My first months on Lemmy were spent on Lemmy.world, which was the biggest instance at the time. I had no experience with Hexbear because .world had defederated that instance. I sometimes saw it being described as a “tankie” instance, but it was nothing specific.
After I moved to .zip, I came across !games@hexbear.net, which seemed to be free from anything overtly political and reminded me of r/Gamingcirclejerk, so I subscribed to it and occasionally made comments related to gaming.
Today I made multiple comments to a post about an article on the STALKER game developers having removed the Soviet symbols and the Russian audio in the remastered edition of the game. I would argue that in the thread, there were no comments from me that could be construed by a reasonable person as defensive of Nazism, fascism, or even hinting at it. For example, in one of the comments, I linked a Ukrainian law that prohibits the use of Nazi symbols, though I highly advise looking through all my ten comments as to avoid any misunderstanding or false impressions.
Conversely, one comment posted by another user dismissed Holodomor as Nazi propaganda, which I reported, but a moderator of that community just ended up calling me out for that and taking no action, followed by them banning me.
The thread containing all of my untouched posts is still available via lemmy.zip. My comments are also available for viewing via my user page. They are not available on hexbear due to the ban.
Oh, yeah, I didn’t mean just “hurl insults until they go away” is effective, but treating their attitude and opinions with the respect it deserves is very effective. The dunk is an important part of that, and what I was thinking of. I haven’t really seen any examples where a lib says something ignorant and the only responses are insults and PPB, that isn’t just several lines deep in a comment chain already (where others have tried and failed to explain things to them.) Not saying it doesn’t happen, just that it wasn’t what I was thinking of, I was probably imagining the same scenario you do, where people call them out for their ignorance, attempt to educate them and refuse to coddle them.