Bill O’Reilly’s new book, Confronting Evil, landed this September and it isn’t a gentle stroll through history — it’s a wake-up call for a nation that keeps confusing comfort with virtue. The tome, released September 9, 2025, warns that evil is not an abstract concept for philosophers to debate but a real force that grows when decent people shrug. This is not the kind of melancholy moralizing you’ll find in elite salons; it’s a blunt challenge to Americans who still believe in country and character.
Coauthored with conservative commentator Josh Hammer, O’Reilly’s book catalogs the brutal deeds of history’s worst actors to draw a lesson for our day: look away at your peril. The narrative ranges from ancient conquerors to modern tyrants, and it’s meant to shock people out of complacency rather than soothe their anxieties. This is a team-up of two writers who understand that history is a teacher, not a sermon.
What makes this book relevant to Americans today is O’Reilly’s blunt diagnosis: a minority of people do harm by intent or cruelty, but a much larger group enables that harm through indifference and moral cowardice. That point — that evil needs active resistance — is threaded through the book’s pages and is the exact opposite of the smug, relativistic thinking the mainstream media sells as “nuance.” If you think apathy is harmless, read the accounts here and tell the families of victims that indifference had nothing to do with their tragedy.
O’Reilly isn’t merely replaying old horror stories; he’s making the fight concrete, arguing that a collapse of civic education and moral clarity has left Americans vulnerable to destructive ideologies. When schools and institutions stop teaching duty, truth, and American principles, a void opens that radical ideas rush to fill. Conservatives should be loud about this because staying quiet is the very behavior that lets illiberal movements gain ground.
The cultural left’s embrace of moral relativism and its contempt for longstanding civic virtues are not harmless academic disputes — they are the ideological oxygen for the rise of bad actors and bad policies. Progressivism’s insistence that history and morality are negotiable has consequences: lawlessness in the name of equity, careerism in the name of protest, and cowardice in the name of tolerance. America was built on a proposition that some things are true and wrong regardless of the prevailing social media mood, and the restoration of that conviction must be a conservative priority.
It’s also worth calling out the media for its role in normalizing this decay. Too many outlets reflexively excuse radical behavior if it fits a narrative, and they gaslight the public about the scale of the threat while preaching outrage over trivia. Real reporting — the kind that names wrong and defends right — is now scarce, and conservatives should fight to rebuild trustworthy platforms that tell uncomfortable truths instead of amplifying fashionable lies.
O’Reilly’s blunt moral clarity is something conservatives should welcome, not shy from. We need more books like this that name the enemy and rally citizens toward courage, truth, and responsibility; those virtues are not old-fashioned, they are indispensable. The choice the author lays out — stand up, teach your children right, and engage civically — is exactly the prescription a free republic needs.
This book’s commercial success and the national discussion it has sparked prove there is still appetite for unapologetic defense of American values. If the elites think they can silence the alarm by mocking it, they’re mistaken — a growing number of Americans want leaders who will call evil by its name and fight it without equivocation. Read the book, then act: teach your kids history and honor, volunteer in your community, and demand that leaders and institutions stand for something real.
