Former Acting Director of United States National Intelligence Richard (Ric) Grenell returned to his home in California following his time in the Trump administration with a mission: to help build up the state’s floundering conservative movement.
During an interview on Breitbart News Saturday, Grenell told Breitbart News’ Washington bureau chief and host Matthew Boyle about how his organization, Fix California, is currently enacting a three-pronged plan to take back the state from authoritarian leftists and to give long-quiet conservatives a voice in the Golden State.
“The lay of the land when I came home was pretty awful, and our donors were supporting people outside of California — we had a whole bunch of people on the sidelines,” Grenell said.
Grenell, who has also been the ambassador to Germany, said his organization’s plan involves tackling three “pillars”: election integrity, conservative engagement, and education.
“We’re not asking people to storm the beaches of Normandy, like so many of our ancestors did before us. But we are asking people to stand up and stop being afraid of the cancel culture. They can’t cancel all of us,” he said.
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Election Integrity
Fix California is presently suing every single county in California demanding election officials “clean up their voter rolls.”
“We’ve got way too many people on the rolls who are residency violators who have not voted, and so if you are going to send people a ballot who don’t know that ballot is coming, you are asking for trouble,” he said. “Someone is going to pick that ballot up, and we have an aggressive political party, one party that controls that state of California. They have learned to manipulate all of these ballots.”
Grenell said a lot of the manipulation is due to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s emergency measures implemented during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Gavin Newsom has now implemented emergency measures to send every single person on the voter roll a ballot. We had this recall election — the rules were you could print your ballot from home,” he said.
Grenell said he has seen the fallout of California’s “unacceptable” election system up close. The parents of one of his friends were both sent ballots in a recent election — both of his friend’s parents have reportedly been dead for more than 10 years.
“Now you can’t tell me that L.A. County has a clean and fair election when they are sending ballots to dead people from 12 years ago,” he said.
“That’s unacceptable. It’s against the law. It’s fraud,” he added.
Grenell said so far, hundreds of thousands of ballots have been removed from voter rolls since president of Judicial Watch Tom Fitton’s lawsuit and Fix California’s subsequent lawsuits.
Conservative Engagement
According to Grenell, Fix California has found 1.4 million conservatives in California who are not registered to vote. The organization has also found millions of gun owners in California “who are afraid to register to vote, and they shouldn’t be.”
“We’re reengaging with conservatives in California. We’re telling them to get off the sidelines,” he said. “We are a state that when we flex our muscle, we can actually make change.”
To gather troops for the conservative war on leftism, Fix California has gone “county by county” finding conservatives and helping them register to vote. Grenell emphasized that conservatives cannot afford to “sit and listen and watch other people debate the issues,” and said his organization is encouraging conservatives to get more involved in local and state elections.
“Get involved, stand up, and save your country. We are not going to have a country if people are just going to sit and listen to radio programs and be outraged in their car or at home. You gotta get involved,” he said.
He continued:
The reality is, every great civilization has lasted roughly 250 years. Constantinople, the British empire — you can go through and just about predict that after roughly 250 years these great powers cease. And I’m very nervous about a continuation of a society where we let politicians make the rules, and we show up every 2 or 4 years to vote. We can’t do that anymore.
Education
Grenell described the “third pillar” as “the most radical education reform measure in the United States” that will “upend the way we fund education.”
Fix California is aiming to put an option for school choice on the ballot in California in November 2022.
“[The ballot] will ask the voter ‘Do you want the way we fund education — the $13,000 per student per year that the state gives for education — do you want that money to follow the student? Let the student pick the school? Create a total competition?”‘ he said. “It’s not just going to be for government schools, it’s going to be for private schools, for any type of school that can get some type of accreditation.”
“This is going to be a bipartisan push to put California back in the lead, create competition, and let the kids and the families decide what’s best for them and where to go to school,” he continued.
Grenell said Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia governor’s race showed him how empowering parents to have a say in their children’s education hits home with voters of all affiliations.
“The lesson of Virginia for me is not that a politician did something — it’s that a politician got out of the way and said to the parents, ‘You’re in charge, you’re in charge of your kid’s education,”’ he said, adding that he does not know any parents, regardless of their political beliefs, who are comfortable with giving strangers complete control over what their children learn in school.
Grenell said parents have told him that during the pandemic, “What Zoom school gave [them] was a gift.”
“They all got to watch what was going on, and I actually think it would be criminal for people who care about education reform to not put education reform issues on the ballot in the fall,” he said.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Twitter.