Depends what you mean by small. I think subs with even a few hundred thousand subscribers are generally pretty good, depending on the community of course.

yeah as 14yr redditor, sigh can confirm.

Anything remotely political creates too much work for mods, who in turn ban first and ask questions later. Eggshells are sometimes not enough.

Pretty sure you've got some opinions that are also being pushed by massive, coordinated troll farms. What you're seeing is the scale of the exercise.

Maybe that tells you something about your political opinions and the nature of the folks you share them with. This sort of thing doesn't just randomly happen. If you're getting clobbered for an offhand remark, it's not about you, it's because there were 10,000 bots and trolls there before you automatedly saying the same stuff to make it seem like 'everybody is saying it'.

Then you turn up, and bam: they don't even think you're real, because you're saying the stuff a thousand bots were saying. Hard luck: I don't think there's a good answer for you, the ground is sort of salted at this point.

>certain dominant political and cultural narrative,

You mean dominant across all of reddit or dominant in that specific sub? There are plenty of subs that have a political and cultural bent quite different from the overall reddit one.