Van Jones shoots straight with no distractions when he says that Donald Trump is in power because of Mass Incarceration.

As explored in Ava DuVernay’s 13th, Van Jones breaks down how “hundreds of thousands of African-Americans [are] permanently barred from voting because they’re convicted felons,” and if they were given voting rights that Florida would run Blue every single time.

Involved in $cut50, it’s a passionate issue for him. #cut50 aims to cut the prison population in half!

He spoke with Vanity Fair in a recent interview and they wrote of his conclusions of 13th:

Though people might walk away from the film with different conclusions, Jones feels that it can teach “some people who are not close to the black community [to] at least understand why there are protests called Black Lives Matter, at least understand why there are so many African-Americans in prison.”

The statistics are shocking. Black men make up about 6.5 percent of the U.S. population, but 40.2 percent of the prison population consists of black men. They’re imprisoned at much higher rates than white men, even if they commit similar crimes. Latino men and black women also face disproportionately high imprisonment rates. As 13th argues, this is the result of years of racially charged legislation that effectively strips people of their rights once they’ve been through the system.

With Trump as president, there’s little hope that this White House will aid any mass-incarceration reform efforts. On Election Night, right after Trump was elected, Jones was one of the first voices of clarity, calling his ascent a “whitelash against a changing country,” in a CNN interview that quickly went viral.

Thus far, Trump’s White House appears to be carrying out this particular form of “whitelash.” Though Jones is very careful to acknowledge that not all people who voted for Trump are white nationalists, he says that it would be “ludicrous” to pretend that none of his supporters are.

“There is a persistent white-nationalist current within the Trump movement,” he says. “Steve Bannon is in the White House . . . that is very, very disturbing.”

Read more on Vanity Fair here.