The accounts that flag these stories are almost always established accounts, so I'm not too worried about them being sockpuppets or paid influencers.
From everything we've seen, flags on political stories are a coalition between (1) users who don't want to see (most) political stories on HN, and (2) users who don't like the politics of a particular story they are flagging. In other words, users who care about the quality of the site, and users who care about a political struggle.
This dynamic shows up on all the main political topics.
There are some accounts that abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position. When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.
This, so far, seems sufficient to me. If we start to see indications that it's not sufficient, we'll take more action.
I know there are many users (actually a small-but-vocal minority of users) who complain that flags are being abused to suppress political stories. What these complainants never seem to take into account is that we want most political stories to be flagged on HN, for a critical reason: if they weren't, then HN would turn into a current-affairs site, and that would not be HN at all.
From the point of view of HN fulfilling its mandate (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), the status quo around flagging is not so awful—it is within (let's say) a standard deviation of the desired state: most (though not all) political stories either fail to make the frontpage or get flagged off the frontpage.
That's the desired outcome, not because such stories are unimportant—often they're far more important than anything that does stay on the frontpage—but because HN is trying to be a particular kind of site. Food is more important than toys, but that doesn't mean there's no place for toy stores, or that toy stores should dedicate more shelf space to food. It doesn't mean that toy stores are suppressing food! or that toy store proprietors don't care about food or don't think people should have any.
When we become aware of a political story that is being flagged off the frontpage even though it fits HN's criteria for being on-topic (e.g.: contains significant new information, has some overlap with intellectual curiosity, has a chance of a substantive discussion, and there haven't been too many political stories on HN recently), then we turn off flags. This is the best strategy I know, so far, for balancing the frontpage according to HN's mandate.
If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but any HN user) want us to change how this works, you'd need an argument that engages with why we don't want most political stories on HN's frontpage. That is, your argument would need to proceed from what kind of website HN is trying to be, and trying not to be. That's the fundamental point.
Instead, most arguments I hear are concerned with the behavior of flaggers, whether they're "politically motivated" (i.e. are against the political causes that someone personally identifies with), whether they are "unfairly suppressing discussion" or not, and so on. None of this engages with the fundamental point. I don't want to say we "don't care about any of that as long as the overall outcome is achieved", but I do think (1) it's secondary, and (2) we would be foolish to make changes that made HN do worse by its mandate. I'm only interested in changes that make HN better for its intended purpose.
After many discussions with users making such objections [1], I get the feeling that they have a mistaken idea of what principles HN operates by, or think it should operate by different principles. The principle they seem to favor is that submissions should simply be ranked according to upvotes. The stories that get the most upvotes are the ones that people care most about, and those should be the ones on the frontpage. Anything else is unfair — is censorship, putting a thumb on the scale, and so on. That is the view implied, and often expressed, in these discussions.
There are a ton of reasons why HN doesn't work this way and is designed not to. The most important is simply that if it did, it would be a different site. The frontpage would consist of the hottest and most sensational/indignant topics, and yes, plenty more would be political. But it wouldn't be HN. We're optimizing for something else entirely, and there's no way that this kind of site can work by upvotes alone. [2]
Flagging on HN is part of this optimization effort, so if you want to change how flags work, you'd need to show how it would move the site closer to this optimum—the goal we have, rather than some other goal that we don't have. HN is far from that optimum, so there is room for improvement. But we can't optimize for two things.
An interesting fact is that while almost all of the Solar System has started as gas, which has then condensed here into solid bodies that have then aggregated into planets, a small part of the original matter of the Solar System has consisted of solid dust particles that have come as such from the stellar explosions that have propelled them.
So we can identify in meteorites or on the surface of other bodies not affected by weather, like the Moon or asteroids, small mineral grains that are true stardust, i.e. interstellar grains that have remained unchanged since long before the formation of the Earth and of the Solar System.
We can identify such grains by their abnormal isotopic composition, in comparison with the matter of the Solar System. While many such interstellar grains should be just silicates, those are hard to extract from the rocks formed here, which are similar chemically.
Because of that, the interstellar grains that are best known are those which come from stellar systems that chemically are unlike the Solar System. In most stellar systems, there is more oxygen than carbon and those stellar systems are like ours, with planets having iron cores covered by mantles and crusts made of silicates, covered then by a layer of ice.
In the other kind of stellar systems, there is more carbon than oxygen and there the planets would be formed from minerals that are very rare on Earth, i.e. mainly from silicon carbide and various metallic carbides and also with great amounts of graphite and diamonds.
So most of the interstellar grains (i.e. true stardust) that have been identified and studied are grains of silicon carbide, graphite, diamond or titanium carbide, which are easy to extract from the silicates formed in the Solar System.
Yes, ants evolved from wasps, and it's really not that surprising if you take a close look at a typical ant and a typical wasp, pretty much the only difference are wings and coloring. There also exist wingless wasps, and some of them are black and really quite indistinguishable from ants by non-entomologist. And that's after over 100 million years since the ants diverged from the wasps! Talk about a successful evolutionary design. Your closest relative from 100 million years ago was a little vaguely rat-like thing. (Edit to answer your specific question: the ancestor of ants and wasps obviously was winged and flying, since both families still have at least some winged members).
As a sibling has already pointed out ants do fly during "nuptial flight", and then discard their wings... wings would only be a hindrance for their largely underground lifestyle. Also ants have retained the stinger which also functions as an ovipositor (egg layer), and some species still use it for defense and pack a wallop of a poison, right up there with some of the of the worst wasps. Google "bullet ant" for some good stuff. Other ants just bite, and the burning you feel is from their saliva which consists mostly of an acid named after ants: fourmic acid (ant is "formica" in latin).
Edit to add one more random factoid that will surprise a lot of people: termites are not related to ants at all, and they evolved from... (drumroll)... cockroaches! It's rather harder to see the resemblance, except for their diet... both are capable of digesting (with help from endosymbiotic microbes) pure cellulose. And while termites don't really resemble ants either, parallel evolution has chosen the same strategy of retaining the wings for the fertile individuals who go on a nuptial flight and then discard their wings and try to found new colonies.
