These are clearly important times, regardless of your politics. The HN guidelines define on topic as "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting."
Up-votes are a measure of what is found interesting. Posting the topic and receiving no up-votes (the "posted but not interesting to good hackers" case) means no presence on the front page, which means no one is impacted, aka the cost is low.
Alternatively, pre-emptively censoring something that might have been of interest (the "not posted but interesting to good hackers" case) means no discussion about a topic people would/do find interesting, aka the opportunity cost is high.
The site self-corrects, so we shouldn't live in fear of topics.