He was defended until he behaved in a way that was indefensible. The biggest complaint people had against him for months was him talking about reading Mussolini and him hating the Reddit Leftist community. The former isn't that big of a deal. I've read Deng Xiaoping Theory to understand it. Should I be demodded? The latter is understandable, since he was constantly being trolled, harassed, and bullied by people who didn't like him. Mod mail was being bombarded by hateful and homophobic slurs against him constantly, before he even did anything that warranted anger (first thing I did when added to the mod list was to go through the past several months of mod mail history). Plus, the Reddit Leftist community in general can be pretty awful (I got half a dozen extremely nasty PMs the other day, sub is always getting brigaded, /u/lovelybone93 gets stalked into other subs, someone was banned from FC yesterday and went whining about it to other reactionary subs, etc), why do you think /r/Socialism is derided by so many?

The moment Gohte actually did something truly appalling (or, as you said, explicit) we took 24 hours to discuss what to do, he was demodded, and then his continued ugly behavior guaranteed he'll never be back in the community.

"Bitter end" gives more credit to the ordeal than it deserves. It was general petty internet beef that wasn't worth a response by anyone, much less the mods, until Gohte finally went overboard in which he was dealt with within 24 hours. It was a pissing match between people for weeks until it because an actual thing for me to care about and it was handled in a day. Seems pretty fair time line for stupid internet drama.