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This is Later with Lee Matthews,
The Lee Matthews Podcast more what You Hear

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Weekday Afternoon's on the Drive. He's
done it again. Bill O'Reilly, with

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his co writer Michael Martin Dugard,
has come up with another killing series that

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is worth every word you read in
it. This time it's Killing the Witches.

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The horrors of the Salem witch trials
that have are very timely this time

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of year. And before we start
talking about the book, Bill, I

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just got to ask about the historic
events of the past couple of days.

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Good thing or bad thing for Republicans
bad big victory for the Democratic Party shows

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the American public that it fits together, it's cohesive. Not one voted to

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retain Speaker McCarthy, even though he's
not a radical guy. He ran the

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house fairly efficiently, I thought.
But Democrats will not go against party orthodoxy.

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Ever, whereas Republicans are divided,
they don't have a leader, and

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eight of them led to McCarthy losing
his job. So it's a big victory

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for the Democrats my thoughts as well. And I guess the quicker they turn

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this thing around, the better.
But you've turned around another great book in

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your Killing series. This is Killing
the Witches, the Horror of Salem,

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Massachusetts. And in reading it,
Bill, the first thing that occurred to

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me was, Yeah, the pilgrims
came over and they wanted religious freedom.

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Most of the people who were coming
wanted religious freedom, but they had to

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have the money to immigrate from someone. And in that way, capitalism seems

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to have founded the United States as
much as religious freedom. Well, it's

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always been a capitalistic country. There
was never any drive towards socialism or a

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monarchy handing out money or anything like
that. But the key to this,

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Lee, and I'm glad you read
the book is I selected the topic because

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cancel culture is back, the witch
hunt is back. In fact, Trump

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uses the words witch hunt pretty much
every hour on the hour, and I

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told one of his guys, as
we can he just hold up my book

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when he's saying, which hunt.
All right, So that would be good

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for sales. But the Salem disaster, and that's what it was, led

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to the deaths of twenty human beings
and even more because hundreds were incarcerated awaiting

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trial on this bogus witch stuff and
they died in prison. So here I

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leaped forward to the cancel culture today
and it's the same lack of due process.

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All accusations are convictions. But it's
not religious driven as it was in

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sixteen ninety two. It's politically driven
by the progressive lefe. They don't like

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you, They're going to try to
destroy you by accusation. That's why you

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hear racist, homopholl bigot all over
the place in the discord, the discourse,

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I should say today. So the
first out of the book is history.

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We got here the Mayflower. You
don't want to be on that boat.

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Lead No, that was a harrowing
journey. And then I segue into

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present day and you do so in
Killing the Witches, the horror of Salem,

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Massachusetts. Another thing that the book
deals with in depth, and I'm

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glad you do, is the idea
and how we came about the idea of

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religious freedom. Right. Benjamin Franklin
was a young teenager in Boston and got

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onto this Salem horror and he actually
went to the house so the chief witch

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hunter, a man named Cotton Mather, and they had a discussion, and

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I chronicle that in Killing the Witches. Well, Franklin was so appalled,

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even as a teenager. He's a
genius that it kept that this whole life.

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And when the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia
debated the role of how religion would

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be handled, Patrick Henry and Roger
Sherman and a bunch of them wanted America,

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the new Country, to be defined
as a Christian nation, but Franklin

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said absolutely not because of the excesses
that happened in Salem. And Franklin,

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Madison and Jefferson won that battle,
but it was a brawl. And I

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we write all about that in Killing
the Witches as well. Well you also

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get into how the religious freedom is
then expressed by the founding fathers and uh

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and the and the nation, and
the notion of a church, a sponsored

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church, a government sponsored church,
and how that came It almost came about,

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but didn't right, and the Salem
witch trials derailed that. So in

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Massachusetts, no matter what religion you
were, including being a pagan, you

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had to pay a tax to the
Christian Church. Virginia the same thing.

