At this point you really should ask yourself whether to continue moderating such comments. If you're at the level of hearing "dog whistles", you're already starting to act in bad faith.
I think Scott Alexander correctly identifies the biggest problem of moderation: that while you may think that it's about fostering civilized discourse, it isn't. When you get recognizable, it becomes primarily about protecting reputation of your own brand or name.
In other cases, it highlights my point - it is a subversive form of hate speech and it gets past the mod team:, and starts the radicalization process Or polarizing process.
On the other hand it may be a genuine comment, naturally arrived at by a user, but it pattern matches with the mod team and it gets removed.
For example an old argument which is now easily refuted is “brownies have larger families, and their growth rates are over taking natives!”
That’s a factually correct argument, but it’s an incorrect conclusion which takes (took) advantage of average user ignorance.
But the other issue is that this thread stays up, other people who come across it get “red pilled” or “triggered”.
Subsequently the thread becomes a source for flame wars, “engagement”, and propagates schisms in the community.
In the end moderators have to act based on the taxonomy of ideas presented, not their possible sincerity. Leaving it up will only cause further damages.
As a result moderators, (probably like the police) drift away from the average user views and behaviors.
This is the fundamental crux of the moderation problem, if not of communication itself : we can never know the intent behind a statement.
Is it a sincerely held view by someone who is not a Bigot or racist? Or is it sinister and malignant sentences designed to get past moderators and radicalize/convert users and disrupt other communities ?
Tone of voice does not carry on the internet.
Worse, Good moderation is simply a better training environment for the next generation of harassers and bad users.
From my experience - basic rules got rid of the dumbest type of harasser currently active on the forum, but then created a medium for a more evolved and trained harasser to arise. What used to be obvious hate speech, misogyny and so on was exchanged for veiled abuse and dog whistles.
The rule of moderation is that your attackers keep moving up a Turing-like scale, till inevitably their arguments are indistinguishable from genuine comments made out of ignorance or lack of malice.
This ignores the damage done to your relation with the community, peace of mind, and the paranoia that slowly starts to grip your team as people threaten you, try to doxx you, and worse.
While you may rarely meet insane people in real life, because of the limitation of physical reality - online behavior is not regulated by the needs of actually having to use calories to move your body to interact with a person.
Instead, its a lot cheaper for people to give in to obsession and hammer away on a keyboard as they vent their frustration on someone standing between them and speaking their mind about things they feel strongly about.
God- I could write chapters on what happens when you have enough disgruntled users who decide to make a new forum, driven only to hate your team and moderation style - then spend their time attacking you.
But in the most delicious of ironies - the new forums created to target your rules and moderation style, eventually have a crisis of behavior which they fix by foisting similar rules as the one that got them banned in the first place.