Peter Navarro’s I went to prison so you won’t have to is a bare-knuckle account of Biden’s abuses – and a warning of what may come

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

Peter Navarro has written a terrifying and exceptional book that should be required reading for those who seek to understand the depth of the abuses of the Biden presidency, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Congress, and their allies in the courts and media. It’s also a stark warning that should they ever return to power, the future will be very dark for President Trump and his supporters. 

The book is written in the form of a day-to-day diary of his life in a Miami prison, where Navarro served a four-month sentence from March to July 2024. It is an especially valuable contribution for four major reasons.   

First, the book’s genesis is Navarro’s great sacrifice: He went to prison because he refused to cooperate with Pelosi’s House Select J6 Committee.  Pelosi waged lawfare pure and simple against him.  President Trump had invoked executive privilege, and the select committee demanded that Navarro break the law.  He refused to do so.  Obama-appointed Judge Amit Mehta sentenced him to prison for a misdemeanor.  In prison, Navarro was the only one serving time for a misdemeanor. 

Second, the work is a poignant love story detailing his relationship with his fiancée, Bonnie Brenner, co-author of the book. Brenner provides insight into how she suffered and supported Navarro through their profound love.  While he was in prison, the couple were limited to daily phone calls and brief weekly visits.  As one of Navarro’s fellow inmates told him, she was doing time through him.  

Third, Navarro provides an account of what is wrong in America’s prison system.  This includes its treatment of prisoners and their incentives, its infrastructure, and all too often its employees.  There is significant variation among the prison’s employees, ranging from good to tyrannical.  His gripping account of one particularly martinet guard gives insight into actual, gritty conditions faced by the prisoners and their families.  In his analysis, he makes a strong case for prison reform.  

Far from a “soft on crime” approach, Navarro explains why reform is necessary.  It will reduce the crime rate by lowering the tax burden and rate of recidivism.  Under Biden, the Bureau of Prisons bureaucracy was not fit for purpose.  It imposes tangible and needless difficulties upon prisoners, including being unable to address the health of seriously ill prisoners or even manage their release on time due to the incentives of the prison system.  A dark secret of the system is that its business model requires holding onto inmates – because they are paid by the numbers they hold.  This encourages endemic fraud in the Bureau of Prisons.  

Like an investigative reporter, Navarro details and publicizes these abuses.  His account also provides an important window into President Trump’s effort in his first term to improve America’s prison system through the First Step Act.  Navarro’s documentation of the problems will serve prison reform well in Trump’s second term. 

Fourth, the book is a warning.  It is a chilling illustration of the true totalitarian nature of the left.  It is a “J’Accuse” for our time.  Like Zola’s work, it is a bare-knuckled indictment of an evil system Democrats direct and wield to sustain their rule and punish their enemies.  Unlike Zola, this system conspired not against one man, but against President Trump, Steve Bannon, John Eastman, Jeff Clark, and many others—in fact, well over half the country who support President Trump. 

Navarro’s account is a contemporary reminder of the abuses that the great students of totalitarianism like Arendt and Solzhenitsyn have identified in past tyrannical regimes.  It is not only the banality, capriciousness, and brutal incompetence of tyranny, but that one does not realize when it starts how horrific it will quickly become.  The Russian people did not realize in 1917 that they were only years away from the gulag for thought crimes, and the German people did not grasp the same in 1933.  An initial wave of harassment and imprisonments quickly led to the full horrors of communism and Nazism.  

Navarro’s book is a warning that tyranny is here in America now, and if the left is not stopped in its tracks, what they did to him will morph into even greater abuses against more and more Americans if the Democrats return to power.  I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To is a warning to all Americans of what can happen to them, and that you very well might end up in the cell next to Navarro and other Trump supporters in the wake of future Democrat victories.  Americans must read this book to hear Navarro’s warning – and prevent a bleak and brutal future under the totalitarian left.

Bradley A. Thayer has been a Visiting Fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, and is a widely published author and opinion contributor, particularly on the threat from the People’s Republic of China.

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