A retired U.S. Navy officer has declared war on the "religious fanatics" in Florida who are flooding school boards with demands to ban books, arguing in front of one board that they are engaging in "religious fascism."

According to a report from the Daily Beast's Michael Daly, 54-year-old Wess Rexrode appeared at a school board hearing in Florida's Martin County where he gave members of the board and supporters of book bans a piece of his mind.

Rexrode, who was deployed on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt on 9/11, bluntly stated, "Religious fanatics, who wouldn’t even let women be educated, flew planes into the World Trade Center and my Pentagon. I spent the last decade of my naval career fighting religious fascism abroad. I never thought I’d have to fight it right here in the United States of America.”

According to the Beast's Daly, "Rexrode was speaking specifically of those who used a new Florida law to have 92 books banned from the county’s public school classrooms and libraries. Books by Jodi Picoult and Toni Morrison were removed following an objection filed by a member of Moms for Liberty who had not even read them."