Matt Hasty
Retired Army Warrant Officer | Bronze Star Recipient | Screenwriter, Actor & Acting Coach | 2020 Congressional Candidate
Matt Hasty describes himself as a "Redneck, Retired Army Warrant Officer, former congressional candidate, mediocre actor, great teacher, rambling writer and spouter of nonsensical gibberish." The man with twenty years of service and a Bronze Star gets to grade his own résumé, but the mediocre actor thing is selling him short.
He served as a Chief Warrant Officer in the US Army from 2000 to 2019, with deployments to Afghanistan, Korea, and Europe, roles spanning communications, special operations support, and leadership development, plus crisis response work coordinating FEMA disaster communications convoys in the Katrina aftermath. He holds a BS in Information Technology Management from American Military University and an MA in Organizational Leadership from Norwich University. In 2020 he ran for Congress in Louisiana's 5th District as a no-budget, grassroots candidate who figured service did not end at retirement.
The second act was the stage. Matt became an award-placing screenwriter, a working actor and director in the Charleston, SC scene with a TV credit on *The Righteous Gemstones*, and the instructor behind Acting for the Camera at Trident Technical College, which is where the great teacher claim comes from. He writes regularly on Substack and lives in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
On Space Tomatoes S3-EP12 ("From Bronze Star to Plot Armor"), Matt brought the soldier's hardest question to the table: what do you do when the order itself is illegal? He walks through why "I was just following orders" died as a defense at Nuremberg and never should have lived, where personal accountability sits when the chain of command goes criminal, what standing armies and 700 foreign bases have to do with the Constitution, and what basic training rips out of a person on day one. Sharp, funny, and unrepentantly opinionated, the guest who turns military discipline into a case study in individual conscience.
Find Matt: https://linktr.ee/matt.hasty
Substack: https://substack.com/@matthewhasty
X: https://x.com/Terkunamam
