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Pete Hegseth: “I went into Afghanistan pretty optimistic and I left very…”

Featuring: Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense | National

From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story

Published October 16, 2024 | Video Starts at 01:05

Memories from Afghanistan. What did you take away from the Afghanistan experience that was different from the Iraq experience? So I had the opposite. I went into Afghanistan pretty optimistic and I left very pessimistic. I appreciate you taking the time, man. I, I can't. I don't think there. Is there another host on Fox News that is on as many shows as you are? (01:05–01:11)

CLAIM

Asserts a change in perspective from optimism to pessimism regarding the Afghanistan experience.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

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Pete Hegseth

“If... Kamala Harris wins and... DEI CRT gender climate nonsense continues... I probably wouldn't recommend [military service].”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 00:24-56:46
“There was a lot of spill trade work going on under the surface inside America, domestically that had changed our country.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 00:53-00:59
“I have mailed my Harvard degree back.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 04:31-04:33
“Harvard was just horrible. I got dumber.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 05:19-05:22
“I did ROTC at Princeton. There were three of us in the Mighty Tiger Battalion.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 05:38-05:43
“There were 700 guys in 04 and 05 who've been pulled off the battlefield at Gitmo.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 09:51-09:57
“We thought military tribunals and commissions were coming.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 09:56-10:00
“These commissions never got off the ground because of left wing lawyers and all this other nonsense.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 10:11-10:18
“Bear Stearns, May it Rest in peace. Great firm, May it Rest in Peace act. They actually cared only about making money.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 12:06-12:14
“The war wasn't going well, at least from the view of what we were getting domestically.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 12:33-12:39
“They did a 20-month tour.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 17:20-17:23
“We made a great deal of local progress in stemming the insurgency, creating local partnerships, standing up the Iraqi police, an army.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 18:07-18:16
“More troops and Petraeus's surge strategy probably could be effective in bringing down the sectarian violence.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 18:17-18:30
“I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that was published in I think October of 2006 called more troops please.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 18:40-18:47
“Obama took a trip to Iraq in the middle of the campaign because he was getting so much criticism for being out of touch with the war.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 22:36-22:43
“I came back from Afghanistan and ran for the US Senate against Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota, which is my home state.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 25:11-25:18
“The Star Tribune, which is our liberal rag in Minnesota, dubbed me a front runner. Day one, I announced I raised a bunch of money.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 25:38-25:45
“We were front and center on the Phoenix VA scandal.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 27:43-27:46
“Obama did kind of a surge [in Afghanistan].”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 31:17-31:21
“We were already touting this hallow force, saying things that we knew were not true.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 33:16-33:22
“We really are advancing a shell game here that's going to collapse when we leave.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 33:46-33:51
“Afghanistan just didn't exist [in terms of infrastructure and modernity compared to Iraq].”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 34:40-34:43
“The Taliban may have run into Pakistan, but they're re-establishing underground and they're the real power base.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 36:09-36:16
“Most folks don't know Afghanistan was thriving at least and open for Westerners not that long ago.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 36:16-36:23
“The Taliban is stronger, has deeper tentacles, has totally infiltrated the military services and police.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 38:28-38:37
“Once you start to signal that we're out of here with a date certain which is exactly what happened.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 38:48-38:54
“They moved it up to, I think, August 25th, and they moved it up because things were going sideways so quickly.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 39:20-39:26
“It took 10 days. That's all it took.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 39:54-39:57
“Once we made the decision to abandon Bagram and we had consolidated, it was just. It made no sense.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 40:03-40:09
“The only guy that was fired was Stu Scheller, the colonel who stood up and said what everybody was thinking.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 41:26-41:31
“We fought Afghanistan and Iraq basically one year at a time. 20 years for 20 years, all on PowerPoint.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 42:01-42:08
“We didn't have enough ammo. We didn't have enough [resources].”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 42:14-42:16
“The ANA was by the end of your deployment that a unit better be green.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 42:15-42:19
“Everybody's lying. Everybody's making up. Or if they're not lying, they're just naive.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 42:40-42:46
“Governor Cuomo was not going to have Pete Hegseth, the Fox News [personality], in his National Guard.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 43:21-43:28
“We didn't have enough guys and they didn't have enough people on the streets.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 44:23-44:28
“Generals again and leaders who kowtow to the political moment, even though they know what they're peddling about their own service is not…”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 45:32-45:40
“There were 25,000 of them sleeping in the parking lot of the Capitol.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 46:22-46:26
“Someone identified a Jerusalem Cross tattoo you have on your chest right here as an extremist tattoo.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 47:41-47:49
“Certain people are being targeted, purged from our ranks and, and they're not the kind of guys you want kicked out.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 48:56-49:04
“We only have one military, only one Pentagon.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 50:07-50:10
“I don't want my kids fighting some long insurgency in Donbas.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 51:42-51:49
“When I joined ROTC, we weren't talking about gender and race.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 55:06-55:11
“You see a battalion commander who got promoted... because he checked a few boxes.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 55:45-55:53
“Standards always evolve over time.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 56:50-56:54
“I'm walking on eggshells inside my unit because of this dynamic of gender or race or trans or extremism.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 56:54-57:03
“The vaccine mandate pushes.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 57:02-57:05
“I know for sure that this book was well read inside the Pentagon.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 57:58-58:04
“Parents have allowed, you know, we've coddled and we've pretended and we've, we've been led by our own kids as opposed to leading them.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 59:20-59:30
“If you really want to join, my recommendation to them is join the Navy SEALs, join the Army Rangers, join the Green Berets, go for the best…”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 1:00:01-1:00:10
“Even your conventional infantry units are dealing with a lot of this nonsense.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 1:00:32-1:00:36
“We just screens and dumbed down schools and vapid media have created men without chests in a time when we need them more than ever.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 1:01:00-1:01:11
“There are a lot of utopians out there on the left who think we can tinker our way into human perfection.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 1:04:40-1:04:46
“If you open Genesis, you know that's not possible.”
From Wall Street to Iraq The Pete Hegseth UNCENSORED Story | Uploaded October 16, 2024 | 1:04:45-1:04:49