Texas federal prison inmate Julie Howell.
It’s up to you whether you feel any sympathy for Julie Howell. She was an associate professor and the department head for Educational Leadership and Technology in the College of Education at Tarleton State University – part of the Texas A&M system – between April 1, 2022, and April 9, 2024, fired and later indicted because she used the card that’s supposed to be for work expenses and pissed away $941,128, mostly on gambling, something she says was induced by trauma caused by her daughter getting shot. She was facing 10 years in the joint but in January she signed a plea agreement which got her a year at the Club Fed in Texas, reporting to begin her sentence in June.
As reported on Friday, she didn’t last two months there. Now she’s at FDC Houston, a place where a female inmate sued claiming she was raped by a guard four days before her release in 2017. It’s not the worst in the system but it is most definitely not a Club Fed where inmates can train puppies to become service dogs. Howell now has to live next to violent offenders, gang members, unstable pretrial defendants, and all sorts of the people she was not incarcerated with two weeks ago.
All because she spoke out to the media and said she wasn’t comfortable with Ghislaine Maxwell being around her. And simply because convicted felon President Trump’s regime could.
Ryleigh Cooper was a probationary US Forest Service ranger, working on a masters so she could get a promotion, fired in February because Elon Musk figured out that any and every federal government employee under probationary status can be fired without cause – even those who had been working for decades and just had been unlucky enough to have been under the normally perfunctory status as the result of a promotion or lateral transfer to their current position at the time.
Everyone got a schadenfreude-y laugh out of Cooper’s misery back in February when the Washington Post profiled her – and rightly so given that the Post wrote “she believed” the Orange God Emperor “when he said that Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican administration that suggested mass cuts to the federal workforce, was not his plan.”
But for every MAGA-voting now-former federal worker fucked over there’s probably at least one, maybe more, who did not and suffered all the same. Just because Trump and Ketamine Brain could.
Johnny Noviello, a Canadian green carder whose Facebook posts made his non-voter support for the Orange God Emperor unambiguous, died in June at an ICE gulag in Miami under unclear circumstances after being locked up for six weeks pending deportation. Noviello, 49, had moved from Canada to Daytona Beach when he was 10, growing up in Florida and becoming a legal permanent resident in 1991 but never a citizen. In 2017 he and his father, 80 year-old Angelo Noviello, were arrested for selling oxycodone, hydromorphine, and hydrocodone out of their auto repair shop, ending in a 2023 conviction for Johnny. Without any prior record and evidently it being a small amount, Johnny did four months in the joint and a year on something called “community control,” and had been complying with the rules of his probation. Yet when he showed up for a May 15th appointment with his probie ICE was there waiting to cuff him and send him back north.
Simply because they could.
There are countless examples of what other fascist regimes have done when there are no limitations on their ability to destroy people’s livelihoods and lives. This one always stuck out for a lot of reasons beyond just being a darker exaggeration of Republican Party politics these days. It’s that it was for Saddam Hussein just a dull exercise in bureaucratic monotony, like it was as dramatic to him as signing some legislation to build a new irrigation canal, not all that much different from the dull exercises in bureaucratic monotony that befell Howell, Cooper, and Noviello this year.
For them and their distinctly vulnerable positions, their experience being at the mercy of MAGA Republican America in 2025 has more similarities than differences with Ba’athist Iraq in 1979. Sure, they weren’t taken outside and shot like 22 or so of the 66 guys arrested but the deprivation of any sort of legitimate judicial recourse whatsoever happened just because it could.
Too bad for them that eggs were expensive and Kamala Harris didn’t go on Joe Rogan’s show. Could be too bad for a lot more people for a much longer time, people who don’t seem as vulnerable yet.