ICYMI: Rep. Cisneros Calls Out Secretary Hegseth's Purge of Books at Naval Academy

A partial transcript of the interview can be found below. 

On the removal of 400 books from the Naval Academy: 

And to those people who say, you know, if these midshipmen want to read about memorializing the holocaust or a book about, you know, female comedians, pretty funny was also a book pulled from the shelves. They can do that on their own dime, on their own time. It shouldn't be in the library. What do you say to them?    

We are training leaders over there at the service academies. Whether it's the Naval Academy, whether it's West Point, the Air Force Academy. These are institutions of higher learning. We want them to be well rounded, we want them to be well-read. We want them to go out and read different books, get different sides of opinions. We're not creating stormtroopers over there... Diversity is a strength and I don't care what Pete Hegseth says. It is a strength. The Marine Corps did studies that showed diverse teams perform better than teams that aren't diverse. And so we have the proof out there. And it's not only at the service academies in the military, but corporate America as well.  

Initially the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, military academy at West Point, those were not included in the purge order, because their colleges, the focus was on the K-12 schools because they received federal funding. Do you think there should be some distinction?  

I think it's horrible that we're taking books out of all our schools, whether it be K-12 or these institutions of higher learning... to go into to just minimize and say, well, now you can only read these books. You know, this isn't Nazi Germany, this isn't the Soviet Union. We are not meant to be an authoritarian government that says you can only do this, or you can only read that. And that's the scary part of what's going on here is, I think they want to take us down that path.  

On other impacts that Secretary Hegseth's anti-DEI orders are having on the DoD:  

As we look at, you know, often this is put in the, the, the context of disrupting cohesion, the absence of those conversation. Does that also disrupt cohesion?  

One of the other things, right, that is scary about this is that both the Navy and the Marine Corps took steps to put their sexual assault, sexual harassment training on pause. Using DEI as the reason for doing that... These conversations need to include everybody, and we cannot just minimize this, like, you know, put it to a back room where people are talking about these things in secret, afraid to bring them up because they're afraid they might get in trouble or be disciplined for raising issues.  

On President Trump's tariffs and their impact on small businesses:  

How does that work? Just removing the inventory and selling the fresh one. Can you explain that?  

No, I can't look, the chairman, Chairman Williams is a car dealer. The prices of his vehicles are going to go up... A lot of our small businesses rely on supplies that come from either, you know, some of our biggest trading allies, Mexico, Canada China or other countries around the world... The American people are getting hit with a double whammy here. Not only are they going to have to pay higher prices because of the tariffs, but their pensions, their 401(k) plans are involved in the stock market, right? That's where they're invested in. $6 trillion, we lost in two days. And there's no sign of when this is going to end or if they are buckling and realizing they made a mistake.   

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