Hasn’t Bill O’Reilly done enough harm beating the drums for America’s failed foreign wars? But he’s still around somewhere, trying to top his earlier act with more of his trademark fever-swamp rants, now offering advice to President Donald Trump on the Iran War.
His latest advice is the stuff of world historic war crimes.
The danger is acute. The president watches Fox News “incessantly.” No one is real in Trump-world unless they are seen on TV. Those who are real assume a larger-than-life influence if they’ve been Fox fixtures. The passageway between Fox News and the Trump administration is like an eerie science fiction wormhole between galaxies. It not only seems to defy space and time, it defies common sense. How else could Trump have gotten Pete Hegseth?
Other Fox New hosts and contributors who ended up in the Trump administration include Sean Duffy, Jeanine Pirro, John Bolton, Larry Kudlow, Mike Walz, Dan Bongino, Sebastian Gorka, Mike Huckabee…There are more, but you get the idea. A preponderance of war enthusiasts, some for Iraq, others for Ukraine, all for Iran.
O’Reilly supported all three wars. And since he was the biggest Fox star for sixteen years, one must assume he looms large in Trump’s consciousness. That makes his pathogenic influence especially menacing.
O’Reilly does not appear to be given to intellectual exertions. During the heyday of Dr. Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns, for example, when the Federal Reserve, fiat money, and monetary policy were front and center, Bill asked a guest, “Who is this guy Keens [sic] that everybody is talking about?” Despite bloviating about politics and policy every night for years, O’Reilly simply had no idea who John Maynard Keynes was, the North Star of Washington’s calamitous economic policies for generations now.
In the twilight of a career riddled with little knowledge and worse judgement, O’Reilly showed up on NewsNation recently with advice for Trump in the Iran War. This, said O’Reilly, is what he would do if he were president of the United States:
“I would tell Iranians living in Tehran, the capital city, to get out. Because we’re going to wreck your infrastructure. That means water. That means power.”
Given his intellectual indolence, one immediately suspects that strategic advice isn’t original with O’Reilly. He is merely giving structure to a babbling, midnight Trump post during the June 2025 U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran: “Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”
Let us unravel this nightmarish idiocy. Tehran is a city of almost ten million people. The greater Tehran metropolitan area has an estimated population of 16.8 million people. What does anyone think will happen if 16.8 million people are told to flee at once because the president of the United States is about to make their lives a living hell?
It is almost impossible to imagine the gridlock and the chaos in housing, water, food, medicine, roads, fuel shortages, disease, accidents, and violence that would ensue.
World historic war crime?
Consider: When Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forced the evacuation of Phnom Penh, Cambodia on April 17, 1975, the city’s population was estimated to be between two million and 2.5 million people. Although the communist Khmer Rouge had already decided to expel the population of the cities, the evacuation was announced as necessary to escape an imminent U.S. bombing attack. Everyone, the well and able as well as the sick and the dying, some pushed on hospital beds, were force-marched into the countryside and jungles. Looting began at once. Famine and epidemics followed. 20,000 died just along the roads. A quarter of the country’s population, a third of the men and about half that many women, died before the entire communist madness and violence came to an end some years later.
25,000 people died in the firebombing of Dresden. That is a modest death toll compared to a panicked evacuation of sixteen million people. 140,000 died from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, over 70,000 in Nagasaki. Even that horror could be dwarfed by O’Reilly’s recommendation.
R.J. Rummel, the demographer of deaths by democide—mass killings by governments—estimates that 7.7 million died in Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. That may be somewhere in the order of magnitude of O’Reilly’s barking lunacy.
“Now the world would go crazy,” acknowledges O’Reilly, if Trump were to follow his advice. “You know what would happen. The Democratic Party would jump up and down here. Trump would be almost alone. But that is the way to do it.”
That is the way to do something. That is the way to take a spot in the pantheon of the world’s most villainous state criminals. That is the way to blacken America’s name for generations.
In my latest book EMPIRE OF LIES: Fragments from the Memory Hole, I identify Bill O’Reilly as among those suffering from a malady I call “Combat Envy.” The evidence provided is the bogus claims he makes about his personal war experiences. Combat Envy is a pernicious syndrome shared by others, including former NBC anchorman Brian Williams, who fabricated accounts of his own war experience. There is some evidence that Trump is similarly afflicted. Last year, he characterized himself as a war hero for ordering air strikes on Iran.
It is hard to know what is more destructive: the fevered illusions of the president or the surreal war propaganda and commentary that Americans let stream into their homes year after year, night after night from Fox News.
Observers on every side, from realists like Andrew Bacevich to neoconservatives like Max Boot, have noted that Donald Trump seems to act on the advice of the last person he talks with. That is why we must hold our collective breath when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to town. We can only hope that O’Reilly’s depraved howling isn’t heard any time soon anywhere in Trump’s vicinity.
And that someone in the White House turns off the TV.
