I am far removed from what is happening in the 2016 USA presidential elections. As someone that has seen first-hand the politics of fear/hate/identity/class that has come to characterize this year’s campaigns, I can relate to some of the rhetoric (to mean that I have heard similar tangents, although in a more unsavory, vitriolic, and outright murderous tone). But that really is not the point behind my submission of this story.
There is a clear disdain among the HN folk regarding the submission of political stories due to the inherent risk of attracting trolls and eliciting comment wars- this is supposed to be a civil community and, in my experience, this continues to be the case. Indeed, as a young unlearned African man with a libertarian streak- and one that has previously encountered this association between racial and libertarian rhetoric, implicit and otherwise- I felt that this may be the best community to have this sort of conversation. Does the libertarian movement still provide refuge to the racialized aspirations of the white supremacists and the alt-right? Are there points of convergence? Is the marriage between the iconic libertarian Peter Thiel and the divisive Donald Trump emblematic of this convergence?
I am in the formative stages of forming my own political identity and a conversation along this line can benefit me greatly (and HN has, perhaps, some of the most qualified people to weigh in on the matter). In fact, a lot of my posts mirror my own developmental process as an individual, an aspiring software programmer and entrepreneur, and an active member of my local civic community (also, I love gathering information and I reckon that HN conversations are the bee’s knees).
No malice was intended by submitting this post (as a long-time lurker here, I deeply respect HN’s sense of community), but I totally understand if that is how the submission came across.