I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks

Why is this flagged?

First of all, it's about an entrepreneur traveling to the US for a startup, which is directly relevant to a significant proportion of YCombinator founders themselves.

Beyond its direct relevance to the core founding audience of HN, it is not clickbait or wantonly inflammatory, and is clearly of interest to many based on the comment activity and votes.

Musk, Trump and DOGE topics are all being flagged, even if they are relevant… The tech world has blessed this regime.

I don't think 51% of the readers here need to flag something for it to get flagged - maybe more like 5% or 15%?

I guess you can conclude that a few percent here likes Trump etc, but far from a majority

As someone on neither side of that aisle I can tell you it is the smothering effect of attempting any logical discussion in those topics. The smothering effect comes from one side more often than not.

The best part of it all is that you can post like the above with no clear side chosen and the people whom it applies to will react to it negatively as well.