We don't care about "narratives" - we're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't destroy itself in the obvious internet ways, and the principles of how we try to do that are well-established. As I said, this wasn't a borderline call.
If you familiarize yourself with the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and the moderation practices here (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang), you'll soon see that they're applied pretty consistently and don't favor any narrative nor any particular issue position. It's common for people to feel like the mods are biased against their view when they see a comment that they happen to agree with getting moderated (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), but this is just a cognitive bias—a form of sample bias, in fact, because those cases always stand out more (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
The problem with changing the subject from the original topic (the new phone) to a generic flamewar topic (race grievances) is that the latter tend to quickly take over a thread and to quickly lower comment quality. In that respect, they are like flames—they spread quickly and consume everything—so "flamebait" and "flamewar" are good words for this.
> I realise you are now attempting to delete his comments
I haven't deleted anything. If you're referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28921996 being marked [flagged] and [dead], that's because users flagged it.
It's really easy to jump to conclusions about this kind of thing, which means it's best to hesitate and sift through what you've actually observed vs. what it seems-like-it-absolutely-must-be, because the latter is usually a misinterpretation. This applies to all the moderation practices here. For example, if you see a post getting moderated and conclude that we must be opposed to the views expressed in the post, that's a big non sequitur. We moderate posts with the opposite views just the same way, when they break the site guidelines.
You can disagree with the guidelines and/or refer to moderation as censorship if you like—people differ about such things. Nonetheless the HN guidelines are the rules by which this site operates (we're not trying to impose them anywhere else!) and, agree or disagree, users here need to abide by them.