Like it or not Hacker News has never been (and will never be) a platform for free and open debate. It's designed around aggressive curation for quality over quantity and that makes it very easy to brigade by design.
It could, but that'd be odd. We've seen oodles of structurally similar posts hang out on the front page unflagged before. There are even past examples of major posts criticizing the journalistic integrity of 60 Minutes. Only once the material becomes critical of the regime does it become flagged.
I am tempted to go over each such complaint on this page (there must be a couple dozen so far) and reply "Quiet, please! People are reading."