There's always a ton of randomness with these things. People tend to underestimate how that affects nearly every aspect of HN. That is, they misinterpret a random outcome as some sort of meaningful thing and then attribute a meaning to it.

If you assume that rhyme or reason is involved, then of course the results seem bizarrely inconsistent and the only models that fit will be Rube Goldberg ones. Simply understand that randomness plays the largest role, and the mystery goes away. (But I know that's less internet fun.)

In terms of all these political stories getting flagged: it's a simple consequence of there being a huge influx of intense political stories while HN's capacity remains "30 slots on the frontpage" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If these stories mostly didn't get flagged or otherwise moderator, HN would turn overnight into a current affairs site, which it is not and never has been.

That still leaves room for some stories with political overlap, though not nearly as many as the politically passionate would prefer. Btw, this is a special case of a more general principle: there are not nearly as many stories on any topic X as the X-passionate would desire. The front page, in that sense, satisfies no one!

But back to the politics thing—here are some links to past explanations about how we deal with that:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 has a good list of more.

For those who are up for a more complex explanation, this is really how I think about this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306. The basic idea is to avoid predictable sequences: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....