A Man Died Hog-Tied in ICE Custody. They Called It Suicide.
Chaofeng Ge, a 32-year-old Chinese immigrant, died in ICE custody in Pennsylvania on August 5th.
The official story: suicide by hanging.
The autopsy: found hog-tied with bedsheets binding his hands and feet behind his back, cloth around his neck.
The family’s attorney asks the obvious question: “It is truly mystifying how any detention facility can let someone leave their room, create three nooses and then hang themselves without anyone knowing.”
The DHS response: boilerplate about taking deaths seriously and investigating thoroughly. No answers to how someone ends up hog-tied while committing suicide.
This happened in August. We’re learning about it in November. It will disappear by tomorrow.
The US government murdered someone in an immigration detention center and then tried to cover it up with a bald-faced lie. This has become the character of our government. This is tyranny. Allowing this to continue in our collective name is—I don’t even have words.
This is our collective failure as Americans to govern ourselves as a constitutional republic. We gave up. We let the reprobates run the show. And now they’re murdering people and lying about it.
A man died with his hands and feet bound behind him, and the official explanation is suicide. There will be no emergency congressional investigation. No mass protests demanding accountability. No institutional response adequate to the horror of what this represents.
Just boilerplate statements and bureaucratic silence while we move on to the next outrage, the next scandal, the next manufactured distraction.
We are witnesses to tyranny. And our silence makes us complicit.
Go Deeper into the Circus
They Don’t Understand Orwell. At All.
How charming it must be to invoke George Orwell while cheering the richest man on the planet as he systematically buries dissent on the platform he purchased with the explicit promise of “free speech absolutism.” How delightfully convenient to wave Nineteen Eighty-Four
On Seeing Clearly Without Losing Your Mind
I put out a meditation yesterday, and it elicited concern from some people who know me. I am both surprised and existentially amused by this. But the discussions the piece caused have made me want to dig deeper here into the philosophical question that hides behind the mythopoetry. Why it’s not empty sentiment. Why it attach…
Are we going to see these events reported anywhere else? This is serious from many perspectives.
What is truly terrifying, is that could be any American citizen. Any one of us. What is enraging is that this is not a bigger story. It’s every bit as shocking as the black student in Mississippi found hanging from a tree that was ruled a suicide as well. It’s total bullshit, of course. We cannot stay silent, we cannot continue our complacency. We need to remember our collective agency. We must reclaim the republic which is rightfully ours.