Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.

As for there being “a sizeable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian”: without links to comments or account names I'm not able to gauge what you mean. But I'm in the threads every day and the political skew is clearly in opposition to the U.S. administration and to the the left of the broader population, which you would expect of a population sample dominated by tech industry employees and freelancers. But it's still a bell curve, which means, yes, there are some people here who are to the right of centre. That shouldn't be surprising or undesirable if we want to debate important topics.

If you see toxic material that hasn't been flagged/killed, you should flag it and/or email the moderators about it. It's fine to criticize us if you've done that and we haven't taken adequate action, but you've cited no cases of that.