I think it's here, but the tactics are a little different.

What I'm seeing are political posts that stand a good chance of rallying people, uniting a front of some kind, and yielding fruit that could very well be positive action.

Trolls/state-actors/whoever see this and sow dissent and start pointless arguments, tying up over 50% of the visible space for discussion under the post. These cats are incredibly good at crafting troll-bait and it shows: the chaos crowds out everything good going on. And this happens every, single, time. It's hard to see this and not think that it's orchestrated somehow.

Also, if you keep a tally of the flavor of troll-bait being put out there, patterns emerge. Nudging people to start a US civil war is a very common one.

I think all mods would have to do is disallow changes of topic under threads, forcing them out to the top-level. That may cure any toxic piggybacking, letting the trollbait languish further down the page or get down-voted appropriately.