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And Patrick Henry, as I mentioned, give me liberty or give me death,

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he wanted that to continue with the
new country after we won the American

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Revolution. And so that's what spurred
this unbelievable debate they had in Philadelphia,

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And if not for the Salem witch
trials, that constitution could have been written

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so that people would have had to
pay money in taxes to a certain church.

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Bill O'Reilly, the book is Killing
the Witches, the Horror of Salem,

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Massachusetts. I want to pick on
the governor of Massachusetts for just a

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minute, Thomas Hutchinson. I don't
know, Bill, and reading your account

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of it or Stacy Shiff's recent account
of it in her book, Sam Adams

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Revolutionary. Is he a Mikeavellian villain
or a passive, aggressive, incompetent imbecile.

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Oh, he was a stooge of
the crown. I mean, you

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know, he pretty much did what
they told him to do and he didn't

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wind up well for him. We
write about him and killing England extensively.

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Don't mention him so much in Killing
the Witches, because he wasn't in He

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wasn't around then. It was a
guy named William Phipps who was the governor

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Massachusetts Bay. And the only reason
that the witch chrial stopped, the execution

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stopped was because the loans in Salem
accused Mary Phipps. The governor's wife of

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being a witch. I mean,
how stupid as that. And then finally

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the governor said no more, and
we're not going to do this anymore,

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which he should have said in the
very beginning, because any sane person knew

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that all of year old girls accusing
people of being witches. And basically,

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essentially, if you're a witch,
you're in the league with the devil.

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You're doing the devil's work. So
that's why the salemon forty said you had

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to die. And for those who
did die, it was fairly lucrative.

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For those who did the killing,
they acquired property and wealth. Do you

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bet there's always a component of money. We opened a book in Scotland where

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they actually burned witches. We didn't
burn them here in America. We hung

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them, and we tell you why
that happened. But when a witch was

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accused and went on trial, then
all the witches, land, money,

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and everything else was seized. And
if they upon conviction and execution, they

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just divided off the assets among the
judges and the clerics. So how corrupt

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is that? As corrupt as oh, I don't know. Current day we're

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talking about killing the witches. The
horror of Salem, Massachusetts, Bill O'Reilly,

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and finally, Bill, you do
take it, You take evil and

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trace evil from the witch trials all
the way up until present day. Evil

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does it exist in the spiritual scary
form or as I believe, the worst

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evil is in the hearts of men. Well, we take you through the

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Exorcist book and movie, which was
based on a real case thirteen year old

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boy in Maryland named Ronald Hunkler,
and in the movie they changed it to

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a girl. Linda Blair played the
part because of more sympathetic but what this

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boy endured in the doctors could not
cure his maladies, physical and mental,

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so his parents decided to take him
into the Catholic Church for an exorcism that

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actually happened, and what he endured, and we write because we all the

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diaries of the eight Jesuit priests that
conducted the three month exorcism, it's really

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really fighting. And then when they
made the movie about the book, nine

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people died associated with making that film. So there's a lot of spooky stuff

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in Killing the Witches. With apologies
to Edgar Allen Poe, this is the

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best Halloween book you're ever going to
get. I think so too, and

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you ought to. It's an easy
read. It also encourages you to do

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like I did. When you see
the footnotes and you see the interesting side

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notes, it makes you want to
go and look more up. As all

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the Killing Series books do well,
we're in business to educate everybody about the

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United States. If you read all
thirteen Killing books, you will know your

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country from beginning to modern time.
And as you know, Lee and I

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appreciate you reading the books and having
me on. The Killing Series is the

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most successfu well nonfiction book series on
the planet, so we hope everybody will

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consider it and you'll learn a lot. Killing the Witches the Horror of Salem,

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Massachusetts available everywhere you get books,
and if you want to hear more

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about what Bill thinks about current events, billoreilly dot com. Bill you bet,

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that's where we live. We do
radio and television every day, and

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people go to Bill O'Reilly dot com
and get Killing the Witches free if you

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become a premium member, so it
might be worth considering as well. Thanks

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for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember

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to listen to The Drive Live weekday
afternoons from five to seven and Iheartsmedia Presentation