beginning, because any sane person knew that all of year old girls accusing people of being witches. And basically, essentially, if you're a witch, you're in the league with the devil. You're doing the devil's work. So that's why the salemon forty said you had to die. And for those who did die, it was fairly lucrative.
For those who did the killing, they acquired property and wealth. Do you bet there's always a component of money. We opened a book in Scotland where they actually burned witches. We didn't burn them here in America. We hung them, and we tell you why that happened. But when a witch was accused and went on trial, then all the witches, land, money, and everything else was seized. And if they upon conviction and execution, they
just divided off the assets among the judges and the clerics. So how corrupt is that? As corrupt as oh, I don't know. Current day we're talking about killing the witches. The horror of Salem, Massachusetts, Bill O'Reilly, and finally, Bill, you do take it, You take evil and trace evil from the witch trials all the way up until present day. Evil does it exist in the spiritual scary form or as I believe, the worst
evil is in the hearts of men. Well, we take you through the Exorcist book and movie, which was based on a real case thirteen year old boy in Maryland named Ronald Hunkler, and in the movie they changed it to
a girl. Linda Blair played the part because of more sympathetic but what this boy endured in the doctors could not cure his maladies, physical and mental, so his parents decided to take him into the Catholic Church for an exorcism that actually happened, and what he endured, and we write because we all the diaries of the eight Jesuit priests that conducted the three month exorcism, it's really really fighting. And then when they made the movie about the book, nine
people died associated with making that film. So there's a lot of spooky stuff in Killing the Witches. With apologies to Edgar Allen Poe, this is the best Halloween book you're ever going to get. I think so too, and you ought to. It's an easy read. It also encourages you to do like I did. When you see the footnotes and you see the interesting side notes, it makes you want to go and look more up. As all the Killing Series books do well, we're in business to educate everybody about the
United States. If you read all thirteen Killing books, you will know your country from beginning to modern time. And as you know, Lee and I appreciate you reading the books and having me on. The Killing Series is the most successfu well nonfiction book series on the planet, so we hope everybody will consider it and you'll learn a lot. Killing the Witches the Horror of Salem, Massachusetts available everywhere you get books, and if you want to hear more
about what Bill thinks about current events, billoreilly dot com. Bill you bet, that's where we live. We do radio and television every day, and people go to Bill O'Reilly dot com and get Killing the Witches free if you become a premium member, so it might be worth considering as well. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and Iheartsmedia Presentation