Ric Grenell to Newsmax: California Built Culture Leading to Crime Wave

For years, California has put itself "into a corner" by building a culture where "people get to ignore the laws that they don't agree with," and that has led to the growth of violent crime, former ambassador and acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell said Monday on Newsmax.

"We have had politicians pushing law enforcement officials not to enforce the law," Grenell, now the vice president for international development and a national security contributor for Newsmax, said on the network's "National Report." "After seasons of pushing sanctuary cities, and then last summer this crazy narrative that we should defund the police, that started to take hold in the progressive leftists' psyche that maybe it was a good idea to take away money from the police."

The police defunding, along with attacks on law enforcement officials have "created a dynamic where thieves, burglars, vandals have decided that they get to react" and now there is a serious problem, said Grenell.

That's leading to people who used to push the defunding laws to now be seeking a different approach, said Grenell: "I think that we've had a reckoning with the consequences of pushing really bad policies. Now you're seeing a different approach from even the mayor of San Francisco."

Grenell also spoke out about the growing travel bans and other steps that are happening, particularly with the advent of the rapidly spreading omicron coronavirus variant.

"I'm of the impression that politicians are not going to be able to stop a virus," said Grenell. "We were told years ago during flu season don't go see grandma and don't go to the movie theaters. Those are warnings that individuals who live in free places get to decide whether or not that blanket mandate applies to them."

But people who are healthy and young "obviously don't have to take the warnings as seriously as people who are are sickly or older," he added. "I think one of the things that we've failed to do, the government has failed to do, is to recognize natural immunity … natural immunity confirmed cases of COVID should have been treated differently, and they're not by government officials."

Grenell further discussed the Russia-Ukraine border, following a report in The Wall Street Journal that the Biden administration is considering sending Ukraine military equipment that was initially bound for Afghanistan.

"We always want to make sure that that threat of military action is a credible threat of military action," he said. "We have to remember that Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the last time that he calculated that the American threat of military action was not a credible threat is when he decided to just grab Crimea, which is a portion of Ukraine. He grabbed it for the Russians, and they rewrote the border of Ukraine."

And now, Putin is recalculating that there is no "credible threat" of military action under President Joe Biden, and it's a "crisis for Europe," said Grenell.

"The Europeans need to get much more serious about this," he said. "Remember Chancellor [Angela] Merkel is gone. Olaf Scholz is the new chancellor. The defense and diplomatic ministries in Germany are now run by the Green Party, so they're completely inexperienced when it comes to foreign and defense policies."

All this adds up to a "recipe for disaster," said Grenell. "Putin smells weakness."

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