Lol, politically-charged? When I joined here multiple people had "don't tread on me" avatars so I just chose this one on a lark. It's weird you and panhead latch on to that as a point of attack because I couldn't care less about that either way, and I probably don't know half of the things it's been used to represent over the years.
I don't want to lump forum issues and world issues together. From a forum pov, from a forum that I guess seemed to want to be a venue for top manufacturers to come in and have a discussion, you probably don't want to mix a bunch of adults behaving in the cringiest most juvenile ways imaginable, with like trying to be the reputable official source of representation for Diezel, etc. These things don't mix well. You don't want to be a manufacturer or advertiser and be like, hey, come to this alt-right homophobic conspiracy shithole whenever you have a question about our products, etc.
So right, they had the option to moderate it and trim the fat off the forum, and they didn't want to. To me, that's the right approach and just part of running a forum, but when you wake up every day and III had started 10 more threads, no one can really moderate one person whose entire life is apparently spent in this subforum. So I can't blame them for not wanting to wade in.