Elections Have Consequences: What Trump’s Victory Means for Residents of the Carceral State, Legacy Media, and Dismayed Leftists

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For a decade, over the course of three national election cycles, it has been too easy for the left and their comrades in the mainstream media to frame Donald Trump’s supporters as racists and xenophobes who hate people of color. The 2024 election returns have finally proved that lie with statistical clarity—they can’t say that anymore. Young men, Black voters, and Hispanic voters stormed the polls in support of Trump in a rejection of Kamala Harris, the Democratic party, and the media narratives framing Trump as a virus.

The Black and Hispanic constituencies that have for decades been the so-called core voting blocks keeping Democrats in power have finally revolted against their benefactors, left the plantation, and sided with the Orange-Man-Bad punching bag who most legacy media pundits, editors, and newsrooms have persistently disparaged as a racist, fascist, and the reincarnation of Hitler. They rejected Barack Obama’s “vote for your sista” appeals.

How did that happen? Why did that happen?

Jay-Z infamously rapped about how “numbers don’t lie,” and so, the many more millions of Americans who chose Trump over Harris represent a popular vote power slap repudiation of the weighted polls, slanted messaging, and leftist propaganda machinations that have been steadily fed to voters for years, only to fray under the trial-by-combat test of modern gladiator politics. No longer can you blame the torch-carrying southerners, rural farmers, or low-information voters who lack a college education for steering the nation into a hillbilly cul de sac. In an election supposedly framed as a choice about abortion, fewer women voted for Harris in 2024 than did for Biden four years ago. Harris hemorrhaged home-team voters like prison stabbing victims left on the top tier to bleed out—nothing could save her.

In California, incarcerated citizens are staring at a dynamically reflexive electorate that saved Governor Gavin Newsom from multiple recalls, has fired the soft-on-crime district attorneys in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and moved to the conservative corner of the ring concerning prison servitude, increased penalties for drug and theft crimes, and increasing the minimum wage. For those of us who remember how the Biden-authored Clinton Crime Bill and the Three Strikes Law formed a dual-front 90s-era headlock on crime, the wages of radical policy have spawned a snapback that feels like a tsunami of retribution from the silent majority. Trump was very competitive in California.

As an activist journalist stakeholder, I am first in line to press for equity, free speech, civic engagement, and a viable opportunity for confined persons to demonstrate their capacity for change—but the fusion of redemption and public safety represents the true meaning of restorative justice. There can be no parole without change, insight, and transformation, and there can be no change without the opportunity to do the work that honors the societal debt that every law breaker owes the community we have taken from. That said, liberal policies have been too lax, permitted far too much unaccountability, and the streets are too unsafe.

The community writ large is rightfully fearful, the police have been defanged, and our porous border has facilitated a lawlessness that traditional democrat and independent voters have rejected. The prevalence of crime has given back the gains won by the many returning citizens who have shown us what the right of return looks like. Suburban moms are afraid, blue collar Black and Hispanic men refuse to march in a monolithic line, and the silent majority just roared in your face. Take it from me—many of us sitting in prison are shaking our heads at the cyclone of push-back headed our way; we can see the conservative boomerang come back around.

I’ve stood in my C-yard Honor Building housing unit dayroom at Valley State Prison and exchanged words with our Governor—he told us that our prison was the “future of corrections.” He urged us to remain here, program here, and chase freedom from here. Many of my friends are living their best lives in freedom because he either commuted their sentences or facilitated their parole via the Commissioners he has deployed. Though I critique many of his policies, I know that he believes people can change, because I watched many of his conservative predecessors do everything possible to prevent every lifer who came before them from ever walking free.

When cameras aren’t rolling, and his security detail isn’t flanking him, Gavin the man, apart from his public role as the state’s chief law enforcement officer, treats the folks his authority imprisons with dignity and compassion during up close and personal engagements. This is a man whose family has been touched personally by violent crime. He was shaking the hands of lifers and LWOP prisoners long before anybody was thinking about traveling to Norway or redefining the mission of the state’s prison system. He was empowering Scott Budnick to advocate for youth offenders a decade before anybody cared about the brain science that now undergirds how redemption and mitigation dance together. We need him now more than ever.

Watching the emerging conservatism erupt from the center of the Earth like a mammoth mother worm surging underfoot in a scene from Dune has focused my attention upon the capacity for social justice Gavin wields in his hands to unilaterally shape how the prison industrial complex might work in service of transformation. None of my abolitionist allies will look to him to bend the leviathan any more than they might say the word reform out loud. But we live here—and we die here. Some of us get to leave, and that only happens at all because Gavin has reoriented the agencies he controls to facilitate it.

He will never get the credit he deserves for being the human land bridge of enabling possibility, because for every one of us he allows to walk free, there is a broken family seething over the loss of a loved one. The public safety political calculus for top dog officials who control the levers of parole is particularly perilous for those with weak knees, but Gavin has devised a perfect system of hands-free plausible deniability thanks to an En Banc two-step that allows him to deny parole to those who his En Banc panel will subsequently release thereafter anyhow. Again, he doesn’t have to work this hard to release so many violent offenders—but he does.

Should I reveal just how many lifers here were fretting over the prospect of Gavin becoming Kamala’s running mate after Pelosi and the DNC pushed Biden out? Trust me, watching him talk to Bill Clinton on the golf course in the run-up to the announcement of her running mate struck fear in thousands of Golden State lifers who saw their prospects fade with his expected ascendency. He is viewed as a savior—that’s not hyperbole either. The public would know that if there was any true semblance of honest and uncensored reporting coming out of the prison newspaper PR machinery postured as news inside of the few prisons that publish resident copy. The public might have also known just how many imprisoned Black and Hispanic residents loathed Harris, rejected the left, and glimpsed the bellwether living in those sentiments.

I tried to warn you.

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