Did I miss something?
People tend to form conclusions about HN more by the strength of their passion on a topic than by the actual data. In other words, there's usually sample bias at work. There's a lot more politics on HN right now than there usually is, which is appropriate since it reflects what's going on right now. But obviously we're not going to let the politics dominate, because that would kill the site.
I wrote more about this here if anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969.
My guess, following CaliforniaKarl, is that a some users are really intent on flagging everything anti-Trump, and others want to flag everything that is not in their own bubble, which is why every politics post gets banned here.
A shame, as I would have liked to see the perspective of HN users on this topic (and not just the perspective of the 3 users required to flag a post)
The former (user flagging) is described in the Guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), near the bottom. Since your account is so new (that's why your username is showing up in green text), you probably don't see the "flag" option. The flag option appears after your karma passes some threshold, but that threshold isn't disclosed.
As for the latter (a moderator adding a down-weight on a post), when searching through old comments I found a comment saying that there was an additional downweight placed on the parent post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12715222#12715332). I didn't know that was possible, although in hindsight I guess it was obvious.
I have to admit, while I do like the sparse-ness of the site (in that it gives you the content with minimal adornment), I think it sometimes goes too far in terms of how the guidelines are presented. For example, there's no mention at all of vouching.
As another example, when 'no politics for a week' was announced, it was via a "Tell HN" post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404). IIRC, that was lifted not too long after, but that lifting was noted in a comment on a post, not as a separate post. I found that interesting, but problematic: Things like "Show HN" and "Ask HN" have their own feeds, in addition to the main and "new" feeds; I think it's very important that "Tell HN" (or some other feed conveying site updates) also have some sort of feed.
There are many places on the internet where yays and boos are the most interesting class of comments. Hacker News is not typically among them.
Unfortunately the present news climate has a lot of bias in the reporting. People should be able to choose their flavouring of news, just like their ice cream or pizza toppings. Keeps the noise level down by sticking to technical topics on HN.
Shit's been hitting the fan since October, as far as I can tell. I think we've all missed quite a lot.