It's possible to email the mods vouching for stories (or comments). I do this fairly frequently. Not (yet) in this case, though there was a politically-tinged story earlier this week that I alerted mods on.

What's particularly insidious is that killed stories both don't show up in Algolia search results (this is somewhat understandable, but in the case of political flagging, problematic), and even where favourited (something I also do with some regularity), may not be visible to non-logged-in users and IIRC actually disappear from the index in time.