The way this started was when almostgotcaught made a comment that said "jesus christ you people are so thick", in a reply to a different commenter. That commenter had written an inflammatory comment attacking America's "barbaric cultural history". I chided them first and flagged their comment so it was killed, and only after that responded to almostgotcaught, because "jesus christ you people are so thick" is well towards the worst end of the spectrum of inflammatory comments we see here. I hadn't seen any of the stuff from typeofhuman at that point, and nothing about dog-whistle comments had come onto the radar. I was just focused on dealing with a user who seemed to be waging war against HN and going off on a tear, which they've done before. They (almostgotcaught) are a user who has a history of posting inflammatory comments, about things that have nothing to do with racism; the first comments they were called out for by dang were about programming languages.
I've been doing this work in various forms for a long time, and we've had cases before where dog-whistle comments have been posted, and, in the best instances the way they've been handled by the community has been anti-inflammatory and mature. That is, others reply with sober explanations about what's going on, and send emails to the moderators so we can know about them and take appropriate action (killing comments and banning users). In such cases, the issue was dealt with very effectively and without it turning into a huge meta-drama that gives it much more visibility than it needs to have.
This is ultimately the point I keep trying to make. HN's guidelines and feedback mechanisms are designed to deal with this stuff, and have a track record of dealing with this stuff very effectively when people use them properly, which most people do, most of the time. That could have happened in this case too. When people take matters into their own hands and wage war, everything breaks down.