Peter Navarro’s prison memoir warns America about lawfare’s rise

Blaze News readers know the script: agencies weaponized, media complicit, ordinary people crushed in the gears. “I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To” follows that script with raw detail and a court docket.

Peter Navarro, once a senior economic adviser to President Trump, begins his account with a boarding-gate arrest worthy of a thriller: five armed agents, leg irons, and a cell once used for John Hinckley. He ends with a defiant claim — that a man can emerge unbroken after 120 days in what he calls a “lawfare gulag.”

The new gulag is not only a place. It is a habit. Navarro’s account shows how to break it.

Navarro doesn’t argue that America has become the USSR. His point is sharper: Bureaucratic impunity and political prosecutions can turn any free nation into a maze of petty tyrannies.

Kafka behind razor wire

The book’s middle chapters read like Kafka with a side of commissary ramen. Navarro describes a prison “camp” wrapped in razor wire, a dentist prescribing sunscreen the commissary didn’t sell, and commissary prices triple those at Target. He recounts a sudden Special Investigative Services raid that smashed showers, flooded the dorm, and locked inmates down. A First Step Act loophole denied him time credits because his sentence included no supervised release.

Absurdities pile up, but the lesson is deadly serious. Systems that multiply rules and shrug at conflicts breed injustice.

Executive privilege on trial

Navarro anchors his refusal to testify in claims of executive privilege and Department of Justice-recognized testimonial immunity for senior presidential advisers. He dismisses the Jan. 6 committee as a political theater project designed to “expose for exposure’s sake.” A White House letter, he says, purported to waive a predecessor’s privilege — something he insists an incumbent president should not have the power to do.

Skeptics may doubt Navarro’s reading. But the incentive structure he highlights cannot be ignored. If an incumbent president can extinguish a former president’s privilege at will, and if Congress can punish disputes it should legislate, then the machinery exists to criminalize losing an election.

That is not a conspiracy theory — it is a theory of incentives. And it is what Navarro says happened to him after the Biden administration took power.

Survival notes

Blaze News readers will recognize the moral of Navarro’s ordeal. He refused to plead the Fifth — not because it wouldn’t have helped, but because, as he writes, he would not validate a process he viewed as punitive. He catalogs the system’s manipulations: “Potemkin” cleanups before the media arrived, choreographed delays that wiped out visiting hours, petty flexes of power designed to make people small.

RELATED: The ‘normie conquest’: Millions just joined the right overnight

Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images

Americans long believed political imprisonment couldn’t happen here. Navarro insists it already has.

Why the book matters

Why should “I Went To Prison So You Won’t Have To” sit on every Blaze News reader’s shelf? Because it doubles as a manual. It maps how citizens can be dragged through the gears: investigations framed as oversight but prosecuted like warfare, constitutional disputes treated as crimes, prison terms leveraged as warnings to Trump and the MAGA movement.

The book’s title is both a promise and a dare. Learn the tactics. Resist them peacefully, locally, lawfully. Read it. Argue with it. Mark the pages that disturb you. And above all — stay awake.

The new gulag is not only a place. It is a habit. Navarro’s account shows how to break it.