Trust me when I say that the author, as the years went by, got kinda weird with regard to his politics. As in, he was always right-wing, but he went kinda from sensible albeit someone I disagreed with to full on Obama Derangement Syndrome.
And his writing suffered for it, I think.
Coming in late, but as someone who used to be quite active on the author's forums a decade to 15 years or more ago, I can confirm. Back in the early 2000's, the overarching political tone was conservative/right-wing, but sensible, and bear in mind that in those days I broadly agreed with them. My views haven't really changed
that much, in fact; it's just that, over the past decade, I've gotten pretty thoroughly turned off by the nutball-Tea Party-Trumpist fringe that's taken over; I think it started when I voted for Obama in 2008 and got deeply irked by the Obama Derangement Syndrome you mentioned*. Anyway!!!
I think SD.net never has really recovered from the
Salvation War fiasco. When it all came crashing down (the author reneged on putting up the third book because he claimed he'd been hacked by someone in Ukraine who stole the first two books and put them up in another online archive before he could officially publish them, and it snowballed from there), the resulting firestorm pretty much consumed the site and a lot of people quit or were shown the door. The mods ended up having to ban all discussion of the stories or the author. In fact, IIRC, the site's owner/admin, the aforementioned militant-atheist engineer, went more or less AWOL for quite a long time, leaving the running of the site up to the rest of the mod team.
*There were some other dodgy things going on too, like the fact that one of the most prominent posters on the author's forums, who actually was promoted to that site's mod team at one point, who claimed to be a (female) general in the Thai Army, is now more or less acknowledged to have been a persona (or sockpuppet, if you want to put it that way) of the author. I think it's a measure of how convincing the deception was that almost nobody, for literally years, questioned "her" posting style, which was done in a bad, in fact stereotypical, dialect, which in turn ignores the fact that almost no well-educated person who has English as a secondary language writes English in a dialect unless they're writing a story with a character who speaks English in a dialect.