Name: Former Green Beret Evan Hafer on Freedom of Speech and the Consequences of Occupational Wars
Uploaded: 2023-11-29T18:24:24.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Former Green Beret Evan Hafer on Freedom of Speech and the Consequences of Occupational Wars' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-29. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Former Green Beret Evan Hafer on Freedom of Speech and the Consequences of Occupational Wars' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-29. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- We are, as a culture, being manipulated.
We're being manipulated.
And it's moving us further and further away
from just sanity, just pure sanity.
- It's the foundations of Western logic, right?
- Yeah.
- It's, they're trying to poison
the roots of Western logic
by completely rewriting what we would call
the history of the world
and the progression around physics and math.
And you name the thing that's under assault,
it's under assault today.
And I think, who benefits from that?
You just have to look around and say,
"Who benefits from that?"
Oh, our foes.
That's who benefits from this.
And not much has changed.
If you think, what, 2,500 years ago,
people will say Socrates was put to death
for corrupting the youth, I think is what it was.
And I'm like trying to recall it,
but he was out there on the street,
arguing and debating with people,
talking about ideas.
And the Athenians were like,
"We gotta get rid of this guy."
He's like, "He's pressure testing what we're doing."
Like, "We gotta put this dude down."
And I think, "Well, that was 2,500 years ago."
So anytime the state deems information as a threat,
we should probably be looking at that information
and then really trying to have an open discussion about it.
That's the beauty of America.
Like, freedom of speech.
Yes. It is the beauty of America.
But it's also why they're trying to crack down on the internet.
The internet has been the biggest force in not just relaying this propaganda,
but also fighting against propaganda and letting people realize like,
"Hey, these people that are supposed to be your leaders,
they're compromised and they're fucking you."
And there's some things that they're doing now that they're just doing.
And like, what is the economic consequence of the hundreds of billions of
dollars
that are being spent on these wars that we're not interested in?
What are the economic consequences?
Where are the actual legal consequences for...
I mean, here's an easy one, which is,
"We invaded a country of Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction."
That didn't exist.
That didn't exist.
Yeah.
Not one person went to jail.
We spent more time trying to connect this fiction around Russian collusion for
two years
than we did investigating why there was a massive information operation
internally to the United States that said there was weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq.
Not one person went to jail.
Not one person stepped in front of Congress and had depositions around,
"Why did you say that there was weapons of mass destruction when there wasn't?"
Not one person.
But we spent how many trillions of dollars on this war?
And how many people died?
Yeah.
How many innocent Iraqis died?
Well, I mean, these are hundreds of thousands of people.
I mean, my peer group alone, just thousands of people that are physically and
mentally altered
forever that spent, you could say, the best years of our life in a war under
false pretenses.
And now, the long-term effects are coming back and also the government doesn't
want to pay for that bill as well.
Yeah, they were trying to deny Gulf War Syndrome, remember that?
Yeah.
When they were using depleted uranium rounds?
Mm-hmm.
So these people were all getting radiation poisoning and their children were
born deformed and
they were having these massive problems and they were trying to deny it because
they didn't want
to pay for it.
They don't want to pay for it.
They don't want to write the check.
They do when it directly benefits what I would say is the military industrial
complex and
these wars of occupation.
I don't want to make it sound like I'm anti, I think there's a difference
between a war of
necessity that maintains national sovereignty and a long-term war of choice for
occupation.
That's a war of choice in occupation is an exercise in transference of wealth
from the
taxpayer into the military industrial complex.
And that's like firsthand experience spending, uh, 2003 to 2009 in Iraq.
Uh, I mean, that's, that's a lot of time, uh, four and a half years on the
ground.
And then another three years in Afghanistan, just seeing the expense from blood
and treasure
alone over the course of, uh, 10 years of deployments and understanding what
the difference
is between precision, uh, tracking, and then killing terrorists and what we
needed to do
in order to stabilize a region and then long-term massive wars of occupation.
There's a very distinct difference.
Yeah, I think that's very important to bring up.
And it's also very important to bring up that.
You have to have military power because other countries have it and people who
don't think
that you should support the military. There's, there's people that think all
military is evil.
Listen, if we didn't have it, what do you think would happen? What do you think
would happen?
Like, what do you think the whole world would lay down their arms if we did?
Do you think that's what would happen? We have to live in reality and the
reality of this world.
And you know it better than anybody. This world is a fucking messy place.
It's, we live in a bubble here. Uh, you know, uh, a very protected artificial
reality.
When you get out into the most dangerous places in the world, that's where you
see nature.
That's where you see the real rules of life, which is the only rules are those
of physics.
Bullets travel at X, you know, X feet per second. You have a collective team
trying to organize
against in a, in a very chaotic environment, trying to survive. But really you,
you strip every piece
of what you know around rules, around what's right and wrong. Your morality is
put into question. Your
mortality is at stake all the time. And you see the real world. It's, it's, it's
eye opening to the point of
you, you, you understand how great we have it in the United States and how
beautiful this country is.
And you also understand how fragile life is in how brutal the, the world can be
and how brutal
humanity can be towards each other. You know, it can be gone like that. And I
think being exposed to it
for that long and then coming home that the, the, uh, the things that I've been
able to pull away from
that are this place is amazing. It's beautiful. It's, it's something that we
should foster and encourage
and continue to pass down through generations because we're so fortunate to
have hit the birth
lottery being born here. Yeah. Like I roll out of bed every day, man. I'm like
this, this is awesome.
Like, I'm so happy to be alive. Like, I'm so happy to have all my fingers and
toes
and I'm so happy for the experiences of war because it's shown me what it's
like to
understand my mortality sometimes second to second, but for sure day to day for
years on end and
understand that we're only here for a short amount of time and we got to make
it fucking count. And we
also have to be very grateful and gracious to what we have here for our
freedoms and our country and our
countrymen and the experience of war itself, that chaotic environment that's
shown me
traffic rules don't apply over there, right? It's like traffic lights and
police officers and
you know, the things that we take for granted every day, going to work, you
know, making our coffee,
doing all the things that we do, you strip all that away into just the law of
nature.
It is wild. Like it is forever life changing, but you also understand this is
what we're living in.
Like these, this is the actual consequence of what we're living in. We were
very protected
in the way that we live life right now.