You're drawing conclusions based on what you've happened to notice. That's a skewed sample because people notice the cases that they dislike [1]. Users with opposite politics to yours draw opposite conclusions. If you don't believe me, see the examples at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870. Here are a few more recent tidbits (links available upon request!):

"an extremely conservative place", "dang, who always hands out the bans to one side", "HackerNews Right-wing mods", "HN is surprisingly conservative", "dang, enabler of alt-right QAnon horseshit", "most of people on HN are ancap or fascists", "hacker news only cares about free speech when it can be used to dunk on the left", "zero left wing chatter. instant ban by this fash site", "I feel pretty confident about the right/libertarian bias to HN", "This place is a toilet of reactionary racists", "a white supremacist community", "generally nazi-sympathetic sociopaths", "fine with racist posts, right-wing, bigoted", "libertarian echo chamber", "a community full of some pretty extreme opinions, generally right-wing and regressive", "always been very right wing ... always filled with racist, sexist, right wing political abuse", "all of the libertarian BS here on HN", "many comments on HN of late have tilted radical right-wing", "filled with self obsessed tech bros who pretend they are libertarian but are actually just racists", "hn leans extremely conservative", "intolerable shithole full of pretend libertarians (e.g. racist white power sorts)", "it's capital that aligns to fascism", "pretty heavily Libertarian", "HN has always been a libertarian hell site", "pure, unadulterated, proto-fascist garbage for narcissistic jerks", "overwhelmingly hardcore libertarian forum", "right wing talking points", "gathering ground for aggrieved conservatives in tech", "HN is a weird place. Feels like the loudest political voices are alt-right-adjacent", "I knew HN was right wing but seriously guys?", "Yes, this website full of brain dead right wingers.", "A lot of fascists in this thread, to no one's surprise.", "a forum skewed libertarian techbros", "Literally anything left-of-right-of-centre immediately gets flagged (if not outright banned by the mods)", "moderation choices by dang (e.g. his pernicious need to pander to the anti-science, far-right crowd)"

(Before anyone goes "oho! that's because you are rightwing fascist enablers" - I've pasted these examples because the current complaint is that we're secret Feinsteinians. If the claim were the other way around I'd paste an opposite list. There's an endless supply, from all angles.)

Yes, there are plenty of cases where commenters break the rules and we don't do anything—but you're wrong to conclude that that's because we secretly agree with them. It's simply because there's far too much content for us to read it all. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it [2]. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...